Dealing With the Things That Bother Us Online: Facilitation of Problems Part 1

There have been a bunch of interesting blog posts recently around online interaction facilitation issues. I've been collecting them in draft posts and I'll try and roll them out with a bit of commentary. Work may preclude that, but if I hold on to them too long they lose value. The first is pretty straight forward, has a blog centric focus and springboards off a common theme of labeling folks in a way that may or may not be useful. More on that later. First the links: From Teresa Nielsen Hayden - “Spam, Trolls, Stalkers: The Pandora’s Box of community”.

The ease with which people from all over the world can come together and create a virtual community is one of the most powerful gifts of the internet. Sites which facilitate community—from Slashdot and Metafilter to the single-author blog with comments enabled—do so first by making communication easy. Unfortunately, this also opens the gates to undesirable parasites who, at best, don’t care about your creation or, at worst, want to destroy it. (SNIP)

Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes.

All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

I posted this to the online facilitation list and immediately got a very negative reaction around disemvoweling in the context of an online discussion group. I suggested that blog comments can and often are quite different than a more communally perceived online discussion board or list. The comments spring off of the outward facing voice of the individual blog owner, so it seems to me there is a far more flexible line over control of comments.

Here are a few more links related to Theresa's post: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1246, http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002877.html


Technorati Tags: disemvowelling, onlinecommunity, moderation, faciltiation, trolls, spammers

Weaving Between Blogs and Lists on Language and Meaning

The riff from Dan, to the Onlinefacilitation list has landed now on Bev's blog, Em duas linguas: Leadership or lideran�.

This is interesting to me both on a process and content level. From a process perspective, it is really cool to see the linkage between a large, mostly-reader-only (few post) listserv on online facilitation and two blogs which address leadership and meaning across cultures (the broad generalizations are mine.) What is particularly pertinent to me is that the linkages happened because of people in each of the orbits associated with the lists and the blogs. It was not from tagging or folksonomy. People.

Second is the content - which to me at the core is about making meaning. The thread started from my wondering about how we often don't connect in more diffuse online conversations and I picked up a riff from Dan about talking "with" or "around". So I linked to his post. Rosanna then offered a different cultural perspective on his observations (on the onfac list) which Bev then picked up, adding more thread to the emergent fabric.

Here are a few snippets from Bev:

The poster's comment in the discussion was that the author of the blog about leadership was writing from an American perspective where people avoid showing their anger towards leaders. She suggested that in the Mediterranean basin, you get angry if you feel you can't talk openly to someone - and you would use that to your advantage if you felt that you could touch the insecurities of a leader.

I don't recognise that openness with anger in Portugal - a Latin Atlantic country - but, like her, I was struck by the assumptions in Oestreich's reflection on leadership. Frank and open conversations are good because they make me feel better.

(snip)

These words made me think about two unspoken assumptions. One is the taken-for-granted weight given to 'I', the individual rather than the group. The thinking begins from the needs and perspectives of one individual and to the solving of that individual's problems in order to solve his problems as manager, rather than starting from the problems of the group which may (or may not) be resolved by the manager being frank (or not) with the leader. Starting from the individual is a very culture-specific way of framing a problem.

(snip)

It's just that this conversation on leadership led me again to think of the many invisible taken-for-granted assumptions there are behind the words we use. The best that can happen is that I listen to what you say and transform it's significance to my own context. The worst is that the writing alienates me. Most of the flow of information goes from centre to periphery countries - and in English. Some of that information is transformed into other cultural contexts, while some of it has an alienating effect on people in many parts of the world. And I think we ignore this at our peril."

In a global world made accessible by online interaction, these questions rise large and important to me.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Rosanna!

Another lively, provacative and intelligent voice starts blogging! Rosanna Tarsiero has started her blog at Scrapbook of My Life: "

"Given my eclectic nature, it will be a pretty eclectic bunch of stuff as well, collecting all successes and failures, ideas and brain f*rts that come to my mind."

(P.S. Rosanna, you have comments set so only "team members" can post comments. So I was unable to leave you a note!)

Feeding Tags into a Wiki? HELP!

The wiki some of us started to aggregate resources on distributed communities of practice is slowly growing at http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?DistributedCopsLinks

Mark Radford made a suggestion that makes sense to me, but I don't know if/how to implement it. He wrote in the wiki:

"can I suggest getting an rss feed of the del.icio.us tag for COP, fed into this page, it could be a dynamically updating list of links that people from across the blogosphere feel are relevant to CoPs - Mark Ranford"

Now I know I may have been dissing tags a few posts ago, but... Any suggestions? Can someone help with this? Maybe furl tags as well?

What to do with 268 draft blog posts?

I often capture snippets into draft blog posts with the insane idea that I'll go back and craft them into a cogent post. Today I wondered how many of the orphan posts were sitting on my system: 268.

I am contemplating this... a bit. There is a lesson here, someplace.

Technorati Tags: blogging, drafts, conundrums

Distributed Collaboration in Unexpected Places

I have been working for the past 4 weeks on a project with a colleague who lives about an hour away. We both value our time at home, with family and quiet time, so we have a strong commitment to work in a distributed manner even though we could drive to each other's place.

We have a rhythm of cycles of asynchronous work punctuated by longish phone calls where we do the "negotiation" part of the work (we are revising a curriculum and implementing it with a new toolset - one which we don't really like either!)

We have been working closely on this and related projects for about six months and really enjoy what the other brings to the table in terms of expertise and style. Over time our phone calls have generated a culture that includes getting food mid call, mixing in personal tidbits, family interruptions, and one person walking around while the other types/note-takes. In other words, we have brought diverse physical acts into a distributed interaction.

Today she was in the car with her partner driving to Bend while I was in my home office. She had sheafs of print outs and was armed with a pen. I did the keyboard related tasks. During the call, we hushed for a moment while her partner called 911 from his cell to report a road problem, I made tea, and they stopped for a bio break during which I rang off and kept working, then called her back. At one point I continued to listen and participate (on mute!) while I slipped off to take a pee.

