communities

Dec

2008

Liberating Voices book published

A while ago, I posted some ideas on the socio-technical infrastructure needed to create a network of “thinking communities”. I was then contacted by Doug Schuler, coordinator of the Public Sphere Project, who asked me to create a Thinking Communities Pattern for their Liberating Voices: a Pattern Language for Communication Revolution project.

A selection of patterns, including the Thinking Communities Pattern, has now been edited and published as a book by The MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-69366-6). See also the book flyer. To get an idea of how these patterns could be used, see, for instance, the post by Justin Smith, who lists some requirements for a pattern-based knowledge system.

The best way to introduce the book is by using Doug’s own words:

After eight years of work, the book on our information and communication pattern language project, “Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution,” is finally available.

May

2008

International Workshop on Community-Based Evolution of Knowledge-Intensive Systems (COMBEK’08)

Call for Papers

International Workshop On Community-Based Evolution of Knowledge-Intensive Systems COMBEK ’08

Monterrey, Mexico, Nov 9 – 14, 2008

http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=combek2008cfp

WORKSHOP THEME

COMBEK seeks to address the need for research that explores and embraces the novel, difficult but crucial issue of adapting knowledge resources to their user communities, and vice versa, as a fundamental property of knowledge-intensive internet systems. Through a deep understanding of the real-time, community-driven, evolution of so-called ontologies, a knowledge-intensive system can be made operationally relevant and sustainable over long periods of time.

By addressing the notion of “community” in this way, COMBEK hopes to innovate the science of ontology engineering and unlock the expected (and unavoidable) paradigm shift in knowledge-based and community-driven systems. Such a paradigm would affect knowledge sharing and communication across diverse communities in business, industry, and society.… Read more...

Apr

2008

Researching with Communities

Researching with Communities: Grounded perspectives on engaging communities in research

Edited by Andy Williamson and Ruth DeSouza

Researching with communities presents a range of personal and grounded perspectives from academics, researchers and practitioners on undertaking research in ways that promote and privilege the voice of the community, is respectful of local or indigenous practices and is culturally safe.

Most definitely not a ‘tick list’ for approaching community-inclusive research, this book provides grounded exemplars, guides and discussion about the experiences of doing research respectfully and inclusively. It does this by drawing on the perspectives of researchers and community practitioners and by providing a range of reflective chapters that explore what community-based research means in a range of settings and for a range of people.… Read more...

May

2007

Community Lending

An interesting development where web technologies meet real societal needs is the rapidly growing phenomenon ofcommunity lending. Microcredit has been around for longer as a concept to empower poor people and communities by letting them help themselves by creating social systems to provide small loans. These systems help create the trust, do the administration, etc. With the web, however, new socio-technical dimensions are added to the idea. For example, small loans can become global instead of just local in scope, much more background information on debtors can be provided, risks can be reduced by automatically distributing a loan over many lenders and so on.

Some links:

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