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Archive for communuity informatics

Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained—especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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What is HASTAC?

August 15, 2007 at 10:49 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, social media, web2.0

A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists, and engineers from universities across the country, HASTAC (”Haystack”) is committed to new forms of collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and communities to promote creative uses of technology. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure. Our aim is to promote expansive, innovative uses of technology in formal education and lifelong learning (link).

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What is Mashable.net?

August 15, 2007 at 8:43 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, social media, web2.0

Mashable is a news site for the social networking movement (link).

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FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

August 15, 2007 at 7:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, “the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways.”

“Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross- disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure,” said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, “The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as “e-Research” and “e-Science,” including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work.”

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.

–
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu

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Cyberinfastructure for Collaboration and Innovation (selected papers)

August 3, 2007 at 2:41 am · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, humanities computing, web2.0

selected papers from the conference 29-30 January 2007 (link to First Monday)

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JISC inform highlights repositories and Web 2.0

August 2, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, digital humanities, humanities computing, web2.0

The new JISC inform is published this week and highlights an interview with Professor Drummond Bone, President of Universities UK and Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, in which he gives his strong support to JISC’s work to encourage the development of repositories across the UK.

Repositories are, he says, an issue of national economic importance, supporting attempts to increase the UK’s competitiveness in an increasingly competitive international marketplace and to maximise its considerable investment in science and innovation.  The changing nature of research, with vast amounts of research data being exchanged remotely and with ever-greater opportunities for collaboration, means that an infrastructure is needed, says Professor Bone, to allow researchers to work together and to access resources freely.  Universities UK is therefore, he continues, ‘firmly behind the JISC repositories initiative – £3m between 2005 and this year and another £14m over the next three years…’ (From JISC website. Link)

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A Blog Philosophy

July 20, 2007 at 12:33 am · Filed under art, blogs, collaboration, communuity informatics, digital humanities, humanities computing, hypertext, internet

If a blog can have a philosophy, then the philosophy of this blog is that there is nothing particularly radical about the new. The new may be radical to some, but the new can only be new in the context of the old (or their ‘old’). Some of the old may be threatened by the new, but then again if the new isn’t new, the the old is only threatened by what it already knows, or what it has already learnt the hard way (remember Nuremberg). The new never follows what is new, the new leads in the context of ‘olds’ and what it keeps is a sign of how civilised it is, and what it discards, is often a sign of how lazy it is.

Few things are truly new and even the ‘new’ has a history of ‘newness’. Thus finding what is new and applying it to positive and progressive tasks, is far from a walk in the park. A blog is not an end in itself, it is a way of gaining perspective over-time, a cognitive perspective on what is new, what is useful, and how this can progress our knowledge (and make it new). Fundamental to the advancement of knowledge, is moving through knowledge, sharing knowledge, and imparting an alternative perspective to those who don’t look for it and to those who should.

What is new about new media, the Internet, and hypertext? It depends who you ask. In that famous line from 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Foreign Minister, Zhou Enlai, for his views on the French Revolution of 1789. He responded, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Blog on, we might learn something.

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UK gay social networking sites

June 13, 2007 at 9:43 am · Filed under communuity informatics, web2.0

I have always hated the institutionalised and official idea of ‘community’. Communities just happen; according to the needs of that community. Here are just some of the gay social networking sites available in the UK. There are a lot more of them and they address some of the needs of that community. They range from the overtly sexual, to sedate dating sites with real-world events and meetings.

  • The Circle. - Introduction service with female and male personal adverts. Predominantly lesbian oriented site.
  • Closed Loop UK - A group for married gay and bisexual men seeking same sex contact outside of marriage with a single outside partner.
  • Gay Dating Agency - Online dating community for gay men, with message boards, profiles and blogs.
  • Gaydar - Personals and profiles for meeting people through messages, chat and webcam.
  • Gaydate - Ireland based online meeting place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, or the curious. Free profiles; messages and chat are fee based services.
  • Guys4Men - Free Gay Personals. Password protected, so the claims cannot be verified, but the site aims at 2-way profile matching with automatic e-mail notification of new matches.
  • Jake - Social and professional network community for gay men. Regular offline events are organised for Jake members.
  • Kagoul.com - Online community for gay men, with message boards, profiles and blogs.
  • My Gay Prom - Five gay teenagers import from the USA the concept of a gay prom to take place in London. Part of a new Channel 4 series.
  • Out Everywhere - Membership-only social community with online profiles, chat and messages. Regular offline social events are arranged. Paid membership required.
  • Planet Sappho - Subscription based online dating for lesbian, bi-sexual and bi-curious women of all ages.
  • Saphos - Dating and friendship agency for Lesbian women in the UK. Lesbian owned and managed.
  • Significant Others - London based dating agency for professional gay men. Founded in 1992, gay owned and managed.
  • UK gay dating site - Profile site for meeting single gay men. Paid subscription needed to send messages.
  • Urban Connections - Events for gay men in London looking for love or friendship.
  • Manjam– You figure it out!