Now the intent here is not to get graphic. But the image of her sitting in a car and me sitting on the can while we were productively working... well, it cracked me up. This is when I wish I were a good cartoonist.

Technorati Tags: distributed, collaboration, community, cooperation, pee

For those of us who can't keep up with tags, semantic webs and covered bridges...

Shelley Powers has a nice post on Burningbird that ties together a lot of threads, interspersed with her photography. Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Caf�

At the theoretical level I get all the flurry around tags and folksonomy, but I'd like to know how useful this is for the second wave. I know the early adopters are all excited, but has anyone thought about what it would look like in the second wave? How much people will even take time to tag, much less use tags as an organizational tool?

Are we again designing purely for the early adopters, or are we providing a proving ground for ideas that will live or die? If they live, will they be sufficiently adapted and/or adopted by the next wave, or just die AFTER the early adopters adopt them?

I worry about that balance between wide open exploration and naval gazing.

Or maybe it is just because it is Friday with no Saturday in sight due to work. :-( In any case, I appreciate Shelley's writing. It helped me understand more.

Technorati Tags: tags, tagging, folksonomy, adoption, second_wave

Leapfrogging the technology gap

Alexandra Samuels called me a few weeks ago to talk about cases where "two-thirds" world communities were adapting and adopting technology faster, often leap frogging the so-called "developed" nations. I just got the chance to peek at the story: - Leapfrogging the technology gap

"A wireless network links computers in the village to computer chips on each of five motorcycles a fleet. Each vehicle has a transmitter that allows it to upload and download e-mail and data via Wi-Fi, as it passes by village computers. At the end of the day the bikes return to a hub where they upload the information received. The next morning they download e-mail and data from the hub and take it out to the villages for transmission.

Villages like Robib have been described as 'leapfroggers:' communities or even whole countries in the developing world, that are using information and communication technologies to leapfrog directly from being an agricultural to an information economy. It's a phenomenon that combines technology high and low in innovative ways, and is generating not only economic benefits but a new world of educational, social and political opportunities."

Her quote from me refers to the Project Harmony Armenia School Connectivity Project (ASCP).

SXSW Activist Technology Panels

The Activist Technology panels for SouthBySouthWest in Austin in March are shaping up:

I. Activist Tech
Kathy Mitchell, moderator
Dan Robinson
Ren Bucholz
Shabbir Safdar
Erin Rogers
Amalia Anderson

II. Deliberative Democracy
Jerry Michalski, moderator
Kaliya Hamlinet
Tom Atlee - pending
Lars Torres
Nancy White
Jed Miller

III. Are political parties obsolete?
Dan Robinson, moderator
Glenn Smith
Andy Rappaport
Christian Crumlish
Adam Greenfield

IV. "How to think about democracy"
Jon Lebkowsky, moderator
Aldon Hynes
Jerry Michalski
Mitch Ratcliffe
Rebecca MacKinnon
Ethan Zuckerman

Visualizing a Personal Learning Space

I have been working and constantly yapping with friends on this idea of a personal learning space. How can I bring together formal and informal learning, learning communities, resources and those little bits that float around with no particular place to call home?

Now Scott Wilson sketches out a bunch of the junk rumbling around in my brain, calling it a VLE (virtual learning environment). Take a peek: Visualizing VLE. It makes a lot of sense to me. Here's a (too big) img link ...



[via Stephen Downes]

P.S. I so often get key links from Stephen. I'm really looking forward to meeting him F2F to thank him at Northern Voice next month.

P.S.S. Reading a bit further, there was a link back to a related image from July on CogDogBlog

Introduction to Social Network Analysis

Stephen Downes points to a great resource from Barry Wellman: "Networks for Newbies: A Non-Technical Introduction to Social Network Analysis. It's a fast downloading 115 slides that I'm thrilled to be able to point to because SNA is creeping into so many facets of my work. I mention it, but then want a nice resource to send people to. Check it out.

Networks for Newbies

[via Elearnspace, Stephen Downes]

Personal Preferences

I'm always both intrigued and a bit pissed off about these quickie self inventories. I know how to game 'em. I know that I'm inconsistent in how I fill them in. But the continue to lure me in. Here is a new one that gave me a profile I had not gotten much before:

You scored as Intrapersonal. You prefer your own inner world, you like to be alone, and you are aware of your own strengths, weaknesses, and feelings. You learn best by engaging in independent study projects rather than working on group projects. People like you include entrepreneurs, philosophers and psychologists.

Intrapersonal	79%
Musical/Rhythmic	75%
Interpersonal	75%
Verbal/Linguistic	68%
Visual/Spatial	68%
Bodily/Kinesthetic	39%
Logical/Mathematical	29%

The Rogers Indicator of Multiple Intelligences
created with QuizFarm.com

[via Viv]

Communicating WITH or AROUND Each Other Online

I noted a while back that a friend of mine, Dan Oestreich, has started blogging on leadership. It has been so much fun to watch him take off like a rocket, but even better, I now have access to his amazing writing.

Friday afternoon, as I continued work avoidance mode, I read a post that directly spoke to me of the underlying dynamic that I have felt this last week in the Online Facilitation group.

First, he pointed us towards a poem by William Stafford called "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" (A beautiful poem on its own), particularly this part:

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star

A bit later in his post, Dan wrote:

"So let me voice this premise -- opposed as it is to all the fine human relations training you may have received: If I feel that I cannot talk to you about you, directly, and if I cannot talk about about me, directly, then there can be no real "us," no "our star." Under such conditions, the domain of our relationship may narrow to allow only a slim passage of competing ideas whose credibility depends on avoiding what is most sensitive and undiscussable -- which is you, which is me. And right here we begin the awful dance of becoming politically smart and interpersonally unreal. We learn to communicate around each other, not with each other. Inevitably we talk in the background about the very things that should be part of the conversation. We talk about others to others we believe are safe without ever talking to the those who can do something about the problem. "

From an online facilitation practice perspective, this speaks to me of the challenge of the environment where it is so easy for us to communicate AROUND each other. The time, effort and skill it takes to communicate WITH each other often makes us pause... is it worth it?

