Friday, August 28, 2009

Liberating Voices at Not a Number

There was a smallish reading and reception for Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revoltion at Not a Number in Wallingford. Their motto is "Disturbing the Comfortable and Comforting the Disturbed." Although it was raining cats and dogs (literally!) there was a good turnout. Pattern authors Ken Gillgren and Alan Borning were there and we expect a few more at the next event — which is planned for September 24.
(out of focus photograph by Zoe Schuler)

The Public Sphere Guide

Andy Oram has suggested what looks like a very promising effort: The Public Sphere Guide.

From their website: Facilitating and advancing the study of the transformations of the public sphere to enable its renewal – this is the purpose of this Public Sphere Guide, seeking to create a map of this fragmented interdisciplinary field of study. Co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, this beta version is intended to expand incrementally over time. The Public Sphere Guide serves as a research guide and as a teaching guide as well as a resource for the renewal of the public sphere. At the same time, it also serves as a guide to the SSRC’s public sphere program area. The guide is linked to and receives input from the online essay forum Transformations of the Public Sphere. For more information, see the About page.



Comments and suggestions are welcome at publicsphereguide@ssrc.org. Sign up for e-mail updates here in the sidebar of the related essay forum. The past and current SSRC programs in the public sphere program area are listed here.

National Initiative for Social Participation

Aldo de Moor reminded the community informatics research list that, "An important development in the U.S. is the National Initiative for Social Participation. A group of ICT/IS/... researchers is outlining a policy agenda and are in touch with the Obama administration. Who knows where this will lead? I would urge members of this list to get involved, we cannot afford to lose this window of opportunity as a community informatics-community!"

http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com/

>From the motivating statement:

"The benefits of social media participation are well understood by Obama's staff -- during the campaign they engaged four million donors and volunteers. Replicating their success a thousand times might promote many of President Obama's goals. To accomplish that a National Initiative for Social Participation could stimulate effective collaborations in many professions, restore community social capital, and coordinate national service projects. The challenge is to understand what motivates participants, such as altruism, reputation, or community service. Researchers would have to develop fresh strategies that increased the conversion rates from readers to contributors from the currently typical 100 to 1 to much higher rates. Getting contributors to collaborate for ambitious efforts and become leaders or mentors are further challenges. Coping with legitimate dangers such as privacy violations, misguided rumors, malicious vandalism, and infrastructure destruction or overload all demand careful planning and testing of potential solutions."

The white paper:

http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com/file/view/NISP+White+Paper+-+6-02-09.pdf

Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=70985741334

Monday, August 17, 2009

Slides finally available

I finally posted my slide show from the International School for Digital Transformation earlier this summer in Porto, Portugal. Although this is pretty long it should be useful in explaining how I'm thinking about the concept.