Archive for the 'technology_stewardship' Category

Oct 14 2009

Technologies for a farming community in Africa

Last week at the KM4Dev conference in Brussels, I struck up a conversation with Joseph Sikeku, who talked about community leadership and technology stewardship in a radically different setting: a radio station in Tanzania.  Sikeku’s project uses an interesting mix of technologies: 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder […]

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Sep 24 2009

A tech steward looking at reading

Last May’s CHIFOO presentation was a great talk about reading by Cathy Marshall. Here are Marshall’s slides from which I’ve borrowed some images to talk about her work in this post. Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that: “Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is […]

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Sep 09 2009

Interviewing Nancy White

Here’s an 8-minute interview with Nancy White, where I ask her several questions about what’s important about Digital Habitats, how the book came to be, and what’s left out. You can tell that I’ve edited out about 10 minutes of discussion. This could have been a very long conversation since we both feel the topic […]

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Aug 28 2009

Open webinars

I’ve always found webinar software like WebEx, Elluminate, or GoToMeeting to be constraining and, because they try to be a “total solution” they don’t play well with other uses or software.  Because they’re popular they’re used in situations where they’re inappropriate.  The Digital Habitats wiki, for example, doesn’t go into enough detail about their uses […]

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Mar 02 2009

Unfinished is good news

“In a community, unfinished is good news” — that’s almost completely obvious and common-place in the world of wiki practitioners and wiki masters. That’s who was there at the Recent Changes camp. In a world of proposals and business plans that aim to be “done with it” and iron out uncertainty before things have begun, […]

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Feb 11 2009

Listening vs. doing at CHIFOO

One of my challenges in talking about communities and technology is that I’m more committed and passionate about “doing it” than talking about it.  Despite getting introduced by the likes of Ward Cunningham as “a researcher,” I’m always more interested in trying to change how we participate in a conversation than in standing on the […]

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Feb 02 2009

A video interview about Digital Habitats

Ward Cunningham just recently set up his own channel on YouTube and has edited a conversation we had last Fall.  His philosophy for conducting interviews is simple and effective: make guests feel comfortable and ask them questions that make them look good. He did a great job making me feel comfortable. We start by talking […]

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Oct 11 2008

Social proof

Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful.  Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective.  And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of […]

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Jun 23 2008

Migration complete

I changed ISP’s and thus web and email servers and it’s been quite an adventure in technology stewardship (supporting myself in this case)! Here are a few of the steps along the way: I decided to reduce costs and increase my site’s flexibility, foregoing the wonderful, bullet-proof services at Easystreet a few months ago. As […]

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May 14 2008

Pockets and legs on Facebook groups

A dollar is not a dollar: it depends on which stash it’s kept in. Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring […]

8 responses so far

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