CommunitySense

Oct

2009

Libraries and Collaborative Research Communities

Already a while ago, but still worth a post: on August 5, I was an invited speaker at the Ticer Digital Libraries a la Carte 2009 summer school. In 2008, I attended their fascinating keynote summer school lecture by Stephen Abram. It was a privilege to be on the other side this year! Ticer stands for Tilburg Innovation Centre for Electronic Resources, and is a business unit of Tilburg University’s Library and IT Services. Every year, they organize a summer school, which is well attended by librarians, publishers, researchers, lecturers, and IT specialists interested in the latest developments in (digital) libraries.

My module concerned the Libraries and Collaborative Research Communities track. My co-speakers were John Butler (University of Minnesota), Judith Wusteman (University College Dublin), and Gary Olson (University of California, Irvine).… Read more...

May

2009

Research consultancy: taking the plunge?

On February 18, SIKS, the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems, organized a career day for Ph.D. students, with the goal of making Ph.D. students think about what are the career opportunities after they finish. It was a very inspiring day, with many interesting presentations and interactions.

I was asked to present my perspective on how to set up and survive as a small (i.e. one-man) research consultancy company. In this post, a quick summary of the points I made in my talk.

As an (academic) research consultant, you are a linking pin between science and society. On the one hand, you translate academic ideas into concrete applications, such as projects, tools, systems, and procedures. However, just as important, you should feed back real-world insights into the scientific process.… Read more...

Mar

2009

Presentation at the National Research Council Canada

On Monday, I will give another version of the talk “From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work” that I gave at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, this time at the National Research Council Canada Institute for Information Technology in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It’s good to have another opportunity to present and get quality feedback on these ideas that have been keeping me busy for such a long time.

Abstract

Inspiration is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for collaborative communities to work. Such communities often make use of complex Internet-based tool systems. In these systems, work gets distributed over many tools, often leading to the fragmentation of communicative acts. To address this problem, explicit attention needs to be paid to community activation.

Feb

2009

D-Day for Communities and Networks Connection

As you know, the field of community informatics is a very fast moving target. Trying to keep up with even only the most basic developments in research and practice, from the softest social psychology intuitions to the hardest network infrastructure deployment, is the best way to get completely overloaded. Sometimes, you just want to give up and zone out (try clicking the square in this digital sandbox for some wonderful R&R if you reach that state of emergency!) However, when you feel the “Force Is Starting To Embrace You Again”, a brand new Jedi sabre is awaiting to help you cut through the conceptual tangle and quickly zoom in on the most relevant developments: the Communities & Networks Connection blog portal.… Read more...

Jan

2009

From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work

On January 21, I presented my lecture “From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work” in the UAHuntsville Distinguished Speaker Series. It was a revised version of the invited talk I gave at the ALOIS 2008 conference in Venice in May 2008. In the lecture I addressed how collaborative communities require not only the sense of purpose and drive provided by inspiration, but also the activation of the community in terms of explicitly supporting the initiation, execution, and evaluation of goal-oriented (online) communication processes. To this purpose, a socio-technical design process is needed in which the communicative context and tool system are matched.

A major theme in my lecture was the paradigm-shifting approach of the Obama administration to involve the general public, not only in getting elected, but also in providing ideas for and feedback on the policies proposed.… Read more...

Dec

2008

Strategy interviews

CommunitySense now offers a new service, strategy interviews, which may be of interest to you if you are a management level professional. Such a one-on-one interview allows you to break away from day to day operational issues and instead to jointly reflect upon the important questions: what is the mission of my organization or department? What values are we after? What services do and should we provide? Where do I want us to be a couple of years from now, and so on.

The interview takes place in a relaxing setting and can range from a couple of hours to half a day. I will prepare a couple of questions to get the interview going, and will process and structure your answers in an interview report.… Read more...

Oct

2008

The Tilburg University student portal at a glance

Some information on the Tilburg University student portal, which was launched on September 30, 2008:

The Tilburg University web site has dedicated information pages for the various target groups, including students, lecturers, and prospective students. Through the students target group page, students can login to their personal portal. The portal has been implemented in Blackboard, and integrated with its existing Digital Learning Environment. Once logged in, the student sees three tabs: My Study, My University and My Stuff. The portlets (channels or views on applications or information resources) on the portal tabs are by default only, and can be (re)moved by students as they like.

My Study contains study-related portlets. The default portlets on the My Study tab include My Courses, My Course Announcements, My Study Facilities, Webmail Notifier, My Week Schedule, My Schedule Changes, My Exam Schedule, and Language Tools.… Read more...

Mar

2008

Welcome to the Making CommunitySense blog

Since 2004, I have been musing about the “theory and practice on evolving virtual communities” on my GrowingPains blog. Having moved out of academia I started my own company, CommunitySense in 2007. There were many reasons for this small step for mankind, giant step for me. I have now been in business for a while, and feel the need for a new blog, in which I will share the more detailed, technical, some might say boring bits and pieces of the blood, sweat and tears of making online communities really work. Whereas with GrowingPains I try to paint the bigger “what” picture, through this Making CommunitySense blog I hope to share more of the “how to-s” of making people collaborate through the Internet successfully.… Read more...

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