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Archive for gemeinschaft

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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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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From Community to Gemeinschaft: Belief or Truth?

March 30, 2007 at 7:57 pm · Filed under digital humanities, gemeinschaft, humanities computing, stubs, web2.0, wiki

Community is a hackneyed phrase. It is like the word ‘democracy’ or ‘friends’ or ‘freedom’; the more it is spoken, the less of it there is. There is a lot of talk (again) about online communities; especially considering that it is a central component of Web2.0. But what is a community? I grew up in a community; in a small island on the edge of the Western world. It was fun for a while, but then I discovered that it had boundaries. The word community is often applied to individuals who exchange opinions and text online, but is this a community or is it just sending text? Can we understand online communication without the need for the word community? I hope so. I like the German word Gemeinschaft much more. It refers to a ‘community of belief’. It has religious undertones, just like the bad old days of Web 1.0. An online community is just a belief; and belief all too often overrides truth. The belief is that the online community actually exists; in a word where’ social capital’ and community is on the decline.
By all means start a Wiki, but please don’t call it a community. A community requires boundaries and as soon as you believe that online messages and communication is a ‘community’; you are missing the real one in which these activities are embedded.Here

Here is an article ZDnet on how to get people to use your Web 2.0 applications. Also here is an a new system called Wikipatterns that is built on the assumption that communication is not good nor bad nor is it neutral. (Or, you have a right to be a Libertarian, but I have a right not to be killed!).

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