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.
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).
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.
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.
Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:
* Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.
I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default:
Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news. That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.
Read the whole story on WorldChanging.
If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!
Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.
The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from one of the members of the Habitat Jam team about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from Steven Forth of the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.
The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.
We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org
Event details
Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Thurday, May 4th
6pm-8pm
at
The Whip (map)
209 6th Avenue East (at Main), Vancouver
RSVP on Upcoming.org
Any questions? Email info@socialsignal.com
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