Saturday, December 04, 2004

Cooperation Course - News for Those of Us Who Want to Participate

Cooperation -:

"Stanford students and anyone anywhere interested in learning about the emerging interdisciplinary study of cooperation is welcome to participate in this group blog.

This group blog is the online extension of the classes held at Stanford University (every Wednesday, January 5-March 16, Wallenberg Hall, Room 127, 4:15-5:45 PST). The lectures and class discussions will be streamed and archived in audio and video and available for podcast. This blogspace is for registered students and interested others to discuss the weekly reading in personal blogs and in comments to the stories posted by instructors. A wiki enables registered participants to add their notes and to contribute to class discussions remotely."

 

Ethan on Turmeric, pygmies and piracy

Ethan Zuckerman posted an amazing piece tracking on how western musicians and companies have been benefiting from traditional music -- without credit nor payment to those musicians. It is a fascinating trip down a labyrinth of myth, rumors to reality. A great read.

"What do pygmy lullabies and turmeric have in common? As 'traditional knowledge', they're both badly protected under US intellectual property law. And, as a result, they're an easy target for savvy IP 'pirates', those folks smart enough to stay out of the well-patrolled waters of US intellectual property and set sail for the untroubled IP seas of the developing world. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to say 'Arrrrrr!'"

 

Wilcox: Hands up if you are a knowledge activist

Designing for Civil Society: Hands up if you are a knowledge activist


If your job or passion is to do good communications work using new technology, how do you think of yourself? Others may call you variously a blogger, online journalist, community manager, information worker, editor, researcher, even hacker. Perhaps we'll find some shared interests wearing the badge of knowledge activist."
Makes a lot of sense to me. I like this idea, David!

 

Experimenting With Sharing FURL Bookmarks & RSS Feeds

I have been using FURL to research projects and simply gather sites that I find interesting. I see too many sites to blog them all (both from a review time and quantity perspective). But there are some damn fine resources out there.

To share them, I have made my FURL bookmarks public, put them at the lower right of this blog (below the ginormous blogroll!) and am posting the RSS link here in case anyone is using FURL and likes to subscribe to other's FURL collections.

If you keep a FURL or del.icio.us (I have an account there, but have not kept up with it - it seems to run very slow for me)tab running that covers online facilitation, online groups, social networks, social software or any such permutation, I'd love to know about it to add to my feeds. Thanks!

 

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Stanford's"Toward a Literacy of Cooperation" Course

I've been seeing reference to Stanford's Cooperation Course Goals & Assignments, being facilitated by Howard Rheingold, Andrea Saveri and Dr. William Cockayne.

Might "cooperation studies" be the beginning of a new narrative about human social behavior? Rooted in the zeitgeist of Darwin's era, the scientific, social, economic, political stories of the 19th and 20th century overwhelmingly emphasized the role of competition as a driver of evolution, progress, commerce, society. The first outlines of a new narrative are becoming visible in biology, sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and political science – a story in which cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action play a more prominent role and the essential (but not all-powerful ) story of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a bit. The evolution of cooperation, the dynamics of social dilemmas, the economics of peer production, the design of institutions for collective action, the structure of social networks, the forecasting power of prediction markets, the power of distributed computing – can these frontiers in previously unconnected disciplines be mapped onto a broad interdisciplinary discourse? This course is a first and very wide look at this possible new discourse, research field, policy tool, meta-narrative of human behavior.

The overview is here and the sylabus can be found here. I wish I lived in the area!

 

More Multilingual Online Interaction Experiments!

Sebastian Paquet, in commenting on yesterday's post on multilingual online interaction, pointed me to CommunityWiki: MultilingualExperiment. I am all a-goggle (not a-googled!) Scroll down to the botton and take Seb's hint to play with the little check boxes.

Bev
, are you reading this??

 

Thinking About Communications Channels

On a roll today thinking about online communicatin, Jack Ring posted a link to this definition of communications channels from Principia Cybernetica.

