Short Visit To Copenhagen
Next weekend I will pay a short visit to Copenhagen. Elmine is coaching a youth fencing team at a tournament there, and I will tag along for the ride. A good opportunity to catch up with a few people in Copenhagen.
It will be different to visit the city without going there for Reboot (which will be in June again, and which Elmine and I will be certain to attend). We visited Copenhagen in 2003 for our summer vacation, and enjoyed the yearly Jazz Festival there. After that Copenhagen and Reboot have been synonymous for me. But not this week.
If I haven't been in touch with you through e-mail, but you would like to catch up on Saturday 29th or Sunday 30th in Copenhagen, let me know.
(The picture was taken in 2003, in the city center.)
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)Some Thoughts On RSS Reading (BarCamp Amsterdam III)
During BarCamp Amsterdam, see previous posting, we talked about how I can use my tools to better suit my working needs. One of them being social filtering. In this posting I explore the thoughts on rearranging my feed reading habits this triggered for me. I'll describe how I filter information now first, before exploring how I can adapt those routines.
How I filter information
For my information gathering I have two lenses. Back in September 2005, I wrote about my filtering, and created this illustration, that is still valid:
The first lens is the outside-in lens, on the left of the funnel. The second one is my inside-out lens, and is directed by specific questions and tasks I have at a certain point in time. My RSS reading serves both lenses. The outside-in in real time (what is going on now), the inside-out mostly through searching in the archives or full text search in the current items. All my RSS feeds are people-based. I e.g. subscribe to your blog feed, delicious feed, Flickr pics, and other feeds that contain your personal on-line traces. I rename all those feeds to start with your name. From it I construct an overview of what is happening in the circles and communities I am part of.
Current feedreader organization
In my feedreader, I have grouped all feeds in to only a few sections. One for 'Dutch context', one for 'German context', one for ' Keeping track' which collects all internet traces I leave myself (self reflection as it were), one for clients, and one 'all' which contains the long list of people writing stuff I usually find worthwile. All in all I track maybe about 300-400 people, though it fluctuates over time.
My wiki may point the way
In the wiki I use on my laptop for personal note taking I also keep pages of people, where I write down some of the context we share. Where we met, the type of exchanges we've had in the past, and where they're from. I have about 240 people in my wiki, largely different from the ones in my feed reader. The way I categorize them is what is of interest here. I put the people pages in my wiki in circles based on social distance. These circles are roughly based on Dunbars number and 'natural' group sizes. As you can see in the screenshot below I have circles / categories for 1 (meaning <12), 12 (<50), 50 (<150), 150 (<1000), and 999 (>1000) where the number in the category name is sort of the minimal social distance I 'feel'. Remember: this is not exact science, it is just an approximation of my own intuitions. It means nothing more, but nothing less either.
If you were to draw these circles as a social networking graph, you would get what in SNA terms is called a network of spokes. Me in the centre with connections radiating out.
Tags or folders to add contexts
To be able to not only look at my social network (as an information filter) from the above perspective, i.e. me at the heart of several circles, I need to be able to add contexts. Single facet contexts like 'my old fraternity', 'people working at client x', 'living in or around Berlin', as well as multi-faceted contexts like 'coders in Amsterdam', 'Drupal community members in Germany', 'coders in Ruby on Rails', 'start-ups around mobile applications', ' stakeholders around client system x'. The former would form community 'blobs' on my circles above. The latter would add spider-networks to it.
Social distances with community and multi-faceted contexts plotted on them
Adding the single faceted contexts could be easily done by splitting feeds into folders, or rather allowing the same feed to be in multiple folders. The multi-faceted contexts can not be done with folders I'd say, but need some sort of tagging, where you can filter on combinations of tags to get the context you need. Like drupal+Germany, to give me people working on Drupal, based in Germany. Tags can of course also replace any folder structure completely.
Inside-out and Outside-in
As I said, all the usual feedreading is for outside-in information-filtering. To get a feeling what is happening in the world of people that mean something to me in one context or another. For finding answers to my own current questions, information pertaining to current tasks, or refinding links to things I want to point to in what I share on-line myself, I like to use an archive on my laptop. Insdie-out information filtering then amounts to full-text searches on that archive. Also because I spend a lot of my reading and writing time off-line e.g. in the train, I like my feedreader to store stuff off-line. Therefore on-line feedreaders are not a workable option for me.
