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Category: Virtual Communities (Page 2 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Amongst the Online Journalists

At Chapel Hill’s best kept secret, the Barbecue Joint, with Ed Cone, Kirk Ross, Henry Copeland and Dan Gillmor.

Henry talked about deciding to be a financial journalist in Budapest thinking that with his understanding of finance that the journalism part would be a snap. Turned out to be tougher and he in the end did commit journalism but started companies that eventually led to BlogAds.com

Lots of dissection of community sites and community news projects. What makes them? What makes a company work? Visionaries aren’t the ones who see the work through often. The programmer who is great at swift prototypes and proof of concept designs isn’t usually a very good production programmer or the one who turns out the final polished product. Likewise the production programmer who is great at seeing bugs and straightening out code usually can’t get the sloppy but needed prototype out. Are community thinkers like that? If so who are the production people in community — Ruby?

A number of still secret projects hinted at and even delineated. Great talk and in what seems to be an oxymoron — great brussel sprouts! I can’t believe I wrote that but it’s true.

Dan Gillmor – Monday at 4

Dan Gillmor
What: We the (Traditional) Media: As citizen media explodes, journalism organizations are finally beginning to understand — and use — the tools and techniques. We’ll look at how this is happening, how far it may go and why it matters.
Who: Dan Gillmor, Director of the Center for Citizen Media and author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People
When: Monday November 13 beginning at 4 pm
Where: Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library, UNC-CH

Sponsor: ibiblio.org

Dan Lucas made a poster for Dan Gillmor here.

Open Source .com and .org

As I’ve been preparing for my Open Source Licensing talk today, I’ve been struck by how many F/LOSS projects have a .org and a .com side.

For Course Management Systems, Moodle operates in development mode as a .org and in a support and certification mode as a .com.

For Customer Relationship Management, SugarCRM also operates as a community development site .org and a service and support and packaged product site as a .com.

In Network Management, OpenNMS is a community supported project as a .org and in its commercial mode acts as steward of the project while providing training, professional services and support.

Others?

Ruby’s 2nd Life Roots Camp

Ruby's Roots Camp
Even as political junkie and OrangePolitics keeper of the relative peace Ruby was getting updates on the results of last night’s election, she was telling me about her Roots Camp being held in Second Life on Better World Island starting today at 4 pm EST.

Ruby tells me that the purpose of this Roots Camp is to “de-brief on the election and get a jump-start on organizing for 2008 by interacting with and learn from other leading Progressives in a cutting edge virtual environment that is likely to play a major role in online political organizing for 2008.”

Roots Camps are modeled directly on Bar Camp right down to the wiki and nearly to the logo. They’re about getting down to your netroots, if your roots are progressive (NewSpeak won’t allow you to say Liberal).

Second Life is a 3D virtual environment built by the residents (NewSpeak won’t allow you to say Users). There were at last count about 1,305,950 citizens (they say people) inhabiting Second Life.

For more on Roots Camp SL go here.

THURSDAY Carolina Innovations: Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz

As part of the Office of Technology Development‘s Carolina Innovations Seminars, I’ll be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Some helpful source material (pun intended) can be found at these links:
Free Software Foundation
Open Source Initiative
GNU Project
GNU Philosophy including the 4 Software Freedoms
Software Freedom Law Center
Wikipedia on Free Software
Wikipedia on Open Source Software

For non-software, see Creative Commons, iCommons (international Creative Commons movement) , and the Science Commons Project.

This is another experiment in opening the conversation like the one I just did down at Berry College where using the wiki really worked well. This time a blog post instead.

So Post at this link.

Gillmor: “We the (Traditional) Media” on Nov 13

Dan Gillmor
What: We the (Traditional) Media: As citizen media explodes, journalism organizations are finally beginning to understand — and use — the tools and techniques. We’ll look at how this is happening, how far it may go and why it matters.
Who: Dan Gillmor, Director of the Center for Citizen Media and author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People
When: Monday November 13 beginning at 4 pm
Where: Pleasants Family Room, Wilson Library, UNC-CH

Sponsor: ibiblio.org

Innovation and Rights (Digital and other)

Andrew Chin and I will be speaking to Computer Science 380 classes on “Digital Rights and Innovation” soon. Andrew will be speaking on November 14 and I’m up on November 28. Both are scheduled for 5:00 pm in Sitterson 014.

For my part, I’ve asked the students to read Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Chapter 1 is an Introduction and a Summary of the book by chapters that will give a great overview. Chapter 8 “Adapting Policy to User Innovation” is the meat of our discussion from a policy and law point of view.

Both chapters and in fact the whole book can be bought or downloaded for free from Eric von Hippel’s site.

I’m also asking folks in the class that have questions and/or issues that they’d like discussed to post them here as comments.

Signal needs Joomla help

Uzi sends this plea on behalf of Signal: The Southeast Electronic Music Festival in Chapel Hill:

Signal is ramping up for the 07 festival in April. We desperately need a joomla expert to configure some
settings for us (it’s probably not much work but I just can’t figure it out to fix it). If anyone is interested, I can send you a link the site that’s under construct to see what our requirements are. If you can do the job, we’ll work out the payment.