CHANNEL: "That part of a communication chain in which signals are transmitted from a sender to a receiver. Unlike other processes in a communication chain (e.g., encoding, decoding, translation, transformation), a channel involves a single physical medium that spans the difference in time and in space which separates senders from receivers. A memory is that special case of a channel in which the sender transmits signals to himself at a later point in time. A channel is characterized by the physical properties of its medium and imposes a constraint on the capacity for communication: (1) its selective capability to store, retain, and transmit certain kinds of signals, (2) its sensitivity to non-systematic distortions and decay (see noise, equivocation, redundancy) and (3) its capacity to transmit information. Primary channels in unaided human communication are audio (largely verbal and musical), visual (largely non-verbal and iconic) and tactile. In modern society channels are differentiated mainly by the technical devices used, e.g., writing, printing, telephone, photography, television (video and audio channels), satellite communication, computer networks. Each has its own limitations and properties. It is well established that the social reliance on particular channels of communication profoundly influences how a society administers itself, develops and expands. (Krippendorff)"
Jack focused on this line "It is well established that the social reliance on particular channels of communication profoundly influences how a society administers itself, develops and expands." Great food for thought.

[Thanks to Jack Ring via the AOK List]

 

Inexplicable

I've known Sue Thomas online and off for about 5 years. Her contributions to understanding life online are extraordinary for three reasons. She lives fully online meaning that she immerses herself (not that she lives ONLY online). She takes time to critically and sometimes painfully reflect on her experiences. And most importantly, she shares what she has learned.

Recently she wrote an article for trAce, her online professional (and, I sense, artistic) home. In Walter Ong and the problem of writing about LambdaMOO Sue reflects on why it is so damn hard to explain online interaction experiences to those who have never had one of their own. (Bolding below is mine.)

"At trAce I often speak with people who live and work online about their perceptions of how the net has changed them and the worlds in which they move. In every conversation the transient nature of connectedness is taken so much as a given that there is hardly any need to define or describe it. Everybody knows what it is, how it feels, the energy of it, the occasional despair at its tricks and limitations. We talk about it using the common shorthand of the net - emoticons, acronyms, program code - because the language itself is the key to the concepts and experiences we are discussing. But the problem is that, despite no specific intention that this should happen, it has evolved into a secret cultural discourse which is unintelligible to the uninitiated."

Sue goes on to talk about Walter Ong's work on orality and text based literacy.
"Because Ong’s analysis convinces me that LambdaMOO and places like them are unique in that although their sole method of communication is textual, the communication that actually takes place there is oral. MOO life happens, as Ong describes of a real-life oral community, "as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time." Its characteristics are therefore those of a group which shares physical space and human experience, and it is equally fractured and transient. Furthermore, it uses tropes and vocabulary that are also embedded within that experience and unintelligible outside it."

This set off bells for me. I recognized this shift between text created for an article or a novel, and text that "happens" from me as I participate with others online. It is oral. The back channel chat that Liz mentions is an example: how the form allowed the question to surface over the questioner. The question is the story that is passed from teller to teller in pre-literate times. For a moment, it embodies the speaker as he or she experiences typing it into the chat, but through the medium it becomes "of the group. " I'm reminded of an article Stowe Boyd wrote recently about “real time,” and his experience. ”But more important, the idea that there is some high-order benefit in being able to collaborate asynchronously. Its always a crude approximation of real-time interaction, because the players are unavailable.”

I can recount experiences for when the asynchronous has created more of a reality than real time. When the players were “available” but in a way I struggle to express. We have different experiences of what Sue called the “embedded flow of time.” And for each of us, it is real.

That is what makes this whole experience almost inexplicable. It is experience rather than the reification manifest in text.

(Also posted on Many-2-Many)

 

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Free the Genie Games

Ah, nothing like a creative whack upside the head. This site is a keeper! Free the Genie Games:

"Free the Genie is a deck of 55 creative thinking cards that help aspiring innovators get unstuck, out of the box, and achieve extraordinary results. There are an infinite amount of ways to use this brainstorming tool, but since you're obviously late for something, here are four simple ways to get started."
[via Dave Pollard]

 

Wikis Acting Like Sticky Notes

Wikalong Firefox Add on and Wikalong Redirection Tool are two new Firefox extensions that allow you to add wiki notes to any webpage. I have been playing with the Wikalong -- there is a growing one beside my Bloglines reader page and I've started one on my website. You can subscribe to any wiki too. Here are the details:

Wikalong Firefox Extension: "Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet."

Wikalong Redirection Tool: "Wikalong is powerful extension for Mozilla Firefox browser brought to you by John Cappiello and others.