In a large, diffuse network with disparate motivations, the answer is often, "no." In smaller, more purposeful groups, it is easier to answer yes.

So my question is this. Is it possible to facilitate a large, open network (and I mean facilitate in the most open sense... not just one person doing X, Y and Z) so that it is both worth and easier to communicate "with" rather than "around?" Or should we reduce our expectations in larger networks, and focus on smaller groups?

If the latter, should we be paying attention to how larger groups can self-organize smaller groups (sort of the Dunbar number)? It seems that the recent trends in online interaction software (aka social software) follow this line of reasoning.

But something inside of me thinks we can learn more about the larger network interactions and find ways to make them more connective.

Want to Stop Working for the Day?

Check out the TREASURE BOX. You have been warned. Friday afternoon productivity may be lost.

[via David via Christian]

Situated Learning in Online Courses

Susan Smith Nash had a nice piece back in December about the challenges of using situated learning in an online environment. XplanaZine
She starts off with a nice explanation of situated learning (which I often crudely call "learning by doing):

"Situated learning" is a term popularized by Lave and Wenger (1991), and it refers to the kind of cognitive activity and knowledge acquisition that takes place in an apprenticeship-type setting. It emphasizes the following elements: content, real life, and mentoring. It involves developing an awareness of both tacit and explicit knowledge. Situated learning is on the other end of a continuum of learning that would place rote memorization on one end and team projects on the other, and it requires the application of concepts to solve problems, provide explanations, and to develop action steps and strategies. An important element in situated learning is social interaction.

She then goes on to give a F2F example, cite the challenges in moving this online, then a set of guidlines for situated learning online.

Effective situated e-learning requires the following elements:

1. Needs Assessment. This is vital in order to understand how to motivate e-learners and to select content and activities that connect to experiences.
2. Alignment of content. Make sure that the content is relevant to the tasks, and that it provides scaffolding.
3. Experience-Based Learning. Encourage connections with current, past, or collective experience through'

1. Reflective writing
2. Discussion topics that make connections between course content and experience
3. Discussion topics that encourage sharing of experience
4. Guided discussion responses that reward appropriate sharing of experience
5. In-depth looks at specific examples ( Barton etal, 2000)
6. Meta-analysis of the particular in order to get at the general, or universal

4. Readings / Texts

1. Provide conceptual frameworks
2. Provide theoretical underpinnings
3. Discuss how to apply concepts to case studies

5. Virtual Teams. Develop projects or group activities that require that individual members of teams prepare components of a report, then share.
6. Encourage social identity production through the team activities.

1. Build a narrative about a problem that encourages role-playing
2. Encourage teams to be flexible and let identities or roles emerge
3. Role-playing is agreed-upon and mutually understood by team members
7. Build in a sense of relevancy and urgency

1. Choose topics that mean something to the team members
2. Develop a solution-centered approach
3. Allow new topics to be proposed that connect to e-learners' real-life issues and challenges

8. Embed theory and/or conceptual tools (statistics, etc.) in the experiential activities so that they are a part of the problem-solving or thinking process, not something outside and unrelated.
9. Encourage self-awareness of the fact that a specialized language is being developed in the groups as learning activities are centering around experience and experience-based tasks.

1. Lists of terms and definitions that connect to the tasks
2. Specialized uses and applications of terms
3. An awareness of the new way that signs, symbols, activities are being 'read' -- through the lenses of the context and goals (rather than the other way around) (Gee 2004).

As e-learners engage in a focused, situated type learning in their courses, new internal practices will emerge, and knowledge transfers will take place, not only in the 'nuts and bolts' content areas, but in the way that individuals solve problems, think about themselves in relation to a group or a task, and shift their ideas about themselves and others. It is often a subtle shift of orientation and thinking, and yet the outcomes are vastly different in a course that has incorporated situated e-learning."

I like this list, but I probably would have suggested a different order, with #6, 5, 7, 8 and 9 all competing for first place!

New Literacy of Cooperation in Business

This is what I'll be reading on my upcoming plane ride (or more likely, the airport wait)... New Literacy of Cooperation in Business by Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Kathi Vian

The PDF (856K)files can be found directly here.

Why I Love David Weinberger

Recently David blogged a wonderful piece, Web as world. This one paragraph was like a cup of dark, hot chocolate.

"some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first. Isolation and alienation are withdrawals from the pre-existence of what is shared. I think that helps explain why some sites 'work' and others don't. Many of the sites that work for me are ones in which I see that my participation helps create and enrich this shared world; I have that sense at del.icio.us and Flickr, at every place I leave a review or join in a discussion, and every time I blog. I can't explain that by thinking of the Web only as a medium, but I can explain it if it's a shared world that we are building together."

In the past week there has been an intense and often challenging conversation on the Online Facilitation Yahoogroup which I moderate and sometimes even facilitate. It is a lot of work to keep a 1000+ diverse group moving forward and sometimes I ask myself, "why bother." Well, David summed it up. It is because it is a communal act of building something together. It is a shared world, even if it has warts, bumps and wrinkles. They, at least, are our bumps, warts and wrinkles.

Thanks, David, for continuing to keep the heart visible in all of this.

[lead via Bill Anderson]

P.S. (posted a bit later) Make sure you read the comments following Dave's post with Dave Rogers.

SXSW Interactive - Will You Be There? (I Will!)

After a year's hiatus I'm heading back to Austin in March for SXSW Interactive. I'll be speaking on the Deliberate Democracy and Interactive Technology panel then sticking around an extra day to spend time with 20 folks thinking about the same issue.

If you are going, or live in Austin and want to get together, leave me a note!

Freedom to Connect Event -- Looks Interesting!

David S. Isenberg has another interesting event up his sleeve, Freedom to Connect. Here are the details:

WHO: F2C is for all who care about -- and are affected by -- network connectivity, economics, applications and policy.

WHAT: F2C is where communications policy meets networking technology, network economics, networked applications, and network construction and operation. F2C is dedicated to the proposition that strong networks build strong democracies, and vice versa.

