Culture24 exists to promote and support the cultural sector online and to serve the needs of online audiences. We are a not-for-profit online publisher, working across the arts, heritage, education, and tourism sectors.
A wonderful initiative. Also, check out there data-feeds that contain data from 4300 cultural venues across the UK…wow! (link).
An interesting new report from the Centre for Social Media at American University is Washington DC.
This field report traces how a committed group of volunteers harnessed the micro-blogging tool Twitter to create innovative public media 2.0 experiments—first to actively engage users to report on their voting experiences in the 2008 U.S. election, and then to document their experiences of the 2009 presidential inauguration. Along the way, these two projects demonstrated how journalists and advocates can effectively leverage a range of both commercial and open source social media tools to organize, publicize and implement citizen reporting projects, creating infrastructure for related future projects. Organizers have since worked to archive and repurpose the code and collaboration materials from these efforts for use in 2009 election monitoring initiatives in India and Iran (link)
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/
I attended the OpenTech ’09 forum on Saturday; organised by the UK Unix Users Group and friends at the University of London Union (ULU). For those interested in the social and political aspects of computing; this is an excellent forum to discuss new modes of political communication, privacy, advocacy and other issues that arise from the broader computing movement. There was an excellent talk on the two cultures of science/technology and the humanities from Bill Thompson who compared CP Snow’s pioneering work to present social circumstances. Bill basically argued that technological literary needs to rise considerably; especially in the political classes, otherwise we are doomed! He argued that many people in senior positions (as well as the broader public) do not understand the ‘power in code’ and this is perhaps why so many large government systems have failed in the UK (I just ordered CP shows book on Amazon for 10 quid).
Another interesting session was from a representative from the Guardian newspaper who discussed their experience of reporting the Ian Tomlinson death at the G20 protests earlier this year. The speaker explained how the video footage was released immediately on the web rather the usual slower way through the print-edition. Although the analysis of this technique was not well communicated by the speaker, he did made the interesting observation that the Guardian in this instance had used their online distributing power to ‘crown source’ news rather than simply publish it. They had allowed others to use the video of Tomlinson’s death in Blogs and Youtube etc. rather than slowly releasing it thorough the print edition.
Another speaker from the Guardian talked about the paper’s very bold initiative to make much of their data open to the public. They have RSS feeds, an API system, and a sophisticated tagging system. I found their DataBlog one of the most interesting initiatives in that many of the facts that are researched by journalists have been aggregated for later use and open to the public. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog
The Guardian’s initiative to crowd source the expenses claims-documents of MPS was also discussed; along with the limitations and opportunities of this approach. http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
(This conference about Labour online may be of interest. From my rudimentary understanding ‘free’ labour online is a fairly contentious issue as online labour may be pooled by large commercial interests and used to accumulate profit without distributing the fruits of this labour to users).
Dear all,
You can now join the discussion about topics of user “labor” related to the conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory.”
Introduction:
http://www.digitallabor.org/Join the list and introduce yourself:
http://is.gd/OdX0Follow the conference on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/idctweetsA few questions from the introduction:
* Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?
* What is labor and where is value produced?
* Are strategies of refusal an effective response to the expropriation of value from interacting users?
* How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the speculative performances of the digital economy?
* What can we learn from the “cyber sweatshops” class-action lawsuit against AOL under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the early 1990s?
* How does this invisible interaction labor affect our bodies? What were key steps in the history of interaction design that managed to mobilize and structure the social participation of bodies and psyches in order to capture value?
* Most interaction labor, regardless whether it is driven by monetary motivations or not, is taking place on corporate platforms. Where does that leave hopeful projections of a future of non-market peer production?
best,
Trebor Scholz
– iDC
JISC recently released a report on ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’. The aim of the report is to critically assess recent Web-based developments commonly termed ‘Web 2.0′ and assess them in relation to education and pedagogical practice. The report is available on-line and in hard-copy; plus some of the key findings are discussed in a podcast with David Melville, one of the report’s authors.
Some of the key findings of that report are that students may not be developing the critical skills to evaluate information and that ‘Web 2.0′ may be promoting shallowness. And although Melville discusses Web 2.0 as a solution to all sorts of social ills from those associated with multiculturalism and globalism to a ‘collaborative’ deficit in education, I do worry that the report itself is not critical enough as many technologies are produced within commercial and other contexts that may not have the unique interests of education in mind.
