User innovation, "The Public", and community

[David Nolen]

The thoughts in this post about supporting LaTeX directly in WordPress so that mathematicians can collaborate seems relevant to our ongoing work on the WordPress plugin version of ShiftSpace (as well as a neat GreaseMonkey script that Avital created a while back after helping on the first version of Highlights).

http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/07/31/polymath-equals-user-innovatio/

It's always seemed to me that one of the major goals of ShiftSpace is to foster user innovation. In the earlier versions of the software and in the presentations of the project we focused on the notion of public space on the web. I personally believe that is still the main thrust of the project, but I think that we missed understanding what makes people "go public."

This missed understanding is that you need to have activated communities. Smaller groups of people who share ideas and come to understand how to communicate with each other. This smaller community might be compelled to make some of their thoughts public. Little do they know there's another smaller community with similar (or disimilar) sentiments. This sparks even more public conversation. Two other smaller communities join the fray. Perhaps new communities are formed, some destroyed, and quite a few powerful statements made (highlights, notes, media injections, textual transformations, link additions) that are aimed at "the public."

But first, let's start with small communities.

I think Mushon's new design for 1.0 hits the nail on the head in this regard. I finished up the backend to support groups and following two or three week ago, but more on that in the weekly developer update ;)

David