This tool allows you to access Wikalong resources without using Wikalong extension. (ie. when your system or browser doesn't support it)."

 

Conflict Resolution and Development in Online Communities

Olaf Brugman has an intriguing series of essays on his KM site that I've skimmed, but not read deeply. They are on the list for a slower, more thoughtful read, but knowing my time, I wanted to pass along the links.
Goiaba Knowledge Bridge: Conflict Resolution and Development in Online Communities

In a series of articles, disfunctional conflicts and conflict resolution in online communities are explored from a spiritist perspective.

The conclusion is that adopting a spiritist perspective offers a new look on the conflict resolution and community development, especially because the spiritist perspective focuses on roles and responsibilities of individual group members, based on spiritist understandings of 'principles to live by', and on how people are related.

The following articles are available:

1. A spiritist perspective on knowledge management and social development

2. Short introduction to spiritist philosophy

3. The Case of the Dysfunctional Community

4. Community Design Revisited

5. Conflict versus Harmony"
I am peripherallly familiar with the community conflict case in #3, and almost cringe to read about it. That is a testament to the challenge of conflict in distributed groups. I was happy to see in #5 the point made about communities needing both conflict and harmony. Both are important in my experience. So we need to be attentive to the balance point.

 

Finally Creating my Blogroll

Ok, ok, so it took me six months. I have a ton of serious writing to do, so what do I do? Play with my blog. Uh oh. If you think I missed you on the roll, spelled your name wrong or got the wrong feed, let me know. I'm still in serious fiddle mode with categories and what I want public/private (mainly for the fact that 420 blogs is too many to fit!)

 

BloggerCorps - Now A Reality

November 15th I posted about Rebecca MacKinnon's proposal for BloggerCorps. Well, now it exists: "Matching bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started."

If you are a blogger and aren't already hooked into a place where you can share your savvy, check it out. And one more on top of that -- find ways to connect existing and related activities so that we don't do too much duplication and more connecting!

 

Bilingual Wiki Work

Much of my work the past few months has been in multilingual settings. I have been attentive to online interactions that include the possibility that English-only is not the only way to go. I think it might be good to start pointing to examples of multilingual distributed interactions and collaborations.

Seb Paquet has started a bilingual planning wiki for a Montreal social software conference.

What I'm wondering is are people translating their own stuff? When they find stuff in only one language left by others, are they voluntarily translating it? I'm curious about the process.

Here is one snippet that shows me the group also has questions:

Je propose que nous fassions deux Wiki, un anglais, un français à partir de maintenant, alors que la base de la base est en place. Rien ne nous empêcherait d'aller voir ce qui s'écrit de l'autre coté. I suggest the creation from now on of two wikis - one french one english - that we would mix from sometimes and we could look the other side anyway to check both evolutions. Its too heavy this way.

I propose that we create a single wiki, which could have multiple pages in French and English as we like it, peacefully existing alongside one another (just like Montrealers). Care should be taken to link related pages across languages. / Je propose qu'on se dote d'un seul wiki, à pages multiples en français et en anglais à notre convenance, existant pacifiquement côte à côte. Il faudra veiller à faire des liens entre les pages au contenu relié. -- Seb Paquet ++
Maybe Seb or someone participating will leave us a comment or two. Si vous plait. (I don't speak French. I can handle Portuguese and some Spanish. Other than that I know 2-4 words in quite a few other languages!)

 

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

The Quote that Ate an Hour or Why Blogging Takes Time

"The object of life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, 'Holy Shit, What a Ride!!!'" -- Mavis Leyrer
This quote arrived this morning in an email from a friend. Damn, was it apt, I thought, as I looked at myself in the mirror this morning.

So, I wanted to share the quote, but it came without a source. I like a source. So to google I went. First return, there it was, in a person's blog. My morning's adventure had begun.

1. Jody posted it, and credited her friend ...

2. Katja who has a really cool avocado in her blog, which itself is quite a remarkable statement about disabilities, who had this ...

3. very cool map showing where visitors to the site IP's originate which reminded me that a link could take me across the world, but I had to go back to my...

4. Google search to see if the attribution hit on the first return was accurate, so I checked more site, where the quote seemed to travel around discussions of ...

5. motorcycles and more motorcycles...

