Re: collaborative comparisons or lists

[Suresh Fernando]

Doug - this is an important conversation... see below. Since I've been one of the people calling for increased attempts to collaborate in advance of Contact, here are a few thoughts...

I'd like to suggest that we view Contact as more than just a conference, but as locus/vortex where ideas and people will converge! It is a part of a larger fabric of interaction that is currently in process and will continue after the event.

We have the opportunity to make this larger process (however defined) much more substantive precisely because we know that we can meet in Contact and therefore do what is necessary to deepen our relationships.

We should, however, think big about what the human/organizational possibilities are for us to really come together in some meaningful way that makes a difference.

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 7:03 AM, Douglas Rushkoff <rush...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah. Once there were more registered attendees, I was hoping to create a few ways for people to "convene" meetings in advance, and even start collaborating online.

In theory, the process works much much better the other way around. People who have met in real life are many times more productive collaborating online for a period of up to 18 months. The real-life contact grounds the relationships, so that the online connections feel less vacant and paranoid. When this process is tried in reverse, the opposite ends up being true. Suspicions and wariness that develop online (often for no reason) end up coloring the way people interact in the real world, degrading the collaborations.

This is very true and something that I know from experience. As you may know I've been working with the ProM (http://www.slideshare.net/sureshf/pro-m-draftreview0308111) team on developing, among other things, some ideas that we can refer to as Project Matching (http://cotw.cc/wiki/Project_Matching). The essence of this idea is to figure out how to use metadata about projects to create an infrastructure that can match projects that might be appropriate for collaboration. Typically those will be smaller, more fluid, projects such as those that are represented on these lists.

Through this experience as well as prior attempts to organize Open Projects under the banner of OpenKollab (http://mudball.net/openkollab/), I have garnered quite a bit of experience in this area, most of it highly challenging.

There is no question that developing collaborative groups in advance of meeting face-to-face is much more challenging than the reverse. Trust is the most essential ingredient and it's extraordinarily difficult to develop the necessary trust without the opportunity to shake hands, look people in the eye, break bread together etc.

That said, this larger conversation is clearly focused on 'next generation' ideas. We are all believers that the power of the internet will have some role to play in bringing about a better world. The possibilities are extraordinary.

Hence I believe that we need to recognize the possibility for coordinated action that we are currently presented with! Never before in the course of history was it possible to actually commence a global project with distributed teams, resources, global perspectives etc. We are living in extraordinary times with extraordinary challenges and we have a responsibility to explore all possible avenues that can bring about massive, transformational change at a global level.

I maintain that the challenges of getting Open Projects off the ground are not insurmountable. We just need to identify what they are and work through them.


 

So I've been weighing the merits of a number of pre-conference styles of engagement.

My impulse is to use the online environment over the next sixth months simply to establish topics people want to meet about, and then supplementing those topics with links to information about that area.  But I also want people to feel free to convene meetings about topics they want to learn about, and then see who might volunteer to "teach" or "lead" those topics as well.

This is certainly an important element and we can start from there. I am also working on an architecture that can serve as an input to the Open Project process. Hopefully we can review this in the coming weeks...

So let's say someone really wants to know "what the heck is a mesh network, really, and what purpose does it serve?"  They could announce this question online, even as a proposed topic. Then, people like us may put a bunch of links in the "resources" section of that question. And then the person reads those links, s/he may even decide s/he knows enough about the topic and cancel the meeting. (Instead of a word like "canceled" the proposed meeting would simply be changed to a "topic of interest" and moved from the schedule to the resources.)

But we'd have to be careful throughout this process not to establish online rapport styles in lieu of the real-world rapport we'll be developing in October.

On Apr 19, 2011, at 6:49 PM, Vanina wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am new to this group, Mark (@openworld) introduces me this event
> that I did not know so far.
> I have started to read some interesting discussions here.
>
> I feel that maybe our project (socialcompare.com: a collaborative
> platform to structure data and compare everything..) could be useful
> in organizing some information such as social projects.
>
> For example, inspired by a recent blog post of Venessa, I have started
> a collaborative matrix about alternative currencies projects:
> http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/alternative-currencies-monetary-systems
> (I am just interested by the subject, not a specialist... so it is
> probably not perfect... but the purpose is to improve the table in a
> collaborative way... it is like a "wikipedia of comparisons" in a way
> => everyone can add items to compare or comparison criteria, and data
> are published on open licenses: GNU/CCBYSA).
> In another area that seems to interest "Contact Summit" members: "open
> government", I hope we could use socialcompare to create collaborative
> comparisons about politicians projects/programs before president
> elections for example. There is currently some italian members that
> start this kind of comparison for a local election..
>
> And more focused on "Contact Summit" event that is coming, I guess
> that we could compare projects that attend to this event, and even add
> social criteria such as ratings, votes, video.... for example.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Hope I was not too long..
> Kindly,
> Vanina

--
Suresh Fernando
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