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Towards an institutional typology of digital humanities centres

May 11, 2007 at 1:07 am · Filed under communuity informatics, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, software

Thanks to John Unsworth for the link…

This Wiki presents a structured list of departments, centres, institutes and other institutional forms that variously instantiate humanities computing. For each entry a link is provided to the relevant site on the WWW and a brief description given. This list represents an ongoing attempt to derive a basic typology from a complex variety of activities and so to provide institutional models for the field. Despite the fact that national academic conventions vary quite widely and cultural differences make comparisons difficult if not hazardous, no attempt has been made here to account for them. The intention is not to define what is happening in the field world-wide, rather it is to provoke discussion leading either to consensus or at least to an improved understanding of the conditions under which computing humanists work. Constructive criticisms and clarifications are not merely welcome, they are to the point.

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Brown University Causal Reasoning Survey System

May 3, 2007 at 8:25 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, deliberation

The Scholarly technology group at Brown has a whole range of digital humanities projects. I find there Casual Reasoning Survey System of particular interest (although there are no surveys on it at the moment) (link)

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Hypermedia Discourse, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University

April 2, 2007 at 10:55 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, deliberation, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, humanities computing, web2.0

The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, has produced an enormous number of noteworthy projects. Check out the Hypermedia Discourse project:

Hypermedia Discourse website, a research programme launched in 1995 at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Our focus is on what we are finding to be a powerful and intruiging intersection: the meeting of Hypermedia and Discourse theory and technology. Our interests are both conceptual, and intensely practical: the co-evolution of digital tools and associated work practices for sensemaking.We hope you find this engaging, and look forward to hearing from you if this sparks ideas for your own work (link).

Also check out their other projects; particularly GlobalArgument.net

And also, ScolOnto (the Scholarly Ontologies Project)

In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose,
or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure
that is ‘native’ to the internet,
enabling more effective dissemination,
debate, and analysis of ideas?

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Semantic Grid Tools for Rural Policy Development and Appraisal (PolicyGrid)

March 14, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, e-science, political communication, social media, web2.0

How’s this for political communication? And Dr Geert Lovink of Nettime still thinks that blogs are technical advanced.

  1. To facilitate evidence-based rural, social, and land-use policy-making through integrated analysis of mixed data types;
  2. To demonstrate that Semantic Web/Grid solutions can be deployed to support various facets of evidence-based policy-making through the development of appropriate tools;
  3. To focus on the authoring of relevant ontologies to support rural, social and land-use policy domains;
  4. To investigate issues surrounding communication of semantic metadata to social scientists and policy practitioners;
  5. To promote awareness of the Semantic Grid vision and supporting technologies amongst social scientists.

Social scientists and policy practitioners are focusing increasingly on methods and tools for integrated policy evaluation. The importance of greater pluralism in policy evaluation approaches has grown in recent years, reflecting the increased complexities of overlapping governance and policy delivery mechanisms, and the challenge of evaluating policies with multiple, often cross-cutting, objectives. The result is increased emphasis on multi-method or mixed-methods approaches to evaluation, where emphasis is placed on plural types and sources of data, as well as diverse epistemological approaches and analytical techniques. In practice this is characterised by increased mixing of qualitative and quantitative techniques (e.g. surveys and interviews, ethnography or phenomenology, case studies, simulations) and the mixing of formative (evaluation which tries to improve an intervention) and summative (evaluation for accountability, measuring results or efficiency) techniques.

The node focuses on the challenges of using Semantic Grid technologies to enable more powerful analysis of mixed-method data, thus adding significant value to the work of social scientists engaged in the analysis of evidence bases for policy evaluation, and matching evaluative capabilities to the demands of integrated policy evaluation. There should also be benefits for the wider social science community, through facilitating mixed-method analysis in other contexts (link)

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What is icommunity.tv

February 15, 2007 at 9:12 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, internet, media, politics, social media, video, web2.0

Thanks to Chris Haller, Director of eParticipation for sending the link.

The concept behind iCommunity.TV originated in a twofold observation: Despite an almost ubiquitous availability of online mapping applications and websites with geo-enabled functionality, no video-sharing website offers the ability to geographically locate content. Secondly, video-sharing is still mostly focused on entertainment and the few video blogs that exist, mainly serve interest groups independent of location.

We believe that people choose the cities and towns they live in not only based on physical but also emotional reasons — the unique heart and soul characteristics of places. Local events, like school events, last week’s hail storm, or an interview with the mayor about the efforts to revitalize downtown, are important events that generate local identity for citizens, but, particularly for small communities or neighborhoods, there are few venues through which these news items are delivered. This means that local news, especially carried over visual channels, has great potential to support and encourage vibrant communities.

Our effort is focused on developing an aggregation platform that ties into video-sharing platforms like Youtube.com, extends their services by letting anyone georeference and sort video clips in news categories, and offers multiple convenient ways to subscribe to and watch these custom channels (e.g. “Politics in Berlin, Germany”).

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What is the Community Informatics Research Network?

December 20, 2006 at 11:03 am · Filed under communuity informatics, web2.0

The Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) is an international network of researchers, practitioners and policy makers concerned with enabling communities through the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) and specifically with research and practice in Community Informatics and community networking or community technology practice.(link)

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What is the Centre for Community Networking Research?

December 20, 2006 at 10:50 am · Filed under communuity informatics, events

This centre at Monash University holds a conference on ‘community networks’ annually at Monash’s Prato Centre in Italy (link 2006)

The Centre for Community Networking Research, Caulfield School of Information Technology, at Monash University, aims to understand how communities and community organisations are using new technologies. We are interested in the practicalities of information and technology usage and broader issues of community and institutional culture and memory as they are shaped through different understandings and uses of technologies. We are involved in 21 current projects and have 10 local and international PhD students.(linK)

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