WHEN: From 8:00 AM on March 30 through 5:00 PM, March 31, 2005.

WHERE: F2C will convene at AFI Silver, a short walk from the Silver Spring Metro station. The Silver Spring Metro is six stops from Washington, D.C., Union Station on the Red Line.

PARTICIPATION FEE: $250 until February 28, then $350. Register here.
(If you need to be there but can't afford it, write to isen@isen.com and make your case.)

Why Freedom to Connect? updated 17Jan05

The future of telecommunications starts now; there's a new U.S. Telecom Act in the works, there's unbundling in Europe, fast fiber in Asia, wireless across Africa and networks a-building in cities and villages around the world. Lead the discussion. Shape the debate. Assert your Freedom to Connect.

The need to communicate is primary, like the need to breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, socialize and learn. Better connections make for better communication. Better connections drive economic growth through better access to suppliers, customers and ideas. Better connections provide for development and testing of ideas in science and the arts. Better connections improve the quality of everyday life. Better connections build stronger democracies. Strong democracies build strong networks.

Freedom to Connect belongs with Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion and Assembly. Each of these freedoms is related to the others and depends on the others, but stands distinct. Freedom to Connect, too, depends on the other four but carries its own meaning. Unlike the others, it does not yet have a body of law and practice surrounding it. There is no Digital Bill of Rights. Freedom to Connect is the place to start.

Too often the discussion of telecommunications policy turns on phrases like "overregulation," and "investment incentives." These are critical issues, to be sure, but like the term "last mile," such phrases frame the issues in network-centric terms. As more and more intelligence migrates to the edge of the network, users of the network need to be part of the policy debate. Let's put the user back into the picture. Freedom to Connect provides the frame.

Freedom to Connect begins with two assumptions. First, if some connectivity is good, then more connectivity is better. Second, if a connection that does one thing is good, then a connection that can do many things is better.

It is written that Freedom of the Press is only for those with presses. But Freedom to Connect is potentially available to everybody; the main economic limit is the need for sustainable networks that will improve as new technology becomes available. How can we best do this? Who will build, operate and govern these networks? Who will decide how we use them? Who will pay? Who will gain? Aha! Let's discuss it at Freedom to Connect.

Speakers (under active construction, check back soon) updated 19Jan05

Keynotes include Jim Baller, Vint Cerf, Reed Hundt (sorry, conflict was unworkable), Lee Rainie, David Weinberger. Panelists include Daniel Berninger, Jeff Chester, Susan Crawford, Jeff Jarvis, Robert Pepper, Rick Whitt. Others to be added soon. Proposals to organize panels, debates and demos welcome. The agenda will gather a lot more structure (and a lot less ambiguity) over the next few short weeks, folks.

Letters To My President - Rebecca's New Blog

Rebecca Lawrence launched her new blog today, Letters To My President. I met her last night at the Seattle Blogger Meetup and loved her enthusiasm and intent to use her blog to try and connect productively around some tough issues. Here is her introduction:

On Inauguration Day, 2005 some will cry, some will cheer. And approximately half of the country will be contemplating how best to combat this administration and survive daily life in today's United States at the same time. Those who felt oppressed, defeated and voiceless over the past four years are probably anticipating a depressing renewal. But I hope to offer them a way to get involved, and proof that there are others unwilling to settle for more of the same.

To encourage and remind like-minded citizens that Bush is accountable to each of us, the interactive blog "Letters To My President" will launch on Inauguration Day. While President Bush is the catalyst for this e-campaign, the true goals are to: educate, enlighten, and entertain. It is my intent to send and/or post publicly one email or letter to President Bush representing EACH DAY of his second term. Short, long, funny, sad, questioning, and irate. I have committed to writing, gathering submissions, and keeping up the site.

Keep going, Rebecca!

Seattle Bloggers January Meetup

I went to my first blogger meetup here in Seattle last night and got to meet a couple of folks I have known online, and meet many others who are brand new to me.

The Seattle Blogger Meetup is a very informal thing. There were maybe 20 of us, just mingling and moving around talking to each other. Since it was my first time, I was a bit hesitant and talked to the known, but I resolved to move around and talk to at least three new people. I was very glad I did. I'll blog about one of them in a subsequent post.

My very predictable opening line was to ask the other person's name and about their blog. It was interesting to hear how many of the people I talked to had generalist blogs. They blogged because it gave them voice. I realized I have mostly been operating in the corner of the blogosphere where people have fairly defined blog topics so this was a great peek into another area.

And, typically of anything that has to do with the kismet of connections, I met someone who knows a good friend of mine. It always amazes me how we can find connections everywhere. I like that.


Other meeting links: Pirillo, Make You Go Hmmmmm, attendee list, more great pictures

Exercise or Blog?

This month I have worked hard to get back to exercising. I do this in the morning. Guess what gets less time? Blogging. Sigh.

Technorati Tag Experiment : chocolate

Update on the Technorati tag experiment: My chocolate tagged posts showed up. Technorati: Tag: chocolate.

Larry's Solar Toilets

IMGP4139
Originally uploaded by Choconancy1.

A while back I blogged about Larry's Solar Toilets. I forgot I had uploaded one of the pictures to flickr. This is a shot of the newest model which includes a little sink for handwashing. Larry runs the pump for the water from a wind generator. If anyone is interested, I can upload more pictures of the work that Sandy and Larry are doing with sustainable agriculture and solar composting toilets

Technorati Tags: toilet, composting, sustainability, Larry_Warnberg

Technorati Tag Testing Times Two

Now trying Matt's bookmarklet to tag Technorati's tag page on the word tags. My, this can be denser than flourless chocolate cake.

Technorati Tags: technorati, tags

Looks like it works like a peach. Or is that like a chocolate covered peach? (Still working on getting chocolate into every post! ;-) Oh, that means I need to add a tag...

chocolate

Technorati Adds Tags

The buzz is flowing across blogs like molten chocolate. Technorati has added the ability to add tags. I use blogger, which does not have categories (boo), so I have to put the tags in manually. So I'm experimenting with this post. I'm giving it a tag of "tags" (quite original, eh?).

