On Thursday and Friday last week I took part in an interesting workshop called Still/Open conducted by Anat. The underlying topic of the workshop was open source thinking however each of the four presenters covered vastly different materials. To my luck a few of the aspects of the event tie very closely into my work on this project. In particular, the first presentation, on open source magazines and zines, the third presentation, on creative commons and alternative copyright systems.
Firstly, the look at magazines of the open source variety was a great way to interact with the group and experience what collaborative systems could be like. For the first hour or two the specialist, Alessandro Ludovico, lectured on the intricacies of this matter. After that he broke us into teams and set us each a task. My group had the task of creating a strategic pitch for a open source culture magazine which we took on with a lot of vigour. At this point I also use Compendium to Discourse Map the entire conversation. Our output is shown above. For a number of obvious reasons this was a great task ad we had a really good time. We also gave a compelling presentation which it seemed everyone appreciated. Our pitch ended up being essentially a Mothers Group inspired index of localised open source minded services and establishments. Our intention was for the magazine to represent the scales of localisation up to global, for the time being, that would be relevant to a specific reader. We were also interested in rendering it as a map or collection there of, that exist as pages with localities specified for the readers convenience. This and a number of other traits of the product make us think of it as a any web or post web solution. In any case we managed an interesting bout of collaborative though, specifically some that could not happen in a distributed team as easily because of the lace of connection. That said there are identifiable notions that could and did not exist in this instance of the workshop. One in particular is full understanding and explanation of posed ideas. Of course some barnstormers would suggest this is a bad thing anyway but I think regardless it is something that adds certain powers to a distributed team, even if the understating is only minor it may be enough to warrant more justification in the typing of a post or submission of a suggestion.
Other aspects of the workshop were also of course interesting and I am really grateful for Boo Chapel for giving me the opportunity to take part in the whole thing.
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