Today is a panel discussion about the social formations in the age of NextWeb, which is the second part of the CODE: Building the new Agora event. Last night was Wendy Chun's lecture on Open-imagined networks which I blogged about yesterday. It's nice to see a lot of people at this event to discuss about Web 2.0 and social computing. One of the panels is a group from BarCamp Toronto. Some of the representatives from TorCamp here today are Mark Kuznicki and David Crowe. It's a tight night group here, where everybody is sitting in a circle. Right now, everybody is giving a blurb about themselves.
Now, David Crowe is talking about what BarCamp is about, BarCamp is about the connections between people, it is called an "unconference" where there is no set schedule. It's about making connections in a shared environment. You can't build community, community just forms around shared ideas, around connections and events. It's about how to provide tools and systems to people. So the question is about whether community is an organization. The community is built from the bottom and up and is run by individuals not a group of people, so any individual can step up to the plate and contribute to the community. The tools are making the implicit networks become explicit. The community is open, meaning anyone can enter. BarCamp was a reaction to invite-only conferences. One of the things that I brought about is how BarCamp is now applying their expertise in technology to solve society's problems. TransitCamp was created in Toronto by BarCamp in reaction to tackling the TTC's problems in Toronto. What we have in Toronto is closed technologists, who don't really communicate with each other and share, like in Silicon Valley, therefore this is what BarCamp arose from to enable more collaboration and openness. BarCamp can be thought of as a disruptive way of conferences, similar to disruptive technologies (like peer-to-peer) compared to mainstream technologies (like client/server).
The second group is Upgrade which is a group of people that deal with network media and artists and present the work of media artists. There are now 26 nodes of Upgrade worldwide. I've never heard of Upgrade before until today. There really is no structure behind Upgrade, it is broad fusing between technology and the arts like electronic music, arts made with computers. Each particular node is local, but are global.
One of the panel speakers is talking about the Mozilla community and he is a college professor teaching open-source software. And how he is mentoring students as to which people to talk to for writing code, so writing software is about fostering relationships, it's all about social networks. Most software developers meet on IRC where they can talk and listen, but the problem with IRC is that you can't really listen.
The second panel discussion is on Clearing, which is in reaction to a recognition of scarcity of time, a desire to grow and manage identity, and build community. The goals of Clearing are similar to BarCamp, but is like a village. It is being moderated by Jesse Hirsch of Open Flows. The group is organized and communicates through a wiki. There are no lurkers in this group to help facilitate contribution from among everyone in the group. The group arose in response to dissatisfaction with conversations around Web 2.0. There is this group called Juice (I think that's how it is spelled) which was designed to gather a diverse group of people that would never get together, and try to form some interest. There is an intentionality of bringing the periphery to the center, as opposed to starting from a group of people in the center (the A-list) and have other people connect from the center. So, this is kind of like a bottom-up approach. This is quite interesting because when in my research, I was trying to build community around the independent music blog, it was quite difficult, because there was that pressure to provide compelling content and something to say, that would make people go to the blog and start commenting and create conversations as a result of it.
Anyways, very interesting stuff. I wonder if there will be a blog or some kind of communication channel to continue what was discussed today?
On Technorati: CODE-Agora
No comments:
Post a Comment