Matt has noted that this manual tagging is tedious and has written a little bookmarklet to help. I'll try that next.

Technorati tags: tags technorati bookmarklet

An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot

Anjo has thrown down a challenge I can't resist to see if chocolate shows up as some sort of signature word in my blog. With a little kismet in the wind, John Smith sent me the link to this lovely research articlePlokta Issue 23 - An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot. Too good to miss:

Simon Bradshaw, Amanda Baker, Bridget Bradshaw, John Bray, Gordon Brignal, David Clements & Del Cotter

THE CHOCOLATE teapot remains popular as a general comparative standard for the failure of an object to perform in accordance with its intended function, rivalled only by its close relative (in terms of composition, if not morphology), the chocolate fireguard. However, whilst numerous items are colloquially labelled as being ‘as useful as a chocolate teapot', there does not appear to be any objective standard for the usefulness, or indeed uselessness, of a chocolate teapot itself. In the absence of any British, European or ANSI Standard, Def Stan or MIL-STD for this important but poorly-specified reference item, it was decided to conduct an independent assessment of exactly how much use one of them was. As well as filling an significant gap in the standards literature, it was felt that this study would add to the body of work published in the Annals of Improbable Research on the scientific evaluation of common metaphors (Sandford, 1995; Paskevich and Shea, 1995; Dubik and Wood, 1995; collected in Abrahams, 1998).

So what does this have to do with online interaction? I could make something up. Well, it could also be a confessional about my research methods. I would have eaten the chocolate teapot and ruined the research. But my keen intuition would have reached the same conclusion and my chocolate-requiring-cells would be much happier.


chocolate

Jon Husband's 10 Principles for Our Interconnected Workplace

As of today, Jon is up to #4 of his Ten Principles For Our Interconnected Workplace. He started on January 12th with this intro:

About a year and a half ago I wrote what I intended to be a little booklet that set out one principle per page, just a few bullet points ... ten principles in all ... based on my past experience consulting to organizations about work, workers and management/leadership development.

Principle # 1 - Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has.

Principle #2 - The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization ... more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.

Principle # 3 - People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long

Principle # 4 - Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control.

I'm nodding a lot here in agreement. #4 is one of the better expressions of power shifts that I've read because it acknowledges the strengths that were borne in the command-and-control era -- the positive stuff like leadership -- but frames them in the network age in terms of a champion. Leadership has a new manifestation in the interconnected age. It is more artful than ever.

I do have some nits to pick, mainly because of the context of some of my work outside of Western cultures, particularly North American cultures. The freedom of access to information and the freedom to have a voice is still huge issue in many parts of the world. This is not just about internet connection, but the control of this ability. I feel this is a critical issue facing the world and one that gets very little visibility on my continent. It worries me. What are the implications?

I'm looking forward to the next six. Keep it coming, Jon!

Technorati tags: interconnected collaboration principles

Still Not Sure What it Means... but WHAT, no chocolate?

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon Anjo's research. Today, I floated back to his blog and found this interesting post. First, we are clearly having some fun with the idea of not knowing what it means. But I loved something Anjo wrote about his experiment into tracking key words appearing in certain bloggers blogs.

In our research, I'm drawn between those who seek meaning and those who see meaning. Those who seek meaning revert to logic, mathematics, or whatever is computable and formal. Those who see meaning revert to words and images, or whatever that is open to interpretation.

Oh, I think I forgot to note what words showed up in my blogging: blend, coach, distribute community, grey, on line community, on line facilitation, on line group, on line interaction, peek, principles, sector, telephone, thread, web based.

What, no chocolate???? I must be slipping.

Connecting with Bloggers in Vancouver

I'm thrilled to see that Seb will be coming to Northern Voice. He writes: :

"...I will be at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver, sitting alongside my colleague Stephen Downes and Laura Trippi on a panel on weblogs in academia moderated by Cyprien Lomas.

Looks like lots of interesting people will be at Northern Voice! I'm especially thrilled with the prospect of meeting Stowe Boyd, Brian Lamb, the Bryght guys, Suw Charman, Nancy White, and the one and only Lion Kimbro, who's just told me he was coming all the way from Seattle.

Plus, Roland Tanglao is organizing a pre-conference BlogWalk, which I also intend to take part in. List yourself if you want to come! (Look for the Edit this Page link on the page.)

And finally, Suw is thinking about putting together a pre-pre conference open space session, which sounds like a great idea. Interested? Leave a comment here."

This is going to be FUN!

"Blink" and "The Wisdom of Crowds" Book Club

Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki are doing a joint online book club of their two books, Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds . They are interested in how to improve the decision making environment. First, there is lots of interesting reading in their posts. Second, it is a very human voiced interchange.

Surowieki hooked me in his first entry with

"You and I are friends, you blurbed my book, and I think Blink is a terrific book. Now let's argue about it."

Gladwell riffs off of him with his opener

"You are quite right to find this format a little strange. Authors don't usually get to discuss their own books, since that (quite rightly) raises the possibility that the discussion will be less than objective. The difference between a book discussion involving outsiders and a book discussion involving the writers themselves is a bit like the difference between Olympic wrestling and pro wrestling. (Then again, pro wrestling is an awful lot more entertaining than Olympic wrestling, so clearly there is something to be said for contests where the outcome is preordained.)"

Yeah, they appear to have carefully crafted their posts (wouldn't you if you were writing on Slate?), but there is this delicious thread of dialog. Very cool.

[via Stephen Downes]

Doors of Perception - An Enticing Sounding Event

Platforms for social innovation is the theme for the Doors of Perception 8 event in India in March.

What infrastructures are needed to enable bottom-up, edge-in social innovation? And how do we design them? Doors of Perception 8 is about these two questions.

Doors is a worldwide design and innovation network whose aim is to learn how to design services, some of them enabled by information technology, that meet basic needs in new ways. Every two years or so, the network meets to share the results of its work with citizens, education, industry and professionals.

