Weblog
6 days ago: links for 2009-06-27
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"5. Neighborhoods beat networks. Twitter's network effects don't feel much like standard ones. I can subscribe to your feed, yet you don't have to subscribe to mine — times millions. What's going on here? Twitter realizes neighborhood effects, not just network effects: complex sets of intersecting, overlapping, mutually reinforcing network effects. Oprah's followers are a neighborhood, and so are Ashton's. You can benefit from joining many of these neighborhoods — not just one larger network. "
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"To fulfill the high calling of leadership, managers need to move toward a more professional attitude, away from dependence upon the welter of quick fix techniques heaped upon them by most management books and articles. Such a technique-oriented approach to leadership development demeans management. Too many managers already fail to regard management as a profession. They think, how could management possibly be a profession? After all, aren’t managers are made overnight when they are promoted from being workers? And don’t most succeed? It’s easy to see why managers assume there must be nothing in the role that amounts to a substantial profession."
8 days ago: links for 2009-06-25
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"Chicago is angling for about $100 million in federal stimulus money to build a high-speed Internet network that would reach some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. City officials have seized on the stimulus program as a second chance to bring broadband service to underserved areas like the South Side, after a more ambitious proposal to blanket the city with a wireless Internet signal fizzled in 2007. In the next few months, they plan to apply for federal funds to provide high-speed Internet access to tens of thousands of Chicago residents and a multitude of businesses."
9 days ago: links for 2009-06-24
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data, data, data.
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Be bold or go home. That's what they say.
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Ted's interview with Clay Shirky, on Iran.
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"Knowledge Plaza is an easy-to-use, open, flexible and intuitive solution for sharing information and knowledge. The Plaza is the meeting place between those who know and those who search, at the intersection of internal information and external sources."
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"Software originally developed for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project can now be used to power any old PC. Sugar on a Stick, as it is known, can be run from a USB drive to give aging PCs a new look and access to collaborative educational software. "
Sugar on a Stick, as it is known, can be run from a USB drive to give aging PCs a new look and access to collaborative educational software.
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"GroundReport is the most selective citizen news platform on the web, empowering reporters around the world to post news and earn money. Every day GroundReport’s network of 5,000 international contributors publish breaking articles, videos and photos. Reports are vetted by a trusted corps of trained editors prior to publication, and then rated by the GroundReport community."
9 days ago: Crowdsourcing? Here are four lessons from the Guardian
The Guardian enlisted over 20,000 people to comb through hundreds of thousands of documents to find, as they said, the needle in the haystack. From the article, Four crowdsourcing lessions from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment:
Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.The four lessons are:
- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun.
- Public attention is fickle, so launch immediately.
- Speed is mandatory so use a framework.
- Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready.
The thing I think is very interesting about this is not just the success of the effort and they way the Guardian built on the weeks and weeks of work of another organization, but they way in which they used their volunteers to triage information.
This need — to help triage information so that you are only looking at what is most important and requires your unique skill sets — can be applied to research, to disaster relief, to adding metadata to images, and on and on.
So, here’s the question: are you using your engaged participants to help you find the most worthwhile and relevant information upon which you can follow up? If not, why not?
(via Waxy.org links)
10 days ago: links for 2009-06-23
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Freebase is a terrific data resource. Build on top of a ton of free data.
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Updated this handout — adding resources and a listening .ppt — in preparation for session at NCVS.
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"Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet."
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"Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet. The goal is to use the power of "Social Influence" via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogs and other online media to raise an unprecedented amount for our fund benefiting The Humane Society, LIVESTRONG, Oxfam America and WWF from June 1st until August 28th, 2009."
10 days ago: A Good Problem: Bringing Philanthropy and Service Together
I have somehow forgotten how to use the internet and am unable to leave a comment in response to where do philanthropy and service meet? on the Social Citizens blog. So, here it is.
I think that the broader idea of service — the one that is receiving so much attention these days — is about bringing the face-to-face actions of volunteering together with philanthropy in a way that creates a bigger-than-a-sum-of-its-parts kind of change.
Often these two streams (volunteering and large scale philanthropy) seem to operate completely separately from each other — with the micro-donation services Allison Fine mentions in her comment operating in some still-to-be-defined middle space.
Personally, I think that the promise of the increasingly ubiquitous community-gathering technologies is that they can join these streams — without putting an undue burden on the community-based organizations that are the recipients of a lot of the activity. I’m pretty interested in understanding how to build an infrastructure that brings these different streams together. I don’t just mean the infrastructure of Social Actions or serve.gov or All for Good. But a broader infrastructure that supports adding those actions, micro-donations and large scale philanthropy in a way that can help to define a kind of change in a given community. That’s more then aggregation I think. But I get stuck in trying to think about who takes ownership of the next steps.
11 days ago: links for 2009-06-22
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Just like the title says.
13 days ago: links for 2009-06-20
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Congrats to walk score.
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Organizations that are built on and use digital tools to manage and deliver their work.
15 days ago: links for 2009-06-18
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The White House has to examine its cookie policy as it looks to incorporate more web 2.0 services and to track the effectiveness of those services.