Finding the right RSS reader
Now I can start out with arranging my feeds in my feedreader (currently using Vienna) according to the circles of social distance shown above, but tags and one feed being able to live in multiple folders is a different thing. Do you know about an off-line feedreading client that provides these functionalities (one feed in multiple folders and tagging, or at least tagging)?
BarCamp Amsterdam III: Tools I need, But Don't Have Yet
Last week saw the third edition of BarCamp in Amsterdam. Located, just as the first one (and second BarCamp ever), at Mediamatic offices near Amsterdam Central Station, a small group of people gathered to discuss their projects. I am not a coder, but do like to talk about the wishes and dreams I have about my tools. As before this was the still evolving story I brought to the programme.
Listening to Robert on Roomware.
The full title of my topic was "The tools I need/want but that don't exist yet, or I am unaware of."
I started with a sketch of the three major quantitative changes I see.
First an increase in connections between people (induced by new global infrastructure like mobile telephony and internet).
Second, an increase in speed and dynamics (when you build roads, you create traffic)
Third an increase in information until the level of abundance.
As our previous strategies to deal with connections, speed and information don't scale into a networked globalized world, we see qualitative answers emerging.
Those qualitative answers are along the lines of:
First a more pro-active attitude, making your own sense of the world.
Second different priorities in existing and new information skills.
Third, new tools and work forms that cater to a pro-active attitude, and different information skills.
The shift I see, also in working with clients, away from the Web 2.0 avant garde, is to a higher level of cooperation: networked co-creation. Here I quoted Ivan Labra from his talk at BarCamp Brussels, where he distinguishes three maturity levels (sharing information, coordinating tasks, co-creation).
When I look at what this requires to build effective working routines, I see things like:
Pattern recognition, and taking those patterns as input signals.
Being human on-line: more subtle and granular negotiation of trust levels and intimacy in information exchanges.
Visualisation: what is the quality of my social network as a filter, where are the white-spots, echo-chambers, dark zones.
True co-creation: simultaneous editing, re-arranging and adding, in real-time.
What resulted was a good conversation, in which others gave some tips and pointers to tools that might provide buidling blocks (though most were familiar). Yahoo Pipes, Megite, Quartz, APML and Open Search were among those mentioned.
I also noted in this conversation how deeply ingrained a notion it is that we look at information piece-meal. Where my point is, that I don't look at individual information pieces when I want to get a feeling for what is happening in my communities. I look at what they are talking about, not what they are saying immediately. When I have a specific question to answer, then I do read individual items/entries that look to provide parts of the answer.
My main take-away however was the realization, in line with the needed pro-active attitude mentioned above, that I need to dig into this deeper myself. Have a dive into sources on data-mining and into the pointers given.
It also triggered me to think about redesigning the way I gather and combine my RSS feeds. That is the topic for the next posting.
More pics of BarCamp Amsterdam can be found in my Flickr stream, and some video's I life-streamed with my phone are at my Qik account.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)Phun, or Learning Physics the Fun Way
In the VR Lab at Umea University (Sweden) they have created a beautiful teaching help called Phun, where in a game like environment you get to experiment with all kinds aspects of Physics.
When I talk to teachers they sometimes think that making learning fun means making it simpler, dumbed down. Once I heard one say learning had to 'hurt a lot' for it to stick.
To me adapting teaching to our networked information-abundant world means making it fun, challenging, and relevant to me instantly. I've never equated fun with easy. Fun just means the learning process is more engaging, easier to stick to, not that the content is of less quality or less challenging. The work done in Umea is a case in point.
(found via the HumLab blog)
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Moo Cards: Tangible Change
I received my Moo mini cards today. Not a newsworthy event as such, especially not to most of you who are familiar with them anyway.
But the bigger point behind these Moo Cards is that
1) they build on my own production (my Flickr pics), making it more personal and meaningful
2) they turn my photos into tangible/physical products thus taking digital stuff into the physical realm
3) they create unique items (100 different cards) for a very reasonable amount (15 euros), where we've become accustomed to equating unique with pricy.
I am excited about getting my Moo Cards because it will help engage clients, colleagues and others less aware of what kind of changes Web2.0 is an expression of. I will use them as my business cards. Each unique cards has a story attached to the picture it shows, a personal story. Something you never have with other cards. The card is smaller than usual, but they will remember it better. I bet.
(these are the 100 pics the cards have been printed from)
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