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Solving the "digital divide" in Africa will not put food in mouths, knowledge in heads, clean water in households, or make healthcare accessible to those who need it most. Leveraging knowledge, skills, and capacities holds out the possibility of doing all of these things. This is what extending knowledge infrastructure is about: building robust and sustainable networks and communities that mobilize a broad range of information practices, institutions, and technologies (old and new) - and put these in the service of locally-defined needs, aspirations, and broad developmental goals. This report summarizes current thinking and action around African knowledge infrastructures.

Delphi has been around since the 1950's with a large body of support material, case studies and tools on the web and should be part of any virtual team, community or network leader's toolset.

What is the OpenKnowledge project? In a nutshell, OpenKnowledge is a system which allows peers on an arbitrarily large peer-to-peer network to interact productively with one another without any global agreements or pre-run-time knowledge of who to interact with or how interactions will proceed. Any kind of service (e.g., a WSDL service) can become a peer or else we provide facilities for users to easily create their own peer, by sharing existing code or writing their own.

What if you could contribute to a computational (Map-Reduce) job by simply pointing your browser to a URL? Surely your social network wouldn't mind opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or two! Instead of focusing on high-throughput proprietary protocols and high-efficiency data planes to distribute and deliver the data, we could use battle tested solutions: HTTP and your favorite browser.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

Semantic web and social networking technologies offered by KnowledgeHives can become foundations to delivering dedicated solutions supporting knowledge management in your company.

(from slashdot) "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

The SMW+ User Forum is an online community for users and developers of Semantic MediaWiki+ in a commercial or production environment with the purpose to improve and extend Semantic Media Wiki+. SMW+ Forum fuses the social networking aspect of Web 2.0 with semantic technologies.

To download the 34-page version of "The Bioteaming Manifesto - A new paradigm for virtual, networked business teams" published on ChangeThis click here

Ashoka is the global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs-men and women with system changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.

CERES and National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Biological Resources Division (BRD) are collaborating on the development of an Integrated Environmental Thesaurus and Thesaurus Networking Tool Set for Metadata Development and Keyword Searching.

When your readers search for information in real life, their first step is to typically seek out a friend for the answer. If their friend doesn't have the answer they need, someone in that friend's social network may. Eventually, they get an answer they trust, because it came from a source they trust. Your readers can now have that same experience on the web and it all starts with the source they trust. That source is you, the blog publisher.

Today's most successful research teams, businesses, hospitals and classrooms have one thing in common: they know how to transform individual ideas into collective knowledge. Researchers call these organizations knowledge-building communities, places where... ... every individual contributes to a growing body of information ... the creation of new knowledge is everyone's most important work ... shared knowledge leads to innovation and growth Knowledge Forum is an electronic group workspace designed to support the process of knowledge building. With Knowledge Forum, any number of individuals and groups can share information, launch collaborative investigations, and build networks of new ideas…together.

Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

Welcome to elearnspace! This site and blog explore elearning, knowledge management, networks, technology, and community.

Create your own social network, quickly and easily. Elgg allows you to take full advantage of the power of social technology with elegant, flexible solutions for organisations, groups and individuals.

Supercourse is a repository of lectures on global health and prevention designed to improve the teaching of prevention. Supercourse has a network of over 55000 scientists in 174 countries who are sharing for free a library of 3557 lectures in 26 languages.

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf