My friends Paul Miller and Anna Maybank are hard at work at the desks next to me developing Social Innovation Camp. The idea is to bring hackers and social innovators together to use “web 2.0 tools” to solve social problems.
I’ve just submitted my first idea – Partner Up: prosocial networking for organisations. Any comments welcome, and please do submit a few ideas of your own and make my co-workers happy. I’m going to put a few more into the mix over the next few weeks. It’s shaping up to be a rather nice event.
I’ve been playing with Platial this week to see if it can give me the functionality I’ve been wanting for the past year, for geographic bookmarking. I’ve been playing around with this concept of “Placebook” for some months now, which would be a Facebook app to allow me to bookmark places I want to remember (via my mobile), tag them with metadata like “quiet drink” and “business meeting”, share them with only my Facebook friends (or keep them entirely private), and recall them on my mobile when I’m wandering around trying to remember “where that great little bar was that thingy took me to that time when we had the fish. You know?”
I’m very happy to say that Platial looks pretty neat and doesn’t get bogged down in shackling my places to “official information” such as Google local or UGC venue data – which means I can actually call things “My house” and “The tree where I had my first kiss” and so on. Great news for all you psychogeographers (or “neogeographers“) out there. It’s also a good interface and seems sufficiently playful, despite some slight clunkiness with the categories and geo-location stuff. (I haven’t yet checked what they’re using for location data, but I’m really hoping it’s the lovely Geonames.)
The bad news though is that, like all these sites, they insist on sharing. I’ve been saying for a while now that there are some commodities that don’t follow the usual rules of the social web, specifically all those which are limited in quantity, such as physical space, or trendspotting. I’ve been rather ponderously calling this the esoteric web, which simply means any information which needs to be kept secret from the many and shared amongst the few. Put simply, if you tell everyone about your favourite restaurant, the next week you can’t get a table. And I definitely don’t want to tell everyone else where I live, or where I had my first kiss. Social sites like Trusted Places tend to be full of places we like, but rarely places we love.
So please, dear Platial, here’s what I want for Christmas:
let me add private bookmarks that only I, or selected loved ones, can see the places that are important to me;
plug yourselves into the Facebook/Open Social thang so I can use my existing networks to control my sharing, rather than creating yet more blasted online “buddies”; and
give me a nice neat mobile app so I can bookmark places on the move, and find them again quickly when I’m lost in Soho again and my date is shouting at me.
Come on, you know it makes sense. Please don’t make me have to build it myself, I’ve got too much to do already.
Here’s a video of a talk I did for my friend and Sociability Associate Saul Albert back in October, explaining my Freeschools project. It’s a bit long and more than a little rambling, but some of you might find it interesting, if only for the fluffiness of my hair.
It picks up from about 7 minutes in. (There’s also a transcript and some interesting marginal discussions on our Freeschool Commentpress site.)
The Freeschools concept is my favourite “social technology” project right now because it’s so simple. Through the simple application of two colours of post-it notes and some simple “social software”, it is possible to turn any group of people into a learning network. We’re starting to spread this concept via the School of Everything now, and already people are beginning to run these evenings all around the country. If you’d like to have a go at starting your own freeschool, the instructions are here.
The Freeschool concept is based on the experiments of the Palo Alto Free U, on which the School of Everything is based and which I explain a little in the talk. You can see a Freeschool experiment in action in the second half of the video. I think as a social research project, it demonstrates two very important things: firstly, all people need to begin sharing their skills is a clear process for sharing what they know, and what they need; and secondly, you never know what people know.
Freeschools are more than just experiments for me though, they are a good example of an emerging methodology for designing social interactions, once called “social engineering” but which might now be termed social design. In modelling processes for constructing interactive software applications, we are discovering new ways to model all the other interactions in our lives too.