Contact him: uzoma nwosu uzoma .nwosuATgmail.com

100 Million Websites

Just took a call from John Hill of WCHL 1360-AM for comments on the CNN story “Web Reaches New Milestone: 100 Million Sites.”

It’s not clear to me immediately what constitutes a site, perhaps a unique URL?, but a serious looking guy from Netcraft (Rich Miller) assures us on the CNN bit (and at the Netcraft site) that we are there in numbers. If each MySpace and Facebook entry were considered a web site, where would we be? Note: I see from the Netcraft site linked just above that he means hosts not sites.

With the Google acquisitions of JotSpot, Writerly, and YouTube, we can see that the web site per se is less important than web services that allow for collaboration, cooperative work and contribution of and comment on content. Even at this the content is less important than the social acts of embedded in the collaboration, etc.

My first web page, perhaps web site?, was created on a NeXT with Tim Berners-Lee looking on back in 1992. It was ahead of its time. Not because I made it or anything that I did, but because TBL’s web browser wasn’t a browser. It was a collaborative communications tool from its conception.

I opened two windows. One in which I surfed the web — all 5 or so sites. One in which I created my web page. I took TBL’s own page and added my changes making it my own. I then added new links by highlighting and dragging to the composing window. It as completely collaborative.

We are only nearing that ease of collaboration and creation now with what Dale Dougherty named Web 2.0.

I also got off on how all of this ongoing storm of creativity is fed and nourished by Net Neutrality. Write your senator and support Net Neutrality today!

Two Good Essays on Social Networks by Fred

Fred Stutzman has two new essays up on his blog. One on Friendship In Youth Social Networking in which he looks at Harris and other poll data as well as surveys regarding cell phone call lists, IM buddy lists and SNS. In the other, he attacks various misreadings of SNS use. Is SNS use declining? Is SNS use aging rapidly so that 45 year olds on kids’ sites is now the norm? Nope, says Fred.

Both essays and their links are well worth your time.

Social Networking Protection?

Slashdot and others are all excited about the Federal Trade Commission’s moral panic game, Buddy Builder [link to popup Flash on this page]. Nevermind the funky name, the OnGuardOnline hosted site, pits you against a panel of fake characters as you answer some obvious questions about what to reveal in an IM or email.

Then you get to Round Two where you are asked:

One of the risks of some social networking sites is that there’s no way to control who will be viewing your page — including criminals or identity thieves. True or False.

Social networking pages provide a safe way to share your information with the world, including your school, favorite music group or sports team, where you hang out and more. True or False

More insecurity-building quizzes here. You can learn to fear P2P, Wireless, Spyware, ID Theft and more.

Upcoming speakings etc.

October 31 – Paul Jones speaks to news room at News and Observer (internal only sorry) about news as conversation and citizen involvement in political and investigative reporting.

November 9 – As part of the Office of Technology Development’s Carolina Innovations Seminars, Paul Jones be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Readings and postings here.

November 13Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media and director of the Center for Citizen Media will speak at 4 in the Pleasants Family Room of Wilson Library

December 8ibiblio at NCREN Community Day

January 20North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Google’s Craig Silverstein visit reviewed (in Korean)

Visiting Korean journalist Yeri Shin blogged about Craig’s visit on her Korean language blog. Yeri assures me that it’s all complimentary.

I haven’t Babblefished the article yet, but the Google Beta Korean to English translator takes this:

(오른쪽에 티셔츠 차림의 소탈한 인상의 아저씨가 바로 실버스틴입니다. 왼쪽은 제가 듣고 있는 블로그 관련 강의를 맡고 있는 폴 존스(Paul Jones) 교수예요. 이 날 사회자였죠.)

and gives this:

(The uncle of the increase which the t-shirt outfit is informal in right side is rightly the thread bus [thin]. The left side the blow which I am listening pawl Jones which keeps the relation strong will (Paul Jones) professor example bedspreads. This day master of ceremony [yess] [cyo].)

I can see why the Google tool is still Beta ;->

At WCOM

Inside the LPFM sausage factory, where about 10 middle schoolers are putting on the Teen Spirit show on 103.5 WCOM. Not only are the music choices amusing, but the process by which they are chosen by 13 year olds selforganizing their various music choices (and requests) is instructive. Not unlike Free Software projects ;-> Only a little dead air in honor of Halloween so far.

Later, I’ll be back in a different capacity on Melva’s Musings on Jazz as part of a tribute to DizzyGillespie with children’s book author/reviewer/reader Susie Wilde and composer TJ Anderson all of us coordinated by Melva Okun. 7 – 9 tonight.

Fred-mania in Financial Times

Also danahboydmania. In the service of explaining how important understanding online social networks are to kids. Yes, there is the standard Moral Panic! material, but the profile/observations by danah and Fred are palpable. Oddly in the Arts and Weekend section.

“One of the things students do at college is they test out identities. Maybe that is one new thing we are seeing now – more rapid changes of identity. Online you get feedback and you can change at a moment’s notice” Fred Stutzman, University of North Carolina

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