Group items tagged

Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland: * Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another; * If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone; * Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting; * Participants can share applications; and * Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).

OPS4J stands for Open Participation Software for Java, and this community is trying to build a new, more open model for Open Source development, where not only the usage is Open and Free, but the Participation is Open as well. Removal of barriers, let more people in, have more fun and less politics. I have also seen Open Development as a term to describe this. Think of it as Wiki brought to Coding. Wikipedia is of course the most outstanding example of open collaboration.

It has been recognised that failures within an organisation can often be related to the over simplification of the belief structures that are used in decision making.2 Distributed cognition is a framework that can be used for analysing complex distributed settings to explain how the social activities within these impact the cognitive processes of the participants.� Rather than focussing on the mind, the material world is seen as being central.� It shows how important it is that participants in a setting can look at their own interpretations and discus these with others before deciding which actions to take.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has challenged the way that reference works are used and understood, and even the way that the collective enterprise of knowledge construction and circulation is itself conceptualized. The article presents an ethnographic study of Wikiversity, an educationally-oriented sister project to Wikipedia. It begins by providing an overview of the orientations and aims of Wikiversity, which seeks to provide for participants both open educational contents and an open educational community. It then undertakes a detailed examination of this project's emerging, overlapping communities and cultures by providing descriptions produced through a combination of ethnographic techniques. These descriptions focus on the experiences of a participant-observer in the context of an 11-week course developed and delivered via Wikiversity, titled Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources. These descriptions are discussed and interpreted through reference to qualitative studies of the more developed dynamics of the Wikipedia effort - allowing this study to trace the possible trajectories for the future development of the fledgling Wikiversity project. In this way, this paper investigates the communal and cultural dynamics of an undertaking that - should it meet only with a fraction of Wikipedia's success - will be of obvious significance to education generally.

# What is Cruxlux about? # Shining a light on the crux of things. If something's true, it should withstand scrutiny, and if something's wrong, we should be able to help uncover that. With our novel and powerful technology, we allow interactive back-and-forth between different views, making it easy to see counterpoints to a given argument and to identify the root causes of disagreement on an question. Besides participating on this site, the Cruxlux platform can be embedded on other sites, to enable their visitors to participate in inter-blog debates and chats.

Assuming that meaning is dependent upon the interplay between lived experience and theoretical (cultural and social) constructs, the task of this chapter in analyzing the sensemaking processes and activities which occurred during the field trip is to integrate lived experiences with theoretical constructs in such a way that the meanings generated from this integration resonate as valid for both field trip participants and informed readers. Or to paraphrase Ken Wilber,1 through the integration of subjective truthfulness and objective truth we seek mutual understanding. To achieve this end, my analysis incorporates the three strands of valid knowing (instrumental injunction, direct experience, and communal confirmation), as outlined in chapter two, and the three cultural value spheres (subjective, intersubjective, and objective domains of knowing), also outlined in chapter two, with three sensemaking themes (being there, storytelling, and living together) which emerged directly from the lived experiences of the participants during the course of the field trip.

In particular, I am thinking about intentional communities -- communities in which people live geographically near one another, and participate in community together, by choice. They may live together or not, dine together or not, work together or not, worship together or not -- but at least they need to live within some limit of proximity to one another and participate in community together. These are the minimum requirements. But is there a model that works? Or is it time to design a new model that fits the time and place in which we live better?

The exponential growth of diverse types of biological data presents the research community with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The challenge is to stay afloat in the flood of biological data, keeping it as accessible, up-to-date, and integrated as possible. The opportunity is to cultivate new models of data curation and exchange that take advantage of direct participation by a greater portion of the community.

While I understand the principles behind AntStorm's voting system for regulatory purposes, I wondered if it would be more useful for voting to occur from any user after the fact, similar to StumbleUpon or Reddit. My main concern about the voting system was that it would require too much time on the part of the group members, who would need to vote for every single item submitted to a group. To this concern, Wilson explained that the AntStorm voting system is designed to work effectively without participation from all group members, and Wilson's hope for AntStorm is to have such dedicated group members that will have only a handful of interest groups, enabling them to readily devote time towards those topics which are of greatest importance to them.

Using the 1994, South Canyon fire in Colorado as a case study, this article suggests Taylor's (1993) concept of worldview functions as an important "frame" for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995a). Taylor argues that organizations use either an "activity" or "particle" orientation. An activity view focuses attention on organizational units while a particle view sees the organization from the point of view of the product or customer. Results from this study indicate that an organization's worldview functions as an overarching metaphor that influences sensemaking and decision-making processes, and that the worldview perspective in retrospective accounts may differ from that of the participants themselves.

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

The purpose of this study was to improve the quality of students' online discussion of assigned readings in an online course. To improve the focus, depth, and connectedness of online discussion, the first author designed a text-focused Wiki that simultaneously displayed the assigned reading and students' comments side by side in adjacent columns. In the text-focused Wiki, students were able to read the assigned text in the left column and type their comments or questions in the right column adjacent to the sentence or passage that sparked their interest. In post-participation surveys, data were gathered about students' experiences in the text-focused Wiki and prior experiences in threaded discussion forums. Students reported more focus, depth, flow, idea generation, and enjoyment in the text-focused Wiki.

Central to Web 2.0 is the requirement for interactive systems to enable the participation of users in production and social interaction. Consequently, in order to critically explore the Web 2.0 phenomenon it is important to explore the relationship of interactivity to social power. This study firstly characterises interactivity in these media using Barry's (2001) framework differentiating interactivity from disciplining technologies as defined by Foucault. Contrary to Barry's model though, the analysis goes on to explore how interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy.

MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-annotated content from free-tagging. While tags are widely used in Web 2.0 services, their lack of machine-understandable meaning can be a problem for information retrieval, especially when people use tags that can have different meanings depending on the context. MOAT aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tag(s) using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from dbpedia, geonames … or any knowledge base), and then annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags, leveraging content into Semantic Web, by linking data together. Moreover, tag meanings can be shared between people, providing an architecture of participation to define and exchange potential meanings of tags within a community of users. To achieve this goal, MOAT relies on an architecture that can be deployed for any organisation or community and that involves a lightweight ontology, a MOAT server, and some third-party clients .

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called "Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0", where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web "dead". Let me explain what I mean.

MindCanvas is a research service to help companies gather insights about customers' thoughts & feelings. We use Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering the complex questions that you face in designing a product or service.

Welcome to the Netroots Nation question submission page for the Saturday morning (July 19, 9:00am) keynote session "Ask The Speaker." The event empowers citizens to engage America's current House Speaker in substantive discussion about current issues, the legislative process, and how citizens can participate in their government. Instead of simply giving a speech at a podium, Speaker Pelosi will be taking your questions and interacting with convention attendees. The 9 a.m. keynote will be moderated by Gina Cooper, Netroots Nation's Executive Director, and Jeffrey Feldman, author and blogger. But it all begins right now, right here, when you submit your questions and vote on questions submitted by others.

PowerMeeting is a Web-based synchronous groupware framework. It also refers to a research prototype that demonstrates the kind of groupware built with the framework. Such groupware allow participants to plan, perform, and coordinate their synchronous collaboration.