In each strand of my work at the moment, my underlying purpose seems to be to reduce what we’re doing to the simplest format possible. For the RSA Networks we reduced the process of incubating projects to “propose -> discuss -> support“. For Croydon Council last week I was modelling citizen-led campaigning as “Be heard. Get involved. Make change.” My colleague Mary recently reduced the process of a peer-to-peer project support group to “what are you doing, and what do you need help with?“
It may feel like oversimplification, human interactions are surely too rich to really be defined in such crude terms. But that’s the joy of complex systems: a few simple rules can have huge and unpredictable consequences. After all, Go is a very simple game. So is football for that matter. Freeschools are a very simple idea, but their potential for impact is complex and far-reaching. And most importantly, they demonstrate that you don’t need the internet to have social technology.
With more and more tools available either free or for small sums to help people collaborate and share information, I’ve been compiling a list of the best ones I’ve come across. (Thanks to Saul Albert and the School of Everything team for their contributions to this list.)
FolderShare: my favourite, a simple application which turns any group of un-networked, web-enabled PCs into a virtual shared drive (backed-up onto all machines, available offline, and it even includes good version control).
FilesAnywhere: free tool for sharing documents and files online, including version control and multiple workgroups functionality.
Skype: an obvious one, the most common internet telephony service also offers handy chat functions, plus Skype Prime for video conferencing.
WordPress: collaborative blogging can be a powerful way to collaborate and develop a project; WordPress now allows private blogs accessible only to selected users. (It also produces nifty little websites like this one…)
PhpBB: vanilla free bulletin board software, often cited as the open-source standard.
Google for Domains: particularly their e-mail and calendar tools for project management.
Google Docs: excellent for collaborative concurrent authoring of documentation and project plans.
Wikispaces, Wikidot, Stikipad: free wiki tools for recording ideas, meeting notes and decisions collaboratively in a shared space. (See also the neat new Facebook wiki tool, Wikimono.)
Del.ico.us: the most well-known bookmark-sharing system is increasingly popular with organisations for sharing useful links
Feedburner: the free RSS aggregation and subscription tool, now including e-mail broadcasting (subscribe to this site for a demo)
Hiveminder: a simple-to use but powerful task management tool, with support for groups and email integration.
37 Signals: these guys offer some classic project management tools, including Backpack, Tadalist and Basecamp.
Zoho: a range of online project and collaboration tools including wiki and task manager.
Huddle: yet another new project collaboration engine, but slick and with many features.
Openworkbench: basic Gantt and project planning charts, editable and shareable online.
MindMeister: powerful collaborative online and offline mindmapping software
Gliffy: diagramming and project planning software online.
Rememble: social site for timelining and sharing a range of media, from text-messages to photos. Useful if you have too much communication! (Disclosure: my friend Gavin actually runs this, but I was recommending it before I knew him.)
Compendium: excellent if rather technical tool from the OU for mapping discussions and capturing decisions.
Surveymonkey: simple, free survey tool for basic questionnaires and consultations.
Highrise and SugarCRM: cheap and effective contact management tools for managing wider engagement (Highrise is actually provided by 37 Signals).
So, anything I’ve missed? There are new tools emerging all the time and I make no claims to completeness, so if you’ve got anything to add please share it in your comments below. Happy collaboration!
Last week I gave a talk on peer learning with Ben Vershbow of NY think-tank if:book. He’s been doing some fabulous things in collaborative reading, which I think could have big implications for the way blogs and discussion forums interact.
If:book have developed a hack for the WordPress platform which places comments to the right of each paragraph of a blog post. It’s based on marginalia in old-fashioned academic texts and is intended to allow collaborative annotation of academic texts – but it’s such a simple tool that I think it’s got much wider implications.
We’ve been playing with an installation of the system based on the talk we gave at www.futureofthebook.org/freeschool, with some success.
I’ve been thinking about wikis a lot lately. I’ve been plotting various wiki projects for Skillset around job profiles to establish the “official” and the “actual” stories about what people really do for a living. The new Wikimono app on Facebook looks very interesting. And I had a good chat with Paul Youlten yesterday about his new WikiLaLa project for film and TV. Maybe there’s something in the water at the moment.