Our latest global meeting, Doors of Perception 8 (Doors 8) is a five day encounter in New Delhi, India. Our week together features a range of activities :

- plenary think-piece presentations (Monday and Tuesday);
- Project Clinics and workshops (Wednesday and Friday);
- one-to-one conversations (every day);
- encounters and exchanges in the city and around."

Ah, sounds fascinating, with some overtones of a Muckabout minus the online pre/post. For more see:

http://www.doorseast.com/
http://flow.doorsofperception.com/

Patti Anklam on Eclipes and Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

I've been following Patti Anklam's work for a while -- always lots of interesting ideas and forsight. Here is a bit more to chew on about the Eclipse Trust Framework -- and I'm not sure I understand it, but my instincts say "pay attention.

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness.

Eclipse is an open source framework and toolkit for software applicatoin developers. Being a part of the Eclipse framework means that the concepts of social physics, specifically the abilty to collect user context information and interactions with 'the right set' of privacy controls may become standard. One vision for what this means is that I can control how much software applications that I use collect information about the communities I participate in, the identities that I have in those communities, and who can access the information.

As a practitioner and teacher of social network analysis, I am constantly looking for responses to the question of individual privacy. This trust framework, when fully implemented, will provide the technology response. The human, personal, ethical response will always be just that: human, personal and individual.

The last part I get, right away. What interests me is the intersection between the technological and the human, particularly our processes.

The Merc on Online Communities

The San Jose MercuryNews.com had an interesting article on the 9th: Two's company, three's a `community', by Mark Leibovich

Coming off the attention to the ``rat-terrier community,'' the ``heavy-metal community,'' and their roles in recent news events, Leibovich notes there are certainly pressure points. But he is more interested in how the press and the public perceives and portrays these things we call "communities" and "online communities."

`Community' evokes a sense of warm fuzziness on a group of people who have only the most superficial bonds,'' said Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who has written extensively about the ``community of communities'' around the world.

Etzioni said the term ``community'' has not been overused as much as it has been abused. He said an authentic community must include both genuine bonds of affection and shared moral values.

``That should be the test of a community,'' Etzioni said, ``not whether someone simply calls them a community.''

We celebrate this man as a pillar of the community-restraint community.

Anjo Anjewierden: Making a Difference

I'm still getting my head around Anjo's experiment to find common interests among blogs. I found it because it came up on a Technorati search for my blog. Anjo Anjewierden: Making a Difference:

While searching for a reasonable approach to create Visual Settlements based on language rather than linkage, I considered the following idea. In Information Retrieval the idea of inverse document frequency (TF/IDF algorithm) is often used to find 'unique documents'. In a (virtual) community there is a shared interest, but there will also be 'personal' differences, and to identify the uniqueness of a single blog within the community the idea of inverse document frequency might come in handy.

Partial motivation came from a paper on identifying virtual communities using linking structures.

Looking at the terms from folks like danah boyd, Lilia Effimova and others is fascinating. Not sure what it means, though. Find this interesting? Look at Anjo's earlier post on Visual Settlements.

Lee Bryant Looks at Blogs into the Future

More great stuff from Lee B.: Blogs are not the only fruit

What is really going on is a major shift in the way that we are able to communicate, collaborate and share things with each other using online technologies. The key to this is not the technology itself - there is remarkably little that we can do now that wasn't possible 5 years ago - but rather the critical mass of connectivity between people that we are finally reaching, as the Pew survey makes clear. The real story is about about ease of use, availability, culture change and most importantly network effects, as Jon Udell rightly emphasises. As Simon Waldeman notes, the only slight negative in the Pew stats is the relatively low level of RSS adoption among non-expert users. This is something we should all work to address, as RSS/Atom and other syndication schema are the glue that binds this growing ecosystem of connected conversations.

This is just a sip. Go drink it up.

Poynter Online - Taking Tsunami Coverage into Their Own Hands

Steve Outing posts an interesting article on Poynter Online - Taking Tsunami Coverage into Their Own Hands: "

The world turns to citizen journalists for eyewitness accounts and more as the crisis continues to unfold.

The earthquake and tsunamis in South Asia and their aftermath represent a tipping point in so-called 'citizen journalism.' What September 11, 2001, was to setting off the growth and enhanced reputation of blogs, the December 2004 tsunamis are to the larger notion of citizen journalism (of which blogs are a part).

If you think about it, this worst natural disaster in a lifetime is an amazing media story. (And that's not to discount the horrible human tragedy of it, only to focus here on the media angle.) It's not only that it will occupy traditional journalists for months and even years during the recovery. What's amazing is how many of the people who experienced and survived the disaster -- spread across several countries and thousands of miles -- were able to share their heart-wrenching stories, photographs, and videos with the rest of the world."

John Seely Brown on conferencing and collaboration

I missed this one last fall while on the road. John Seely Brown on conferencing and collaboration: "John Seely Brown on conferencing and collaboration

Conferencing and collaboration have come a long way, but the technology has a long way to go before it becomes truly useful. John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at USC and former chief scientist at Xerox Parc, joins us to discuss what's good, and bad, about current conferencing and collaboration technologies."

Michael Sampson's 2005 Top 5

I'm dumping links... too many posts that are in draft form, so I'll just post them without much comment. Here's another look forward from Shared Spaces Research & Consulting

Top 5 for 2005
1. What Becomes of Presence....
2. Collaboration Auto-Discovery....
3. New Integrated Collaboration Environments....
4. Maturation of RSS...
5. Microsoft’s Collaboration Roadmap...

There are some interesting notes that go with these five things. Check it out.

Web And Video Conferencing Systems Requiring IE To Work:

Robin Good roles out a list of which collaboration software vendors work with Firefox and which don't. I can tell you, I'm a much happier user when they work with Firefox. This is a useful list if you are shopping for systems. Web And Video Conferencing Systems Requiring IE To Work: Time For Strategy Review - Online Collaboration and Web Conferencing Breaking News:

"Internet Explorer has been rapidly loosing market share since the beginning of 2004 and in just the last 12 months it has left on the table over 20% of its previous loyal users.

