Conferences

Sep

2010

Conversations in Context: A Twitter Case for Social Media Systems Design

On September 1, I gave the invited talk for the 5th AIS SIGPrag International Pragmatic Web Conference Track of the I-SEMANTICS 2010 conference in Graz, Austria. Here are the abstract of and link to the paper, as well as the presentation.

Abstract

Conversations are the lifeblood of collaborative communities. Social media like microblogging tool Twitter have great potential for supporting these conversations. However, just studying the role of these media from a tool perspective is not sufficient. To fully unlock their power, they need to examined from a sociotechnical perspective. We introduce a socio-technical context framework which can be used to analyze the role of systems of tools supporting goal-oriented conversations. Central to this framework is the communicative workflow loop, which is grounded in the Language/Action Perspective.… Read more...

Jan

2010

Collaboration Patterns as Building Blocks for Community Informatics

From 4-6 November 2009, the 6th CIRN Community Informatics Conference was held in Prato, Italy. As in previous years, the conference brought together an interesting mix of researchers and practitioners from North and South, discussing ways to effectively use information and communication technologies to foster community building. This year’s theme was “Empowering Communities: Learning from Community Informatics Practice”.

I gave a keynote address at the conference. Title of my talk and the accompanying paper was “Collaboration Patters as Building Blocks for Community Informatics”. Below the slides of the presentation and the abstract of the paper.

Abstract

Community Informatics is a wide-ranging field of inquiry and practice, with many paradigms, disciplines, and perspectives intersecting. Community informatics research and practice build on several methodological pillars: contexts/values, cases, process/methodology, and systems.… Read more...

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...

Jul

2009

Communities & Technologies 2009

From June 25-28, I was at Penn State, attending the Communities & Technologies 2009 conference, the main bi-annual conference specifically focusing on this theme. As with the previous editions, I again very much enjoyed myself, both with respect to the many interesting presentations and by meeting up with old and new colleagues and friends who are part of our nomadic research tribe.

To get a feel for what the conference was about, check out the following resources:

A Twitter account of the sessions by multiple authors, hashtag #cct2009.
An excellent summary of the conference by Joe McCarthy.
A Flickr conference photo gallery.

May

2009

ESSENCE09 Workshop

FIRST FACE-TO-FACE FORUM ON ‘ESSENCE’ ONLINE EXPERIMENT

May 5-6, 2009
KMi, The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

The ESSENCE challenge

ESSENCE is the first public event organised by Global Sensemaking (GSm), a network formed in 2008 to develop human-centred computing tools to help tackle wicked problems such as Climate Change.
The overall idea behind the project is that digital discussion and deliberation technologies have the potential to provide a structured medium for building collective intelligence from diverse stakeholders, who often disagree.
Within this context the ESSENCE online experiment has been conceived with the overall goal to improve how climate science and policy deliberation is conducted, in local networks, national organizations, and inter-governmentally.
In particular, ESSENCE has been designed to develop a comprehensive, distilled, visual map of the issues, evidence, arguments and options facing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), and being tackled by many other networks, which will be available for all to explore and enrich across the web.

Nov

2008

BarCamp Berlin 3 revisited

On October 18-19, Barcamp Berlin 3 took place. It was organized in the impressive Berlin Representative Office of Deutsche Telekom. Over 800 people attended, a true bee hive of creative tech people from all walks of Internet life.

BarCamps are a special kind of conference, sometimes even called an “unconference”:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

BarCamps live and breathe Web 2.0, not only in what they are about, but also by adopting its user-driven style in how they are organized. There is much attention on participatory process, or, rather, on providing an overall infrastructural framework, while making participants responsible for what topics are going to be discussed and in what way.… Read more...

Nov

2008

Dutch Innovation Seminar 2008

On October 9, a beautiful autumn day, I went to the De Baak estate, in the wooded centre of the country to attend the Dutch Innovation Seminar 2008. De Baak is a well-known training institute, established by the largest employers’ organization in the Netherlands. As their site states, it “is the place for leaders, business people and professionals in search of inspiration, motivation, knowledge and insight”. Well, inspiration abounded, plentifully.

The seminar comprised a couple of keynote addresses, as well as a number of workshops, and lots of opportunity to network in a very pleasant atmosphere. The theme of the event was “Pulverizing Borders”, about how the Internet allows all kinds of borders to disappear, borders between people, organizations, supply and demand, and so on.… Read more...

Oct

2008

Evaluation SURFnet pilot Active Worlds

After a very intense period of finishing projects, I am now recharging my research batteries. As I am travelling and networking a lot, time for my blog is limited. However, I will try to give brief summaries of some of the events I have attended recently, but not written about yet.

SURFnet provides a high-quality network specifically intended for higher education and research in the Netherlands. It is a subsidiary of the SURF organisation, in which Dutch universities, universities for applied sciences and research centres collaborate nationally and internationally on innovative ICT facilities. One of its R&D topics is how to use virtual worlds in higher education.

On October 1, an inspiring evaluation meeting was organized to discuss the results of a pilot using the Active Worlds virtual world environment.… Read more...

FIRST FACE-TO-FACE FORUM ON ‘ESSENCE’ ONLINE EXPERIMENT

The ESSENCE challenge

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