I like the concept of wikis. Any software that assumes everybody can be trusted seems to be aiming in the right direction. But they can be tricky to get right. I created a wiki for my FreeSchool project, but I didn’t really manage to create the communal area that I was looking for. We’ve used them for School of Everything too, but the biggest problem there was that on any important issue, the debate would progress offline and the wiki would often end up being inaccurate. They also don’t handle decision-making terribly well.
Major exceptions like Wikipedia aside, I think wikis work best when they’re contained within a community. If there’s a pre-existing team working on a project, a wiki can be a great repository of information; a space for recording progress and keeping notes. Wikimono may work well too, by providing wikis for events, groups, communities that create manageable chunks of collaboration. Let’s see how it takes off.
For more fluid activities though, other paradigms may be needed. There are “blikis” – blogs as the front-ends for wikis – which neatly introduces a time dimension into the wiki information to give it some context. MediaWiki can often be more useful for its comments engine than the wiki itself. I’m also meeting the guy at if:book who developed the CommentPress engine on Wednesday, so I’ll keep you posted on that too. The search continues.
I had a good chat with Euan Semple yesterday about, amongst other things, how to design social web tools for visually-orientated people. Euan’s been helping me figure out how to use blogs, wikis, forums and tagging to engage people in film and TV industries, and it really struck me how text-based most social web tools are.
In many ways, web 2.0 is simply the web taken back to basics. At last we’ve stopped building websites using the rules of print and publishing, and we’re extracting more value from simple hyperlinks again. But because of that, the semantic web requires us to be very textual in our thought patterns. There are some things that (visual impairments aside) can be communicated much more elegantly in colours, diagrams, sequences, videos or animations. And besides, doesn’t it all that text just look at bit, um, boring?
At Skillset we created storyboard guides to the media industries that worked pretty well as a visual portal into the deeper site content. But they’re still embedded as Flash pop-ups in text-based pages, and extracting content relationships from Flash movies is a bit like putting a comic through text-recognition software. Hyperlinked text and tag clouds are easily mapped, and navigation systems can use those relationships easily enough. But what about physical proximity on the screen? Or relative position in a narrative sequence? Or just things that look similar?
Microsoft’s Photosynth and other similar projects (and possibly the OU’s Compendium) are beginning to offer some answers, but it’s still early days. So, how long before we can create navigation systems that are as flexible and granular as hypertext, but as visually appealing as a style magazine? How long before visual storytelling takes its place alongside text linking in the paradigm of the social web?
I had a fantastic meeting this week at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, who were generous enough to show me some of the incredible software they’ve been developing.
I think the standout product was the fantastic Compendium, a software tool for mapping and analysing arguments. It’s free to download and I can already see incredible applications for it in user experience modelling, process analysis and team collaboration. I’m really looking forward to trying it out in some real-life situations.
They also had some brilliant remote-working tools, including FlashMeeting – probably the simplest and most effective video-conferencing tool I’ve seen – plus a couple of other tools for making people in remote locations feel part of a collaborative community. Great stuff.
The OU are also leading the way in open-sourcing their learning curriculum with the OpenLearn project. If you haven’t seen it already, please do take a look: as usual, it’s amazing what you can get for free these days. We’re looking into how we can promote their content via School of Everything now.
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Posted by Andy Gibson 
If:blog
27 October, 2007Last week I gave a talk on peer learning with Ben Vershbow of NY think-tank if:book. He’s been doing some fabulous things in collaborative reading, which I think could have big implications for the way blogs and discussion forums interact.
If:book have developed a hack for the WordPress platform which places comments to the right of each paragraph of a blog post. It’s based on marginalia in old-fashioned academic texts and is intended to allow collaborative annotation of academic texts – but it’s such a simple tool that I think it’s got much wider implications.
We’ve been playing with an installation of the system based on the talk we gave at www.futureofthebook.org/freeschool, with some success.
The software itself is available for free at www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress. I strongly urge you to check it out and put it to good use!