Just like the way all non-standard conference formats seem to be called Open Space nowadays, how come all sessions that take place in a smaller setting, away from the main conference room are called workshop? Where in reality in those workshops, only the person up front is working, and the rest is shopping (quoting Sebastian Fiedler)
Tag: cowpaths
Collective Action, Not Community
Marc Smith (Microsoft Research) on the word community, during the opening key-note at 2nd International Symposium in Media Informatics:
… let’s shelve the word ‘community’ and use and study the term collective action instead.
There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either…
I like the focus on collective action. It echos the gist of my working definition of knowledge: the ability to act.
I like the subtitle of this conference: Cowpaths, agency in social software. Cowpaths has the right ring for me, it connects to my notion of how social software helps you create and follow traces that coalesce into patterns to help you navigate the information abundance we find ourselves in in this digital age.
[UPDATE] Interestingly enough Marc’s group is called the Microsoft ResearchCommunity Technology Group as Sebastian Fiedler just pointed out to me 🙂