Trickle

So the whole design 2.0 community is moving pretty slowly. I am going to shift things back another week. Which is still fine because I have some extra time but it is a little annoying.

Today I have started posting more items in the design requirements section for project one. I think I will get to do more of that tonight and perhaps add some stuff to the similar section in project two. For the time being things are close to at a stand still but I think as the design aspects come in people might become a little more engaged.

Lastly, my time is being spent mostly on external things now. For instance looking into the success and failures of other systems. More on that later.

Avanoo

Recently there have been major updates to the strange new online question tool, Avanoo. The updates include a rethinking of the whole model of the product and now it seems a bit more like a glorified Pownce with some extra stuff. In any case and whatever it is like, one of the biggest changes is that Avanoo now supports things a bit like collaborative projects. Not quite in the same way that I would like to but interestingly open none the less. It seems like the network topology would allow this sort of collaborative project doing to be very large scale very quickly and perhaps would play well with the concept of the design 2.0 system. For the next few weeks I am going to look at being part of this community and perhaps post a few projects that I am interested in to see what happens. 

Does anyone else participate in this network?

Still/Open - Copyright

As I wrote yesterday, the workshop I attended last week included a number of areas of interest, including a talk on Creative Commons and alternative copyright initiatives by Elliott Bledsoe. This issue is obviously quite closely related to the work that is taking place within the second project of Design 2.0 however it is relevant to note that as of yet there have not been any serious mentions of Creative Commons on the project forum. I will summarize the goings on here and then post it on the forum.

Elliott is a young lawyer form some part of Australia that is not Melbourne and he is part of a research project which is aimed at representing the Creative Commons (CC) rights system in Australia and making a development of policy to represent the CC in a court of law. This is quite nice because it means that now CC can be used by Australians on Australian things and they can sue people who breach the rights within Australia. There are a few other advantages but I do not really care about those. Being Australian, the organisation Elliott represents chose to also implement ethically natured aspects of the policy when they composed it. Subsequently other countries did the same, but he suggests Australia was the first. This is of course not a surprise as that is how people here do things. 

In any case, Creative Commons as many people are well aware is a system that allows average people to have slightly more say in how their work is death with from a copyright perspective. The initiatives of CC institutions include creating "human readable" versions of the policy which can then be used to help people select the appropriate license for their content but also can be used to help potential breaches understand where the line is drawn, something which is obviously a problem with many other aspects of copyright today. 

Despite the great work done on CC I am still quite dubious of it as it completely does not deal well with commercial licensing and it does not offer any kind of rights management if you intend to achieve commercial compensation for your work. This is a bad thing because though artists are passionate about their work, they still need to eat. The CC solution to this problem is, in my opinion quite undeveloped. However, when I posed this issue to Elliott and mentioned that I was running a project in this regard he quoted a project called No Ank which is said to be the answer. At the moment it is just a budding project but they are thinking about it on some level.  Having partially reviewed their methods I feel they are not offering a solution per se but they are offering a method to handle the issue.

I do not support the localisation of new media copyright schemes however I appreciate the work that Elliott and his colleagues are doing. 

Still/Open - Open Source Magazine

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. 

Mid Semester Presentation

On Tuesday this week I gave my mid-semester presentation. We had 10 minutes for presenting and 10 minutes discussion. 

I had started my presentation about 2 days before hand but most of the final content was done the evening before. It ended up being relatively clean and, I think, information rich. In any case, I used Keynote 4.0 from iWork 2008, which is really lovely, and I made seemingly good use of a few of the tools within the package. I think the efficiency gained was largely due to a pipeline for incorporating work into a presentation that I have been working on recently. This process includes subdividing a project into key issues of approach and then building an informational needs plot to drive what is included in the final presentation.

The presentation started with a quick introduction of the project in general and its sub projects. Then I talked about the tools used for the current website and some areas to grow this and deal with issues. There was then a section on Crowd Spirit, the Beta software similar to mine. For a few moments I discussed the counter project, which currently is to engage in some different kinds of collaboration. Lastly I talked about academic developments needed to continue this project and finished with a review of the projects future. 

There were not too many questions apart from needing further explanation of aspects of the work in general. Feedback did, however, provide the suggestion that I not spend too much time on psychological explanations for the projects developments and instead simple try understanding what is happening. This I found vaguely helpful as it allows me to concentrate on the design issues of my work more. 

Here is a PDF of the presentations. Sub page animation is not represented. 

The Free World and the Open World

I think, in the world of things and the world of work and play, there are a number of grate players, participants of the systems and providers of service. With all of these members, however, there is economy. Fundamentally speaking this is not a problem, economy is a great example of complex system design with flexibility to cater for emergent trends and the ability to deal on a global scale with mission critical issues. This is our world. 

There are a multitude of economies and perhaps my interest in this area shows through in my work on the Copyright Project, however, that aside, the greater reasoning and perhaps the driving notion which lead this endeavour to exist is that of social systems and the shift in economy our little earth has recently noticed. A few years back now, a then budding Internet company, Google, released AdSense, that day, the world experienced perhaps the most successful implementation of the attention economy. 

Open source, and closed source are two of the players I referred to previously. They are often seen as characteristic mindsets that separate humanity into two distinct groups. I do not believe in this however, instead, I think there is a part of humanity that lies in between and provides things out of love and passion for the society of beings it takes part in. This is what drove Google, firstly to exist and secondly to revolutionise advertising, it is also the thing that drives the open market economics to need to trend away from monopolise. This is where my project sprouted from and where I suspect the future of humanity lies. My dreams aside, Open Source is NOT a solution, passion is.

This may seem like a convoluted argument, especially when it is actually pitched to demonstrate why I chose the tools I do and why this project will use what people need to use to contribute. We will not use open source. We will use free to us, because that is what we can afford. It may include cases of open source but will be built on and grounded with add supported tools. These are the tools built with incentive and used with passion, this is in my opinion the greatest model of all. 

Real users never pay!

Related Online Content Feed

I have jut put up a feed of things that are related to the stuff of this project. This feed will be aggregated from selectively tagged items in my Google Reader list. Here is the page representation of this list and a mini feed is now displayed in the blog sidebar. 

Competitions

Over the past few weeks I have started working on a few competitions with Soumitri and Liam and yesterday when talking to Soumitri about one we are just starting Malte suggested in passing that I should include observations from these collaborative activities in to Design 2.0. He also suggested I include these things in my review next week. We will see about all this. It is likely I will put up some posts on these matters within the next few days. I think they will be kept separate from the larger work of the Design 2.0 community though. 

A Book on My Sorts of Things

Today I was alerted to an interesting book but my feed reader and a person called Luca. The book is closely linked to my topic of study on this project and would be a really good read I think. The book, "Higher Creativity for Virtual Teams" has been reviewed by Core77 here.

Drops are starting to drip

Today the site had its first posts from outsiders. Jenny posted some stuff on her experience with guitar platers.

Hopefully there will be more of this sort of thing in the coming week.

On that note, I have extended the schedule for finding need for one more week because we have the contingency alowance and it is needed.

Questions and Answers on Interviews

Today somone sent me an Email on how they were not sure how to do interviews and were having a few other problems. I answered and also told them they should post issues to the forum. I think made a long post on the forum describing some details on how to conduct interviews for this kind of project.

I am not sure why but it seems people are really scared to write on the forum. I wish they would just put everything on there.

Anyway. I think it will start moving a bit more soon.