Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Three types of community

Friday, November 16th, 2007

This is a brief overview of three community models. They are theoretical models, but they are ones I have used with a variety of people on a variety of real projects. They are very useful tools to abstract and discuss the myriad issues that communities throw up for their hosts ...

Social networks: findings with Amnesty

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Over June/July 2007, Steve Bridger and I worked with The Amnesty International UK (AIUK) web team, helping them build community around, and promote the Make Some Noise Movement in the run up to the launch of The Instant Karma CD. Download the findings document from here Our aim was to build and ...

Social Networks: Communities: a difference or two

Friday, October 19th, 2007

There is some confusion about what 'social networks' and 'communities' are, and where they differ. To complicate this, I have heard people relating the different words to different technical platforms differently, if you know what I mean. So here is a very high level attempt at explaining it. Socially speaking: Social ...

Festivals: how web stuff can be

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Some time ago, I was walking around The Big Green Gathering Festival at 4am. It was a beautiful night and I was having a great time. The Big Green is one of the darkest festivals in The UK with no spot lighting (because that is simply a waste of energy), ...

What do we mean: Friends?

Monday, September 17th, 2007

The Guardian recently published an item provocatively titled 'You can't make friends online'. It's a deliberately inflammatory title to the early findings of some Pyschology research into social networks, which seem to indicate that in spite of our growing national obssession with 'social networking', the friends that you make online ...

Social tools conference write up

Monday, August 13th, 2007

On the 12th July, Lyndsay Rees-Jones (CILIP MSU senior advisor) and I presented the CILIP online communities story so far (one year into it) at Unicom’s Social Tools conference. Our presentation is here. We chose to do it together so that the attendees could hear both sides of the story ...

Skillswap July: Symony: report

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

Darren Beale did an excellent job giving us all a glimpse of Symony at last week's Skillswap. I can't comment on the elegance of his code or stuff like that because I'm no developer, but, as a facilitator I can say that the audience was absolutely hooked and his live action ...

Tag surfing for the masters of misery

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Dan 'the doyen of digital' Dixon and I are co-curating a miserablist live tag surfing video experience for the masters of moodiness, Grumpy Man, in Bristol next month. Our brief is simple; there isn't one, and the stakes are high; somewhere else. We're going to perform the world's first ever live misery ...

Public, private, personal, political

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

Further to ongoing thought on this area, it's not just Public or private. Of course. Duh. It's public, private, personal, political (with a small p)... One's personal thoughts may not be of interest to others (indeed one's professional colleagues are quite likely to hold different opinions), and are quite likely to distract ...

Skillswap: 26 July: Symfony

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

Am proud to announce another cracking gig to come from our Bristol Skillswap community, this time we're going back to the nub of programming and get down with the currently fashionable and diverse 'frameworks' domain. Darren Beale has agreed to stand up and be stared at, asked questions of, and, more ...