Self-Organizing-Communities

Next week I have the opportunity to present a few remarks to the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Since I had to submit my comments ahead of time, they’re actually done, and I thought I would share. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you have, as I don’t actually talk to the Commission until next Friday. (UPDATE 06 Feb 06: I have included the new Introduction and Summary as delivered to the Commission.) ...

I’ve put up a new paper draft exploring the patterns in CC license selection behavior by users on Flickr. You can access it here: Understanding the CC License Selection Behavior of Flickr Users I’d love to hear what you think. I mean to clean it up for “formal publication” after I get your feedback…

Spotted over at Stephen’s: “Learning Community Catalyst”:http://www.lcc.edu.au/. Haven’t looked closely yet; this is a bookmark. =)

Many people know that I am extremely interested in the growth and emergence of “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/. In addition to keeping the “evolution of moderation on Slashdot”:http://opencontent.org/mod-evolve/ archive, I try to be a student of the archive and what it can teach us about catalyzing the growth of really large, really active online communities. This short foray explores a crisis-response model of large community growth. ...

From Stephanie Allen and co’s new blog, “COP^2”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/steph/ – “At the end of the day, employers do not want well-trained employees; they want employees who do their jobs well.” Looks like some fun research to follow over the summer.

A few Friday afternoon thoughts about pheromones, information foraging, and the success of online communities brought on by reading a doctoral student’s proposal draft… ...

My blogging mentor “Brian”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/ has put up a follow-on to my humble attempt at getting people up and running with blogs in the instructional technology community. Check out “Electric Boogaloo”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/archives/000091.html, which includes a link to “George”:http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/’s “list of ’eduBloggers’":http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000920.html. I’ve already noticed that I’m not doing a very good job following some of Brian’s suggestions… Time to step it up!

In the recent posts that have been going around about research on open source software communities, I haven’t seen anyone point to the motherlode yet.. “MIT’s Free / Open Source Research Community”:http://opensource.mit.edu/ It’s filled with good papers (including some graduate theses) about the how’s and why’s of the groups that make OSS work.

“An Introduction to Open Source Communities”:http://www.blueoxen.org/research/00007/ describes: * What are the demographics of those who participate in these communities? Why do they join, and how long do they stay? How do they interact with each other? * How do open source communities work? What are the patterns of collaboration within successful open source communities? Spotted at “elearnspace”:http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000899.html

“H2O”:http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/index.jsp is a new discussion system out of Harvard that provides scaffolding that overcomes many of the traditional complaints about threaded discussion activities in formal courses. Now if only they supported scaffolds for arbitrary discourse grammars like “FLE3”:http://fle3.uiah.fi/ we could get somewhere…