The report and podcast is available on the JISC website; discussions in this forum are most welcome.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/05/podcast80heinaweb
On Tuesday evening I attended an Oxford Internet Institute sponsored lecture by Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Harvard Law School, Co-Founder and Faculty Director, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society (at the salubrious legal offices of Wragge and Co). Zittrain talked about regulation on-line by major Internet players such as Facebook and Apple and asserted that many of the regulating methods employed by them were outside of the rule of law. His contention was that many ‘Web 2’ companies have immense and increasing social and economic power within the fabric of our lives and are regulating their sites in a rather ad hoc and random way in terms of banning application developers, individuals, and groups that do not adhere to their governance structures. He used a number of examples to support his thesis, plus introduced a simple graph to illustrate emergent styles of governance:
Top-down
Hierarchy >poligarchy
Bottom-up
As an example of a ‘bottom-up’ governance structure Zittrain cited Wikipedia which includes a deliberative system to manage thorny editorial decisions. As a top-down system of governance he cited Facebook; although Facebook is beginning to include the community in decisions relating to its structure and functionality. He used the term ‘social governance’ to describe this bottom-up governance approach and suggested ways in which this approach may be designed into a system (through flagging certain tasks that help tap into the ‘reservoir of good will’ of the community). A well-designed system should have mechanisms to ask users for their input.
Although I tend to agree with many of the arguments of Zittrain, I feel there is a tendency to overstate the importance of sites such as Facebook and Youtube to the broader public. Sure they are popular, but this isn’t the British Library, the University of California, or the Library of Congress we are talking about! They are just large and fashionable web sites; a small part of the fabric of our complex lives. And commercial companies will perhaps always act in their own interests; either commercially or ideologically.
I suppose what is needed is some sort of bill of rights/responsibilities that is general to the operation of the Web within a certain geographical region balanced with the specific values of the site in question. There is nothing wrong with sites asserting behaviour norms upon users; but then again governance structures should be transparent and open; not outside of acceptable norms of the broader public sphere. A site should never assert policies that are deemed racist nor discriminatory (perhaps this is Zittrain’s anxiety when he claimed than many sites operate outside of ‘the rule of law’). The relationship between the community and the platform should always be fair and equitable; especially in large user-based sites such as Facebook. In my mind, governance structures, whether online or off, should always be open and transparent.
One of the respondents to the talk, Ian Brown, a Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (and author of the recent report Database state) asserted that the relationship between Citizen and State and Cyberspace needed to be reconsidered. He also claimed (from his experience) that that the issues raised by Zittrain are not well-known in the UK; especially in senior government levels. As an historian (and not a legal expert), my scepticism relates to the actual significance of the entire debate. I suppose that the significance of the debates depends on the importance the public places on systems such as Facebook and their governance structures. I may agree with Eric Hobsbawn that Terrorism is more a perceived threat in the UK that an actual threat (to the state), but then again the public is led to believe otherwise so it now painfully significant. So if the debates about governance are perceived to be important by the public; then they will become important. So we may have a ‘Facebook Parliament’ in the making deliberating about the rise of rudeness on Facebook . They should start with the Tube system!
For those of you in London, this will be an excellent event (and it is only cost 5 quid). And this is one community that really understands how technology works in the public sphere (if that is your thing). It is on at ULU.
* Ticket reservations now open – Please Redistribute Freely *
Open Tech 2009
sponsored by 4iP
Saturday July 4th – ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/
Open Tech 2009, from UKUUG and friends,
Saturday July 4th
ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
Tickets only £5
Students Free Entry
Totalling 33 talks across 3 sessions covering 7 hours,
some space hijacking and plenty of time to talk in the
bar after sessions which challenge, inspire or talk about
something that makes you want to help how you can. The
last two times we have sold out in advance, so you are
strongly advised to pre-register.
This year’s line up features…
* Two Cultures from Bill Thompson
* Bad Science from Ben Goldacre
* Peace & War
* Making things happen, from those who do
* Web of Power – what’s next for Politicians?
* The Guardian and Ian Tomlinson Story
* Ways our Internet Laws are Broken
The full schedule is at
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/
There is a belief in some circles that Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla and Drupal are labour saving devices and that their very presence online will spontaneously invoke a community of highly-skilled individuals that will submit content and build the system in a coherent and meaningful way. This idea is a myth as virtual communities require a great deal of maintenance, promotion, and strategy to work in a meaningful way for all. It is almost impossible to make a virtual community work if the main concern is the technology alone. It is an inherently socio-technical exercise with the former being extraordinarily difficult in an institutional environment.
JISC will launch a report on Web 2 in Higher Education next Tuesday 12 May (that I will attend). I also draw attention to a case-study report published on the JISC web site last year that claims ‘The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource’ (link). In other words, building a virtual community is a very labour intensive and difficult task in HE and almost impossible if there is not at least some attempt at a community building strategy. A virtual community needs a strong sense of community through a coherent and interesting concept, a belief that the labour that the user is contributing to the site is meaningful and consequential, and some sort of reward system. There is no rigid method for making a community site work, but it does take a strategy to grow and foster the community but the one that develops may not always be the one that was imagined in the first instance.
The University of California Transliteracies Project and UC Santa Barbara Social Computing Group announce the “Social Computing in 2020″ Bluesky Innovation Competition.”
What will social computing technologies and practices be like in the year 2020?
ELIGIBLE: Undergraduate or graduate students anywhere in the world.
AWARDS: 1st prize, $3000 USD; 2nd prize, $1000, 3rd prize, $500.
