wrythings

Andy writes that wiki may be used in a policy writing experiment on Ed Tech.

What’s critical here? Openness, yes, and sincere attention of Legislative staff or Legislators themselves.

We’re still re-learning how to work according to our values. 

This is as it should be.

Following is the project description for Sourcetree Commons, as posted at the Net2 challenge 2007.

Sourcetree Commons: Geeking our way to a better world

To develop better social software, we must use these very tools in the communities that are building them. We leverage social software to amplify the creative power of geeks and provide increased resources, efficiency, feedback and support.

Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:

Our goal is to leverage social software to amplify the creative power of geeks.

Geeks are a force to be reckoned with. They are creating the tools to strengthen communities, share ideas and shape information flow in an information age. Yet we still struggle with old ways of competing, collaborating and decision making. If we are to develop better social software, we must incorporate the very principles of collaboration and collective intelligence into the communities that are building them.

(more…)

Grassroots, and .org! Two of my favorite things. And GR is led by one of my favorite people… blah, blah, blah - I have lots of favorites. Don’t even ask about colors. I’m all about spectrum!

I’m very happy that the Grassroots.org Toolkit was selected along with 20 other projects in the recent NetSquared community vote. Here’s the Grassroots.org pitch for the Toolkit:

The Grassroots.org Toolbox will empower nonprofit organizations by granting free access to a suite of fully configured & hosted online tools, including content management, online event registration software, and CRM.

The whole GR team is great - I know several of them very well, including my former CTC Vista, Dave Chakrabarti. In fact that seems part of the management secret - hire alumni of the CTC Vista Project!

The Toolkit project is still in beta, and I am following on closely as a “Toolkit Advisor”…

They have some other developments in the works that are really cool (at least to me)… but we’ll have to wait a bit before exploring those.

Tonight (Thursday April 19) they’re hosting Malaria Bites - a fundraiser, in Columbus, Ohio.

Reggae, bednets and all.

The results of the NetSquared vote are due today. Without needing to know the outcome… I want to give a big thank you to CompuMentor, TechSoup and the NetSquared team … they really brought excitement to the field of socially conscious developers! Or at least they opened a space, invited us in, and made that space warm and productive and safe, and we brought the excitement together.

I personally needed that positive networking. I have felt it often in open space, but haven’t felt it to this extent online - not with so many groups and individuals. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Why don’t these things work together more easily?

If (for instance) I want to have a wiki and some other CMS on my site, let’s say drupal or wordpress… in terms of site/user experience what functionality might I want? True unified sign-on system with unified session control and maybe unified search on content over the entire site. This seems a reasonable if rigorous set of requirements, and if it were simple to use prominent open source applications together this way we’d see a greatly increased uptake: think social source. (Do check out Peiser’s paper. We’ll take the question of social source further another day.)

What other tools would you like to see able to play together well? If you dig down to the innards of what that means - what do you find? What elements of each application would need to be more modularized?

That’s part of the process I’m calling find the missing APIs.

It would require a different way of looking at your own project, and would ennable a new way of looking at how projects work or could work together, perhaps evolving a practice of strategic roadmapping where we identify and invest in the development of these missing APIs.

Arthur Brock of The Geek Gene, has proposed Sourcetree Commons as an object registry that might make this more likely. It’s still in the early conceptual stage but what is at stake is whether our tools reflect our values and make the work easier.

So much to say! I have been a fan of the Grass Commons vision (not to mention the team) for some time. So much so, I’ve recently joined their Board!

When I first learned of the vision to develop the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge - NICK I was stunned. It’s something we clearly need. I thought: how the heck are we going to get there? It takes some chutzpah to even dream this thing, but that is exactly what we need more of. And we do need NICK. Though it looks to be a long-range project, it may be better to think of NICK as establishing a standard and a technology for sharing consumer knowledge. That’s what I like about it. The Open API for Consumer Knowledge.

If that wasn’t cool enough, look at the underlying technology they have evolved in trying to bring this big vision to the world: WagN

They say Wiki + Tagg’n = WagN, and that’s a good mash-up style descriptor. But being a stickler for the evolution of our language and logic in these new worlds I wonder how we will describe it in the future when it is more natural to us…. when we are, let’s say, more fluent in WagN. And I do think we ought to think of these applications in terms of a grammar of what they make possible. We’ll leave that aside for now.

And then there is Hooze.

Hooze?

I don’t know.

Third base.

Abbott & Costello aside, Hooze will help us to know or remember who’s behind a product and that will help us mean what we pay as the Grass Commons saying goes.