The trend, now that FireFox has released its final version 1, has only increased its speed with IE 6 having less than 60% of my publishing network market share in these last weeks of December.

The issue is of particular concern to Web conferencing, collaboration and live presentation companies who have been betting their cards on technologies that heavily rely on IE presence (e.g.: ActiveX) and which may find that their strategic choice in requiring Microsoft internet Explorer is gradually becoming a critical marketing liability that they hadn't planned for.

The full list can be found in Robin's article.

Academic Blogging via Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing

There looks to be a feast of 13 articles, none of which I've read. (Do you hear that tone of self-frustration? Yup.) Academic Blogging:

In the past few years, blogging has become something of a national pastime, and academics are becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we explore the role that blogging plays for academics both in and out of the classroom.

Here are the article titles:

On the Subject of Blogs
Laura C. Berry, Associate Professor, University of Arizona

"I Don't Really Want to Go into Personal Things in This Blog": Risking Connection through Blogging
Carlton Clark, Professor, Collin County Community College

How I Became an Academic Who Blogs
Billy Clark, Senior Lecturer, Middlesex University, London

Knit Blogging: Considering an Online Community
Amy E. Earhart, Lecturer and Coordinator of Instructional Technology, Texas A&M University

Trying It On for Size
Nels P. Highberg, Assistant Professor, University of Hartford

The Bane of the President's Existence
Dennis G. Jerz, Associate Professor, Seton Hill University

I Blog, Therefore I Am
Angelina Karpovich, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Aboard the Ideological Hot Air Balloon
Nicole Converse Livengood, Ph.D. Candidate, Purdue University

Blogging from the Bottom: A Cautionary Tale
Eric Mason, Ph.D. Candidate, University of South Florida

Blogging Back to the Basics
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, Assistant Professor, Lincoln University, St. Louis, MO

Between Work and Play: Blogging and Community Knowledge-Making
Clancy Ratliff, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota

Practicing What We Teach: Collaborative Writing and Teaching Teachers to Blog
Cathlena Martin, Ph.D. Candidate, and Laurie Taylor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Florida

Having a BALL with Blog-Assisted Language Learning
Jason Ward, Instructor, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

RIT's List of Social Computing Researchers

Researchers - LSCWiki: "This is a directory of researchers interested in social computing topics. Feel free to add yourself or colleagues who you think belong here. We've seeded the list with LSC faculty and attendees from the 2004 Microsoft Social Computing Symposium."

Are you a Social Computing Researcher? Not on the list? Add yourself.

Rheingold: Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

TheFeature :: Mobile and Open: A Manifesto:

"Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for."

Rheingold goes on to say that "A future where mobile media achieve their full economic and cultural potential, requires:"

• That people are free and able to act as users not consumers
  
• An open innovation commons
  
• Self-organizing, ad-hoc networks
  
• the freedom to associate information with places and things, and to access the information others have associated with places and things.

I'm wondering what the definition (or scope) of the mobile internet is. Do you know?

Randall Moss and Non-Profits

Stowe Boyd, on Operating Manual for Social Tools comments on a comment Randy Moss left for Stowe (how is that for a convoluted explanation. More chocolate!) Randy suggested that the goals of public social networks are important in different ways than business networks.

I agree with the business and economic motivations of corporate driven social networks, but I feel that there is a middle ground between the Enterprise and Individual supported networks. This middle ground is populated by non-profits.

Non-profit social networks aim to influence behavior but it may not always be for financial gain. Health related networks may look to raise awareness of disease, or influence behaviors to improve health. These activities are fulfilling the goals of the organization but it is a far cry from corporate sales, and profit margins.

This is often true in the international development world where social networks are increasingly seen as an effect medium for change because the NGO doesn't own them. The NGO taps in, but the network itself determines the outcome. This creates possibility for sustainability, change and development that reflects the users of what is being developed. It is more than participatory development. It is network owned development.

The barriers to these sorts of networks are still often forms of government controls, either of resources, communications channels (no VOIP in X country), or policy that makes the desired change illegal.

Lilia BLogging from HICSS-38: Persistent conversations workshop

Lilia

: "Conference blogging is always a balance: finding a ways to combine your personal goals and informing your readers, choices between f2f time and time needed to reflect and write, balancing fun of being in the flow of discussions and discipline of writing things down. Don't know how it will go this time, but I'll try..."

Technologies for Online Public Engagement

Lars Hasselblad Torres of AmericaSpeaks, shares this fantastic grid of Technologies for Online Public Engagement (PDF). Entitled "Approaches to Online Public Engagement", the grid summarizes 17 organizations that offer tools for online public engagement. Some are familiar to many of us, like Weblab. Others are unique tools developed by local and national government.

ne question I had for Lars was an indication of the underlying technologies offered — all they all home grown or based on commercial or open source products? Lars thought most were homegrown. If you know more, I’d love to know more! Likewise, Lars says he’d love feedback on any parts of the chart. He can be found at lhtorres at americaspeaks.org

As I scan the chart, I can't see some of the emergent technology efforts I hear about from folks like Jon Lebkowsky. CivicSpace Labs, and the work that Jerry Michalski and co. are doing at Yi-Tan. With a little thinking, I’m sure others comes to mind. I suspect this is because these folks have not been oriented specifically towards online consultations which is a very specific online interaction domain. They have been more in the activist domain.

That said, I sense there is a lot of opportunity bridging between the two domains.