SUBMISSION FORMAT: Description of an idea + Imaginative realization, embodiment, or illustration of the idea in a variety of possible formats (e.g., an essay, story, script, application sketch, fictional business plan, etc.).
DEADLINE: January 30, 2009.
FULL COMPETITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Guidelines & Submission Details
http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/contest2020/
Students from any discipline–humanities, arts, social sciences, computer science, engineering, etc.—are encouraged to apply. The competition emphasizes visionary, thoughtful, or critical concepts rather than technical knowledge as such.
Inquiries may be directed by email to socialcomputing@lsmail.ucsb.edu.
COMPETITION ORGANIZERS
UCSB Social Computing Group (http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu)
(A working group in the UC Transliteracies Project: http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu)
Kevin Almeroth – Department of Computer Science; Associate Dean for Advancement and Planning, College of Engineering
Jennifer Earl – Department of Sociology; Director, Center for Information Technology & Society
Andrew Flanagin – Department of Communication; Co-director, Credibility and Digital Media@UCSB Project
James Frew – Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management
Alan Liu – Chair, Department of English; Director, UC Transliteracies Project
Miriam Metzger – Department of Communication; Co-director, Credibility and Digital Media@UCSB Project
With assistance from the UCSB Graduate Student Social Computing “Bluesky” Group.
Finance and Administration Officer
http://engagemedia.org/jobs/finance-admin-officer/
Summary
EngageMedia is a burgeoning online video, networking, training and technology project focussed on social justice and environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific region.
We run the online video sharing site <http://engagemedia.org>, produce a free and open source video sharing platform <http://plumi.org>, initiated an international network of social justice online video projects <http://transmission.cc> (including organising events in Rome and West Java, Indonesia) and conduct regular trainings in free software and digital video distribution.
Our core aims are:
* To assist individuals and groups producing thought-provoking and informative media focused on social and environmental issues distribute their work.
* To develop the digital media and Internet skills of independent video makers and marginalised communities.
* To foster a regional network of producers, to assist each other in producing and distributing their work in the Asia-Pacific region.
* To produce an online video delivery platform under a free software license that others are free to use and modify for their own media projects.
The Position
We are searching for a competent Finance and Administration officer who shares our mission of supporting campaigns and movements for social and environmental justice. We are in a new period of growth, opening hubs in Malaysia and Indonesia. In order to manage our increased operations and budgets we require an experienced part-time Finance and Administration Officer who can ensure the viability of the EngageMedia organisation and associated projects into the long-term. The position starts as soon as possible and is based in Melbourne.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Organisation and Operations
* Ensure internal and external organisaional documentation is up to date and all necessary records are kept
* Assist with preparing operational documents – eg. Ethics Policy, Communications Policy, EngageMedia Rules of Association, etc.
- Budgets, Accounting and Tax
* Assist project managers in the development and maintenance of budgets
* Prepare budget projections
* Develop and maintain cash flow, income, financial activity and other statements
* Identify tax and employee requirements, and ensure all taxes and other liabilities are paid in a timely manner
* Investigate and facilitate EngageMedia acquiring Deductible Gift Recipient status
* Maintain all records to audit ready standards
- Work and Contracts
* Identify employee requirements regarding Workcover and Superannuation and ensure all monies are paid in a timely manner
* Assist in drawing up contracts and ensure these are signed and documented in a timely manner
* Ensure the EngageMedia Collective complies with all federal and state legal obligations regarding employment and contract work
* Pay wages and manage the tracking and distribution of entitlements
Required Skills and Attributes
* Highly developed organisational skills – preparation of financial reports and maintenance of records
* Excellent communication and writing skills
* Creative, has initiative and willingness to learn
* The ability to work independently, setting and managing own tasks and deadlines
* Flexible and willing to work with an international team
* A commitment to EngageMedia’s purpose and values
Education and Experience
* Bookkeeping qualification desirable, or equivalent experience
* Experience using computer accounting packages
* Minimum 3 years working in the non-profit sector in administration, finance or operations
Pay, Hours and Location
* The position is currently for 2 days per week (16 hours) though given further success in fund raising this may well increase.
* Pay is a solid base non-profit organisation wage
* It is a requirement of this position that you work from the Melbourne office, however some flexible hours from home or whilst travelling can be negotiated.
* The position is ongoing and includes a 6 month provisional period
To Apply
Please send a CV and a cover letter (maximum 500 words) to contact@engagemedia.org outlining your interest in the position and your suitability. Please contact us as soon as possible if you are interested.
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 unexplainedespecially 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)
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).
Mashable is a news site for the social networking movement (link).
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
selected papers from the conference 29-30 January 2007 (link to First Monday)
Twitter (Grand Narratives!) Events from Arts-Humanities.net Humanities Computing from Intute del.ico.us tag=newmedia del.ico.us tag=web2.0 BBC Technology News technorati tag=web2.0 Sydney Morning Herald
