Digital copyright: it’s all wrong

June 11, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under creative commons, internet, open source, social media

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it (link)

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OPEN REPOSITORIES 2008: CALL FOR PAPERS & PANELS

October 10, 2007 at 2:36 am · Filed under collaboration, conferences, digital humanities, e-science, humanities computing, social media, tools

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Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

October 6, 2007 at 8:30 am · Filed under blogs, political communication, politics, social media

Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference: Second Call For Papers

Hosted by the New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics
and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.
http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk

April 17-18, 2008.

http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/politics-web-2-0-conference/

Second call for papers

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new
media - a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do
broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if
at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the
communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help
democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for
researchers to share and debate perspectives.

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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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Research Portals in the Arts and Humanities

August 20, 2007 at 8:54 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

The RePAH final report concluded that arts and humanities researchers would find most useful a managed research environment that offers:

• Workflow Management tools that give the researcher greater personal control over digital project resources, especially more evolved bookmarking features and some form of automated copyright management system to facilitate the growing concern with usage permission and intellectual property rights was also highly valued.
• Resource Discovery tools that provide greater control over web-based resources including the ability to filter the quality of hit returns, search multiple databases
• News feed features that by-pass personal email accounts, but notify users of conferences, funding, jobs and new research publications.
• Collaborative research tools for social bookmarking, uploading and sharing resources, annotating digital resources, shared document editing, attaching metadata to personally-created digital resources, and contributing to the authentication of digital content.

Rather than a single monolithic research portal, it recommended the development of interoperable portlets that can be used to embed portal type functionality in institutional and community web sites. To illustrate how this might work we have created a demonstrator that shows how a researcher can add selected research tools to their personal research portal page at their own institution and use these to carry out workflow based, collaborative, research (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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From Google to gaggle

August 13, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under deliberation, media, political communication, social media, web2.0

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).

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The Art of Building Virtual Communities

August 7, 2007 at 10:33 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

A article on building an online community building. There is a lot of this stuff out there now; it has become as important as the actual software that enables the communities themselves.

Anyone who has ever thrown a party or held a meeting has had this unvoiced fear: what if after all the work of preparation, nobody shows up? Or worse, people show up, take a quick look around, decide it isn’t worth their time and leave (link).

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Social networking boom reaches the workplace

August 4, 2007 at 1:11 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

After years of socialising, Facebook and MySpace mean business.

The sites, which started as a way to help people stay connected with friends, in the past year have begun catering to professionals, offering networking and advertising opportunities (from the Melbourne Age).

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Oxford University spies on Facebook profiles…

July 20, 2007 at 6:44 am · Filed under political communication, social media, web2.0

Thanks to the Melbourne Age. I wish that I was important enough that King’s College would spy on me!

For students at the University of Oxford, Facebook is a great way to keep posted on gossip and parties. For campus officials, it’s a new way to find - and fine - troublemakers.After exams, students at the venerable English university traditionally drop their serious ways and indulge in a spasm of “trashings” - rowdy revels that include dousing classmates in foam, eggs and flour.In recent years, students have taken to posting photos of the mess on Facebook, a popular online social networking site (link).

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel - which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters - officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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The world’s most hated blogger

June 19, 2007 at 7:44 pm · Filed under blogs, internet, politics, social media, web2.0

The man known on the internet as “the world’s most hated blogger” is cooling his heels at an undisclosed location near Sydney, working on a way to climb back out of the very deep hole he now finds himself in (link)

From the Melbourne Age

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Digg and Snap mashup

May 21, 2007 at 8:15 pm · Filed under social media, web2.0

Check out this mashup from Digg and Snap (the link preview service I use on this site).

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