Social-Media

This weekend I participated in the NYC free culture summit and learned a few refreshing radical activism tricks from the class of ‘06. In stark contrast to the scholarly focus group I attended last week, this group explicitly understands that they need to create social spaces for like-minded activists to congregate, learn, and plot. The tools of the revolution were revealed in the speed geeking session - Once someone in the 21st century finds the truth, all they need is a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, irc, and rss (with a dash of delicious and flickr, to taste). Remarkable how quickly and easily people with real communication needs figure out how to use this suite of tools, understand which is good for what and when. Highlights included a Riot Folk performance, a talk by Siva (“Space. Hope. Imagination. Potential.”), a talk by the Creative Commons gang, and suprise appearance by Cory Doctorow . The most fun had to be not-protesting (you need a license to protest) outside of Time Sqaure’s Virgin Megastore, and reverse shoplifting DRM info into the stacks of damaged cds. The revolution might not be televised, but it could very well end up on flickr.

Ulises recently asked us to summarize our thoughts for the semester in our blogs. Considering that this blog was started for this class, I was surprised by my own initial resentment at being asked to post something so specific here. During the course of the semester, this forum has become a place for me to speak, not to answer. Even when I was posting assignments for class, they were items and issues which I selected and chose. This initial emotional reaction indicates how engaging these tools can become, and helped me answer some of the questions on Uilses’ list. Its been great fun! Best of luck to everyone, and see you on Tuesday.

The semester is almost over, and that means its time for me to compose some thoughts. As usual, this opens more questions than it answers, but I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. Collecting Knowledge: Narrative Tapestries and Database Substrates “An examination of Web 2.0 using Manovich’s Language of New Media, and an interpretation of folksonomies within the context of the narrative-database dichotomy. This inquiry looks at tagging as a mechanism for constructing narratives from databases, and relates narratives to knowledge construction and representation. Educational curricular activities involving tagging will also be considered.” Special thanks to Prof. John Broughton, John Frankfurt, Michael Preston, and Alexander Sherman for helping me develop these ideas.

Originally published on theploneblog.org How hybrid economies help keep software honest. Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!). One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact. Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings). In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration. But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’. It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community. I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production. Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage”, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects. It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task. As Rheingold said “There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.” - Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

Originally posted at theploneblog.org The theory underlying Plone’s personal-ad campaign. At the marketing workshop in Vienna, one of the exercises we conducted was an informal poll of the personality traits and cultural values that people associate with the plone community. Motivating this exercise was an exploration of the recent Plone personal ad, which came out of the New Orleans Symposium. This anthropomorphizing of Plone was meant to embody the idea that software has a personality, and that since writing code is form of creative expression, the values of the author will inevitably be expressed in its features. So, for example, I will be suprised the day that Adobe easily allows for the assignment of Creative Commons licenses to content created using their tools, but no one is surprised by the fact that the Mediawiki wiki-engine deafualts to this license. If you accept this position, then selecting the right CMS is more than a matter checking off features on a matix. It becomes essential that the vendor’s values are consistent with the client’s mission. In the case of an open source project, the “vendor” is really an entire ecology, comprised of of the community, the software, and the processes and structures which bind them together. Here are some of the values that members of the Plone community currently associate with this project:

I apologize for this study blog’s late start - I just returned from the Plone conference in Vienna, and the internet availability was spottier than it should have been. At the conference I presented a talk which relates closely to the topic of this seminar, entitled Platonic Wikis and Subversive Social Interfaces. People seemed very interested in the subject, and a common response was that these ideas were obvious when stated, but people were very happy to hear them concisely articulated and formulated. I will be posting my slides up on the conference site, but in the meantime, here is a working link to them: html ppt Photos and links from the conference should start appearing under plonecon2005 over the next few days. I will be catching up with ss05, blog postings, and sleep this weekend.

I have an extensive background in software architecture, design, and development. Prior to joining the center, I was the lead developer at Abstract Edge, an interactive marketing firm which serviced both non-profit and corporate clients. I was also a senior developer at MaMaMedia, a children’s educational Web site. I am an active open source contributer whose technical interests include Linux, Python, and Content Management. [This blog was started for MSTU Social Software Affordances, and this post was written as an introduction].