Seb's Open Research
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Friday, March 05, 2004
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Open source knowledge sharing tools from the US government
This suite looks pretty interesting, and it's very nice to see governments releasing free software. (via Situativity)
Workforce Connections™ is the first tool of its kind to be licensed
by the U.S. government free of charge to public and private sector
organizations."
From the FAQ:
"What is Workforce Connections™? Workforce Connections is a set of
Web-based tools that enable content managers, with no programming
experience, to dynamically create and manage online content in a secure
environment. Workforce Connections; is an open source custom
distribution available under a general public license (GPL) by the U.S.
Department of Labor, it empowers non-technical individuals to create,
acquire, share and control knowledge in real-time. Users can leverage
Workforce Connections to build and maintain traditional Web sites,
online courses, knowledge repository, online coach, and communities of
practice portals."
Apparently, installing it is a techie's job though.
In the same vein: the opensourceCMS directory and exhibition of PHP/MySQL systems. Motto: "try before you install" - what a great idea.
 2:32:10 PM
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Workshop on Web-based Tools for Knowledge Sharing @ WWW2004
I already blogged about the weblogging ecosystem workshop at the upcoming WWW conference on Many2Many. I just found out there's going to be another equally interesting workshop on Web-based Tools for Knowledge Sharing at the same conference. It's chaired by folks from the new Information and Communication Technologies Centre
at CSIRO Australia, and the call for papers sounds eminently clueful:
[...] The real value of knowledge sharing systems, however, is in
connecting people to people, so they can share what expertise and knowledge they
have at the moment, given that the cutting edge is always changing. The web is easily accessible
and offers an environment that supports the bringing together of people and knowledge.
Sharing knowledge is a social activity and so social implications of knowledge sharing systems need
to be considered and used to help design processes and tools that are actually useful.
In a complete knowledge sharing system tools to support finding the right person or group of people
are required. Once "connected" people need to be able to share what they know.
The information space in which knowledge is shared needs to be effective in supporting
the knowledge sharing task. Relevant information (documents, data, etc) should be readily
available and delivered in an form appropriate to the participant.
Other tools to support the participant's understanding of the relationships between
all participants may help. Understanding
the dynamics of those relationships between participants and the knowledge or information they are
sharing increases awareness and understanding. Communication practices
and processes need to be designed to encourage the sharing of knowledge whether through
synchronous or asynchronous communication.
Evaluations of knowledge sharing systems in real environments are invaluable in determining what is
useful, what works and what does not. Such evaluations help technologists determine what to improve.
We solicit contributions and participants to examine the use of
Web-based technologies for sharing information and supporting people interaction
with relevant information directly, or indirectly through people contact and
social networks. This can include new algorithms and tools, as well as their
evaluation in a real environment.
Topics of interest
The workshop topics include (but are not restricted
to) the following:
- Recommendation systems
- Collaborative filtering
- Design of information spaces for sharing knowledge
- Social analysis of the knowledge sharing activity
- Knowledge-based information delivery and browsing
- People finding systems
- Group awareness and tacit knowledge
- Social network analysis and visualisation
- Support for e-participation and evaluation
- Support for emerging goals identification
1:10:03 PM
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004
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The future of attention management
danah boyd: What I want in an RSS tool. A concentrate of insight. Pure goodness.
If anyone wants to know why the early players get all of the
attention, it's because RSS feeds focus on people, not ideas, and the
early players are too overloaded with following the other early players
to consider new people.
9:02:19 PM
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Why write papers?
Andrew Chen writes
about his ambivalence, as a researcher who blogs, towards writing
academic papers. It struck a chord with me - I've had very similar
thoughts.
[...] what I blog about now, can be read about now and processed now - but what goes
to a paper or whatnot for some conference just sits and waits until then - and
gets the (smaller?) audience of the attendees, etc…. I arguably get a little bit
more prestige out of it, and it becomes something I can put on a “list of
published works” (assuming the darn thing gets accepted anyway), but I have a
feeling that the prestige and “list of published works” comes at a price of it
coming out slower and to what might not necessarily be the most apt
audience.
In my experience, if what you're into is interdisciplinary,
emerging-stuff research, as far as impact is concerned you're better
off blogging your ideas. When you do, it tends to generate trails of
links that automagically attract interested people from many different
directions (given a critical mass of bloggers who care about your
general area of interest), which enables your ideas to grow and sparks
creative collaboration.
On the paper/conference scene, from the outset you face the problem of
choosing a specialized forum, which likely does not match your ideal
audience very well. And even if your submission is accepted there's a
fair chance that it won't generate much interest or useful feedback
(apart from a couple reviews by people who probably don't care much).
In such a case all you'll get from the extra effort is an extra line on
your academic CV.
I feel that unless you're pursuing research that fits within a somewhat
mature line of inquiry, a research blog is to traditional means of
disseminating research as eBay is to yard sales: given equal effort,
your odds of getting what you need are much better.
6:06:08 PM
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Enlarging the circle
Joi Ito writes:
"something that I'm trying understand is the process that people go
through to reach a higher level of caring for human beings outside of
their immediate circle. I think that this process holds the key for
some of the important contributions that technologies can make."
Yes! This is the circle of empathy issue. Note that the circle needs to extend not just in space (caring about remote others) but also in time (caring about unborn others) -see e.g. Brian Eno: The Big Here and Long Now.
11:54:46 AM
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The freedom to be yourself in public
Cory Doctorow posts a couple observations that resonate with me in a comment to danah's post on homophily and blogging:
1. The Internet is full of weird people. Like science fiction,
technology and RPGs, the Internet since its earliest days has attracted
people who didn't fit in with the local norm, who sought community
online -- the alt. heirarchy is like a roadmap of locally socially
unacceptable hobbies, practices and beliefs that migrated to the net.
This has its pluses and its minuses, but the net always framed itself
as a place where you could come and woo your muse of the odd with other
oddfellows, so no surprise, really, that it's full of people facing
inwards, talking about their own heterodoxy.
2. The Internet makes you weird. The ability to browse all the
possible kinks, find the ones that tickles your pink, and dive in, free
from socially normative disapprobation, is a fast ticket to becoming
One Of Us. No one is *really* a "mundane," but many people button
themselves up and pass -- even to themselves. The net's seductive lure
is to join the kink SIG that corresponds to your inner Imp of the
Perverse and shut out everyone who would have you know that you're a
perv for being *really* into, you know, rubber or chess or Klingons.
I recall conversing with Tom Munnecke
on how one can view blogging as a personal "coming out" experience,
going public with what was once private. And I think this process that
many people are undergoing has the effect of speeding up the change and
diversification of overt personal practices and social norms. While
this might be scary to some, in my view it is a good thing, as it
allows us to
- be aware of how many others are different from, and similar to us;
- be less afraid of behaving in ways that are closer to who we really are; and
- make meaningful connections with strangers that we would otherwise have never found out about.
Coming to terms with who we are is crucial to well-being, and though it might not be necessary, I have no doubt that
speaking out can be helpful - for more on that see "Using a blog for
self-help?".
[Update: Just found this post by Andrew Chen
which seems related. In it he states that “normal” people will probably
never blog. Which makes me wonder if normality is the same as
conformity...]
10:42:11 AM
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004
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Monday, March 01, 2004
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:18:11 PM.
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