5. which leaves me sitting here, wondering who Mavis Leyrer was, a motorcyle person? Back to Google. ..

5. According to a few sites, Mavis Layrer was an 83 year old woman from Seattle. It seems Mavis' quote has been very popular in blogs this fall, including this one, where the author ">went to Google Answers to find the source so...

6. I poked a bit further and found out Mavis was married to George, who has since passed.

Wow. So my story ends, for now, back at google.

And people wonder why blogging takes so much time! Now, to work!

 

Monday, November 29, 2004

The Online Facilitation Blog Turns 6 (months that is)

On Friday 26 November this blog turned a mere six months old.

I've been thinking about this, wondering about the blog's worth, how it complements and competes with other things I do and other such sundry questions. Should I narrow my focus? Not obesess about posting frequency? Learn more sophisticated management and tracking tools and features?

I realized I really don't know the answers to my questions. But so far the 6 months of this have taught me quite a bit and, most importantly, connected me to some wonderful people.

I guess I'll continue, even with unanswered questions!

 

Don Tapscott tells Toronto's "Listening to the City" to take it online!

The Toronto Star ran a piece by Don Tapscott, Breathing e-life into democracy, taking the upcoming "Listening to the City" F2F event to task for not doing it online. I agree with almost everything Tapscott has to say except the assumption that a fully online event would cover the territory. I don't think we have ubiquitous online interaction skills and more importantly, habits, across the diversity of a city like Toronto. The same could be said for the F2F event - there are people who won't go for lots of good reasons. On the balance, I'd bet that going online could probably increase the participation level. More importantly, it could start fostering a new practice of online participation in local issues. Here's a bit from Don's article:

It's time Toronto dumped limited, costly meetings and started online talks with its citizens, By Don Tapscott

This Sunday, Toronto City Council will host a $110,000 "Listening to Toronto" session at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where 1,100 residents will form small discussion groups and brainstorm about how to improve our city. Let's hope their top suggestion is that the city should never again spend the money, time and energy to host another of these events.

Today, we live in a wired world and the Listening to Toronto exercise belongs in cyberspace, where it would be far more effective. Toronto is a plugged-in city in one of the world's most plugged-in countries, and City Hall should exploit this technology to the hilt.

By moving discussions online, we would have a process that is cheaper, could involve tens of thousands more citizens, could be ongoing, and would achieve more substantive results.

To see how digital tools could bolster voter involvement, we could harness the tremendous innovation in information technology that has come to light in the past decade .

New digital tools have paved the way for profound transformations in how companies function.

He goes on to say some key things about online polling. Critical, IMO:
But there are right and wrong ways to pursue e-democracy.

Last month the city's technology committee said the city should explore online polling. "I think this is long overdue," said Councillor Jane Pitfield, a member of the e-city committee, which asked for more research on online polling. "The public needs to be engaged and I think it will help our city council and our mayor do a better job."

This would be a mistake. First, as an indicator of the public will, online polling is next to useless. Organized groups can hijack the process to do the equivalent of stuffing the ballot box. If politicians want to know the public's mood, a reputable pollster is the best choice.

Second, online polling does nothing to tap into the citizenry's knowledge and expertise. Citizen engagement isn't a matter of clicking Yes or No on an online ballot.

We deserve a system where we can discuss issues, brainstorm, raise everyone's knowledge level, and come to more informed decisions.

So, is Don over idealistic? (I hope not. I fear so.)

Rather than being skilled in belligerence and demagoguery, we would see the rise of conciliators and those who encourage public participation. They would feel comfortable and not threatened by the idea of an emboldened and active electorate.
[via Alexandra Samuels]

 

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Using Blogs for Collaborative Document Review/Writing

I'm still catching up on blog reading and found Stuart's post on Iterative Blogging: BlogDoc 1.0

I tried to leave a comment for Stuart on this but there is comment foo tonight, so putting this here as I know Stuart, that you are vigilant and tracking trackbacks and such! (That I could figure that one! Oi!)

Stuart, I'm about to do a two day online meeting with folks in Africa which will require document review. I'm very interested in seeing if they want to try this. I believe I am dealing with low tech experience/saavy and bandwidth issues, so I have to figure out a very lightweight interface. And this is not a html saavy bunch as far as I know, so no fancy formatting.

I'm very curious!