New Page for the Journal of Computer Mediated Communications

The JCMC has a new home, and a new edition chock full of interesting articles. Here is the latest table of contents:

Volume 10, Issue 1, November 2004

• The Internet and Social Participation: Contrasting Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses Irina Shklovski, Robert Kraut & Lee Rainie
  
• Cosmopoliteness in the Internet Age Leo W. Jeffres, David J. Atkin, Cheryl Campanella Bracken & Kimberly A. Neuendorf
  
• A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research Constance Elise Porter
  
• Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online Catherine M. Ridings & David Gefen
  
• ‘Other People Benefit. I Benefit from their Work.’ Sharing Guitar Tabs Online Thomas Chesney
  
• Friendships through IM: Examining the Relationship between Instant Messaging and Intimacy Yifeng Hu, Jacqueline Fowler Wood, Vivian Smith & Nalova Westbrook
  
• Effects of Perceived Interactivity on Web Site Preference and Memory: Role of Personal Motivation Hwiman Chung & Xinshu Zhao
  
• The ICT Enabled Virtual Collaboration through Trust Liaquat Hossain & Rolf T. Wigand
  
• Interactive e-Commerce: Promoting Consumer Efficiency or Impulsivity? Junghyun Kim & Robert LaRose
  
• A Methodology and Investigation of an eLoyalty Metric, Consumer Bookmarking Behavior Jamie Murphy & Charles F. Hofacker
  
• Strategic
  Choice of Electronic Marketplace Functionalities: A Buyer-Supplier Relationship Perspective Shan Wang & Norm Archer
  
• The Impact of Internet-Based Communication Systems on Supply Chain Management: An Application of Transaction Cost Analysis Sung-Yeon Park & Gi Woong Yun
  

Rethinking What "Restoring" Means

There have been many voices who are looking to understand how the post-tsunami relief efforts can be a chance to create positive change for the affected community. Rife in this idea is the challenge of knowing what is positive and to whom. How local communities can voice what is right for them.

How many meal time conversations have been brewing in homes and communities miles away, wanting to be a positive source of ideas and energy. How do these ideas surface and find fertile ground? I don't know. But I figure blogging some ideas is one way as a blog post can have an amazing power to connect to a network. So I share some ideas from my friend Larry Warnberg, a steward of the earth if there ever was one. Larry's passion is toilets - toilets that save precious water and steward the ground. He and his partner, Sandy Bradley, are role modeling sustainable living and gardening practices on Washington State's Long Beach Penninsula on Willapa Bay.

Here is what Larry emailed me (posted with permission). Larry has been contacting relief agencies to offer his expertise with solar composting toilets:

Hi Nancy:

Thanks for your help with networking. The only response so far to dozens of inquiries has come from Scott Mantz at Care to Help. But, hey, it's a start.

I shouldn't be surprised by the lack of interest in composting toilets among NGO's. Among the few Emergency Sanitation programs I've discovered so far it is apparent that the agenda is set by the pipes-pumps-tanks promoters, sponsored by Engineers and suppliers, supported by the IMF and World Bank. The Hudson Enterprise Institute has media watchdogs patrolling for incursions on their turf, promptly ridiculing any barbarian who foolishly suggests a regression to primitive unsanitary fecal disposal. They nailed me twice.

Corporate control of sanitation development projects is nearly complete. From what I read in some groups, much of the US aid money will go to pre-selected products and services. I struggle with how composting toilets might eventually get on the purchase list (assuming I could even get a foot in the heavily guarded door), since there is no need to sell anything. I see it more as an educational process, a packet of learning on not fouling one's nest, saving water, preventing pollution and disease, and returning valuable nutrients to the soil. A bucket is cheap and readiliy available, but the ancient wisdom is not widely accessible. Can it be packaged? The Humanure Handbook is available in several languages, a valuable resource and guide for many. But it is just a drop in the bucket compared to the overwhelming need for better sanitary facilities not only for tsunami survivors, but wherever sewage-borne disease is a problem.

Persistently, Larry

The interior of one of Larry's latest solar composting toilets - complete with a sink.

Technorati Tags: compost, toilet, tsunami

Hearts and Minds: Carnival of the Capitalists!

I am feeling a bit embarassed... I have a pre-press copy of Lisa's Hanberg's new book, High Impact Middle Management to read and review, and I haven't done it yet. Then today, via a separate blog link, I tracked back to her site and a rather amazing weaving of ideas in her Carnival of the Capitalists!project. It starts with this poem, which resonated with me (all things in the world and my life considered!)

Brains and Hearts

With brains and hearts we plunge into the future
Hoping to better our lives and realize our dreams
Sorting through endless possibilities, digging deeper
Questions, contemplation, and impassioned screams

Spiders spin, gibbons swing, whales breach, ants build
Race horses and sled dogs thrive only when in full stride
With brains and hearts we carve a life fulfilled
Thinking, creating, and contributing to life’s joyride

Lisa Haneberg

APPLY NOW!: Networking Award in honor of Frank Burns

Lisa Kimball just pointed me to a networking award her company, GroupJazz, has created in honor of online networking pioneer Frank Burns. Act now: the 2005 deadline is January 7th!

The Group Jazz Meta Networking Award in honor of Frank Burns: "We have established the Meta Networking Award to honor Frank and to carry on the work he started in the way he taught us to do it. We hope that this award can play a small part in making the power of networking media available to people and organizations who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of it to leverage their goals.

Each year we will make at least one award to an organization or project that is committed to doing something aligned with the original mission of The Meta Network - closing the gap between the human condition and human potential. The selected organization or project will receive a full year of consulting, services, and access to online media and other tools to enable them to design, launch and implement a network that can play a key role in supporting their purpose. Our goal will be to help the network be self-sustaining by the end of the award year."

SMS in Disasters: Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC)

Posted by Jon Lebkowsky on WorldChanging: .

Could SMS be used effectively to send alerts about impending disasters and coordinate disaster relief after the fact? Some of the people behind the SEA-EAT /Earthquake and Tsunami Blog though so, especially given the effective use of SMS in the region by people like Morquendi. A system's already being built – you can see incoming messages here. For testing purposes, they're asking people to send messages to +44 7890 716 820. "While testing, it would be great if they could mention which cell phone service they are using. People sending messages from Sri Lanka will have their messages posted directly. People posting from other countries will have to prefix the message with ARC." [Link to post at SEA-EAT Blog] | [Link to more information about ARC]

Wherever we can be more creative about our use of technology in serving the community, the better.