Tidying tags (and cars?)

When a story titled Confession: I’m a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who’s linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy...

Just because it’s a remote conference doesn’t mean you don’t get a badge

Meet me at Net2 Remote Conference

Planning on joining us for the remote conference? Let the world know (and give the conference some link love) by posting this badge on your blog or web site. Just copy and paste the following HTML code wherever you'd like it to appear:

<a href="http://www.netsquared.org/remote"><img alt="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" title="Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference" src="http://tinyurl.com/mkav3"/></a>

Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared

As part of the NetSquared remote conference, I'm going to be hosting an online chat conversation on "Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared". Since Social Signal helped to develop the strategy for the NetSquared site, and undertook the Drupal set-up and configuration work on both NetSquared and Net2Learn, we periodically get questions from people who want to know why we set up a certain feature in a particular way, or how we were able to get a page to work a certain way in Drupal. This session is a chance to answer some of those questions in a more structured setting.

Create a hallway for your web site with Gabbly

We've been playing with a new tool, Gabbly, as a possible means to run live chat on the NetSquared site during the conference. Gabbly lets you add a chat window to any web page on the Internet, simply by typing "http://www.gabbly.com" in front of any URL. For example, you could chat with other folks reading the NetSquared blog by typing in the URL "http://www.gabbly.com/netsquared.org/blog" — check it out!

Gabbly keeps the last 18 messages in the chat room visible to anyone joining the room; and as long as you keep the chat windown open, you'll see ALL the messages typed since you logged in (plus the up-to-18 that were then when you arrived). And since Gabbly generates an RSS feed for each chat room, you can archive the chat about any web page by aggregating it back onto that page (as long as your web site has a built-in tool for aggregating RSS feeds).

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I’m making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

  • Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it’s useful for folks who want a quick overview
  • Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men’s work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
  • Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
  • Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it’s useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
  • Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online “public sphere”; it’s useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
  • Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression

I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation — including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.

Now available: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

As announced today on Civic Minded: I’m making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters: Chapter 1: Introduction provides an...

Attached to Accuracy

Tonight’s bout of vigilante fact-checking was prompted by a story on the web site of Attachment Parenting International (API). API is a nonprofit that advocates for what is these days the ascendant philosophy of child-rearing. Best known through the works of...

On Civic Minded: Jane Jacobs drew the map on online community

From my Civic Minded blog on Corante: 

Today marked the end of Jane Jacobs' life, but not of her work. Jacobs' pioneering work in urban planning changed the way we think about cities — and by redefining our ideas about how cities work as communities, she set the stage for the best thinking about online community today….

Jacobs' death reminds me how much my own work in online community, and the work of Internet community-builders in general, owes to that earlier generation who reclaimed urban centres as living communities. The most important principles of online community building and online dialogue grow out of the experiences of urban community planners and participation planners: Communities are about people, not structures. Healthy communities are owned and shaped by their members, not by some team of expert planners. Communities thrive on activity and diversity. And if many of the most influential experiments in online community are those that tie online communities to real-world towns and cities — projects like Die Digitale Stadt, MeetUp or even craigslist — they also owe a debt to Jacobs for helping to keep those real-world communities vital.

Read the whole post on Civic Minded.