The Information Commons In the mid-20th century, R. Buckminster Fuller proposed the construction of a monumental globe to be suspended above New York’s East River within view of the United Nations building. It was to be covered with millions of tiny light bulbs, essentially forming an immense, spherical computer display. It would present a constantly-updated graphical summary of the various facts and statistics comprising “ground truth” of the state of the planet. It was Fuller’s belief that such a “God’s eye” view of Earth and the activities of its inhabitants would empower and inspire the UN delegates –and everyone else– to better consider all the consequences of their decisions and thus be more likely to “do the right thing” from a global perspective. Writing in different times and from very different points of view, Fuller and Gelernter describe a common vision: that technology has made it possible for individuals to apprehend the world and its activities as a single system.
Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation — HBS Working Kn In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection. Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.
Against Well-designed Reputation Systems (An Argument for Commun Intro: I was part of a group of people asked by Beth Noveck to advise the Community Patent review project about the design of a reputation and ranking system, to allow the widest possible input while keeping system gaming to a minimum. This was my reply, edited slightly for posting here. We’ve all gone to school on the moderation and reputation systems of Slashdot and eBay. In those cases, their growing popularity in the period after their respective launches led to a tragedy of the commons, where open access plus incentives led to nearly constant attack by people wanting to game the system, whether to gain attention for themselves or their point of view in the case of Slashdot, or to defraud other users, as with eBay. The traditional response to these problems would have been to hire editors or other functionaries to police the system for abuse, in order to stem the damage and to assure ordinary users you were working on their behalf.
Wikinomics Concepts[edit] According to Tapscott, Wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. Dialogue Mapping The icons represent the basic elements of the Dialogue Mapping™ grammar (called IBIS): Questions, Ideas, Pros and Cons. This is a very simple map, meant to convey the basics of IBIS. In real meetings and projects the maps are much larger, more complex, and can be nested deeply. Here's an example of some larger maps from a 2-day strategic planning meeting: This combination of (i) a shared hypertext display, (ii) a trained facilitator, and (iii) a conversational grammar is Dialogue Mapping™.
Internet Resources - Writers Resources - W Unsorted [/writers] James Patrick Kelly - Murder Your Darlings - "When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings." Greda Vaso - Determining the Readability of a Book - includes formulas for Gunning's Fog Index, Flesch Formula, Powers Sumner Kearl L. Kip Wheeler - Literary Terms and Definitions L. Kip Wheeler - Comp - Lit - Poetry - Links - more Style - Grammar - Errors in English [/writers]American Heritage - Book of English Usage - free download Band-Aid AP StylebookPaul Brians - Common Errors in EnglishCJ Cherryh - Writerisms and other Sins The Chicago Manual of Style FAQ Gary N. Curtis - The Fallacy Files - Logical fallacies and bad arguments Prof.
Distributed karma: an idea for fixing recommendat Two points: It seems a question of scope is in order here; what exactly is the purpose of a recommendation system? Is it a system to forward to users that which they want to see, or is it a system that suggests various opinion of high quality to users? Outsourcing - Wikipedia, the free encyclop In business, outsourcing is "an agreement in which one company contracts-out a part of their existing internal activity to another company" [1]. It involves the contracting out of a business process (e.g. payroll processing, claims processing) and operational, and/or non-core functions (e.g. manufacturing, facility management, call center support) to another party (see also business process outsourcing). The concept "outsourcing" came from the American Glossary 'outside resourcing' and it dates back to at least 1981.[2][3] Outsourcing sometimes, though not always, involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another.
WWW Collaboration Projects This is a list of resources about collaboration technologies and WWW projects that support collaboration by participants. Please add others to the responses below or on the appropriate page. Dimensions of Cyberspace