Planblog

Summer 2010.

A series of conversations, meetups, barcamps all around the Mediterranean.

A collaborative journey in between places, worlds, cultures.

A North-South, East-West, Orient-Occident cross-pollination.

Some travel required. No shortage of topics.

Anyone game?

PS: Thanks for the inspiration, Cem!

Wiki meets Facebook.

First up, the Wiki Project:

theWikiProject is a place for you, your friends, and your groups to write Web pages together. Using the same software that powers Wikipedia, you can share pages with just a few folks, inside Facebook, or with the whole world at theWikiProject.net!

Another cool feature is a wiki-style Wall, since you can put your own page inside your Facebook profile, and any and all of your friends can edit it.

This is EXPERIMENTAL software by a couple of developers who wanted to use MediaWiki inside of Facebook. We CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR PRIVACY nor the RELIABILITY OF OUR STORAGE. Yes, it’s on Amazon.com’s servers and we make hourly backups, but this is just a very small project at the moment…

… but if you pitch in and join theWikiProject, we think it could be a whole lot bigger!

Read how the makers of the Wiki Project explain “Why a wiki?“

Secondly, Wetpaint launched the beta version of its Wiki Whiteboard app on Monday:

Wiki Whiteboard by Wetpaint makes it simple to work together with friends and groups inside Facebook. Adding content, images, videos, and dozens of other widgets is as easy as clicking and typing.

Who knows, there may already be more wiki apps on Facebook than just these two…

Listphile just came out and seems very nicely done at first glance:

Listphile is a free website that enables anyone to create collaborative lists, atlases, databases and more. Lists can be broad and ambitious (like a List of All Baseball Players Who Played in the Majors) or niche (Punk Bands from the Lower East Side, 1975-1980), or quirky or ridiculous. You can collaborate with other people to share, create, and make something that will benefit humanity.

I set up a little civics-related crowdsourcing experiment: A good citizen is…

Will be interesting to watch what kind of statements people suggest.

Via Techcrunch: Listphile: Lists On Speed

Just sayin’.

I’m quite fascinated by the opportunities or large-group collaboration.

I recently thought about how crowdsourcing could best be applied to the translation process, and came across the following projects or services (may not all be active anymore, but listed here nonetheless):

• Babels — Babels is an international network of volunteer interpreters and translators whose main objective is to cover the interpreting needs of the Social Forums.
• Cucumis — Free online translation service
  Cucumis is a community of translators who share their linguistic knowledge and help each other online.
• DotSUB — Any film in any language.
• nativetext — nativetext is a free web service that translates RSS feeds from blogs and podcasts into foreign languages. (site defunct, archived version available on Archive.org)
• Speakeasy — Speakeasy is an integrated internet and telephone service that connects new immigrants with a network of multilingual volunteers who answer questions, give advice, and provide language interpretation over the phone. Speakeasy’s novel approach to community networking leverages the ubiquity of cell phones to create a model of “just in time” civic engagement, enabling volunteers to remain “on-call” to their community wherever they might be.
• Traduwiki — Anybody is a translator
  Traduwiki’s mission is to use the power of ‘we’ to translate the most interesting documents. Explore the thousands of docs already uploaded, contribute two phrases at a time and let’s spread the best stuff.
• Worldwide Lexicon Project — Translating The Web To And From Any Human Language
  The Worldwide Lexicon is an experimental project to make translating websites, blogs and real-time IM conversations easy and accurate, using a combination of human and machine translation. The project was created several years ago by Brian McConnell, a telecommunications entrepreneur and inventor.

Anything else out there that should be mentioned? Feel free to leave a comment.

I don’t think so. It’s just happening more on Twitter these days.

Coworking is spreading to Germany:

• Google Group
• Wiki

Kudos to Johannes for moving this forward. He presented the coworking concept at the recent Web Monday Karlsruhe.

Via Nicole: Coworking DE

You know what to do…

I’m spending too much time reading all kinds of blogs, following certain keywords, trying to keep up with some of the interesting conversations that are going on all across the internet. It’s browsing the 800+ feeds in my feedreader (only 10 percent of which I actually read on a regular basis), picking the items that seem worth reading, then reading, then maybe bookmarking, or downloading any documents that may be referenced, and reading those, or otherwise processing all this information etc.

Problem is, it takes way too much time out of my day. It’s been bugging me for quite some time now, too. I guess I have to either set strict time limits or find better filters.

Dan Russell over at Creating Passionate Users has a nice article (part two of a three-part series): Sensemaking 2: What I do to make sense

His personal process is as follows:

• FIRST: Figure out what it is that you’re trying to understand or get done–let’s call this the domain. This is crucial because you can waste a lot of time doing various experiments or studies on the wrong thing. …
• SECOND: Collect a lot of information about the domain. I like to read about how others think about the domain, what works and (just as importantly) what doesn’t work. Sometimes people will say how they think about the whole domain, and that’s often incredibly useful because they’ll have already organized things in a way that’s useful. …
• THIRD: Organize the information. Depending on what the domain is, you might look for an organization that helps you see the entire structure of what’s known, or you might end up building a very detailed model. In almost every case, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to organize the information I have into some kind of representation. …
• FOURTH: Iterate. Realize that you almost never get it right the first time. Sometimes I’ll get the original domain wrong, and I’ll be studying the wrong thing. Sometimes I’ll collect a lot of junk information that I have to winnow out. And sometimes I’ll just create representations of that information that don’t work out.
• FIFTH: Do. As in, do whatever it was you wanted when you figured out what the domain was. Research of the kind I work on is always trying to figure out something so you can do the next thing.

I’d be interested in learning more about how sensemaking works, for individuals but also collaboratively among (large) groups, and if and how it can be done over the web. To what extent does divison of labor work here? Can sensemaking be split up into many small tasks so as to allow for more of a swarm approach?

A real-life example as well as third and final part of the series are scheduled to come out later this week.