Life With Alacrity

BGIedu Students Post for Blog Action Day on Food

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 17:35:27 PDT

Today is Blog Action Day, where each year a topic is chosen and bloggers and activists worldwide write about that topic in their blogs or post about it on Twitter and Facebook using the tags #FOOD and #BAD11. This year's topic is Food, and this year many of my students of my BGIedu class Using the Social Web for Social Change are using the day to help kick off their "Beat Blog" assignments. (Blog continues with a list of student blogs...)

Managing your Social Graph with Google+ [Google Plus]

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:29:13 PDT

With Google+ almost two weeks into its test phase, conversation about this new social network service seems to be going in circles. Literally. That’s because Circles is the Google+ feature that users are generating the most buzz about. It’s Google’s answer to the problem of organizing your social graph online. If you’re not familiar with a social graph it’s a map of everyone you know and how they are related to you. Social graphs are tricky; as you try to define them you’ll inevitably run into some complications. [Post continues with more advice on managing Google+, your social graph, privacy, and time management tips.]

Paying for Favors

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:59:46 PST

One of the common practices in the independent movie industry is to share favors to keep production costs low. I loan you use of a camera and you later do some editing for me on the cheap. Of course, it is often actually less direct then that: I loan you the camera, the community knows that I am generous, and when I need some editing time on the cheap, my social capital in the film community makes the resource available to me. [post continues with quote from Joss Whedon and some commentary]...

Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:59:37 PDT

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year's Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is sponsored yearly by Change.org. I wish I had known...

Facilitating Small Gatherings Using "The Braid"

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:19:40 PDT

[intro skipped] One tool that I've used to manage these odd-sized groups in the past is what I call “The Braid”. It is derived from a group process called the Café Method, of which The World Café and Conversation Café are excellent examples. In The Café Method, people meet in smaller groups around tables, and then flow from table to table sharing ideas, but ideally keeping each table at 4-7 people. There is an excellent free PDF guide to the Café Method offered by The World Café called Cafe To Go. [rest of post continues with more details on The Braid...]

Password Best Practices

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:29:32 PDT

Passwords are very important for maintaining your online identity, because they ensure that no one else can access your accounts and do things that you wouldn't do. As such, you should make sure that your online passwords are as strong...

Creating Shared Language and Shared Artifacts

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:13:10 PDT

[brief summary of longer post] The average native English language speaker uses in the realm of 12,000 to 20,000 words, whereas a college graduate would use 20-25,000 words…Every time a new group of people meet together — whether in a team, in a marketplace, or in a community — one of the first activities they must do together is create a shared language…They do this in order to communicate more effectively together, to put a context on the words that they have in common, to construct a shared understanding in their minds based both on available information and their individual diversity of experience…Without a shared language there will be no clarity on mutual goals — whether it involves working together, transacting a trade, or creating something…However, some facilitators have learned that one of the best ways to help a group form a shared language is by having the group create together a shared artifact…It allows the individuals participating to ask the questions: "Is this what you mean when you are talking about this?..an important factor in shared artifacts — if the shared artifact is not constrained then it will be too large or complex for the group to reach some measure of completion…Often there are differences in status, purpose, or perspective that can get in the way of group formation, but a focus on a common task of the creation of a neutral shared artifact allows those issues to come later as the participants develop the trust and shared language required to talk about those tough issues.…The conjoined social networks in the blogosphere — via Facebook, Twitter, or the attendee-focused Unconference — cause new terminology and new language to form ever faster…Or is there just not enough space for it within the tightly constrained social artifacts of the internet?…These are questions that we as social software technologists need to address as the future of the internet increasingly becomes the present of our social groupings.

Teaching "Using the Social Web for Social Change" at BGI.edu

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:36:27 PDT

Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of "Using the Social Web for Social Change". [post continues with details...]

Creative Commons Posts "Defining Noncommercial" Report

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:55:42 PDT

ast year I participated in a survey followed up by a focus group on the topic of Noncommercial Use, in particular around the context that about 2/3rds of the Creative Commons licenses extant use the NC attribute, such as in CC-BY-NC. (post continues with details and commentary...)

Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:46:36 PDT

In my first article in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I discussed only offers up the most rudimentary explanation of the dynamics, and that is because typically not all of the members of a group are equally involved. In order to better define who constitutes the tightly-knit "participant community" upon which the group thresholds act, we have to study power laws which let us measure the intensity of individuals' involvement in a group. (post continues with more details)

Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:44:23 PST

In my previous post, I talked about the limits on sizes of tightly-knit communities. These group limits are closely related to a number of interesting personal limits, and are often confused with them. Unlike the group limits, personal limits actually measure something different: the number of connections that an individual can hold. They're yet another thing that you must consider when thinking about communities of people.

Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:53:36 PDT

We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Although many communities surely germinate and bloom on their own, purposefully creating communities can take a tremendous amount of hard work, and one factor their success ultimately depends upon is their numbers. (post continues with discussion of various ideal and non-ideal group size thresholds...)

New Blog for Ephemera

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:22:55 PDT

This blog has been quiet lately as I've been doing a lot of work in the last year on the iPhone...

In Seoul for the Social Web

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:18:39 PDT

I'm in Seoul, South Korea this week for the 13th Global Forum on Business Driven Action Learning and Executive Development, where I'm presenting on the topic of the how to get involved with the Social Web.

iPhoneDevCamp and Hack-a-Thon

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:19:52 PDT

I feel privileged and honored to have been part of the iPhoneDevCamp over this last weekend. Over 380 iPhone developers came out to the Adobe Campus in San Francisco to help each other make the best possible web pages and webapps for the iPhone. I was the keynote speaker on Saturday, and Master of Ceremonies for the MacHack-style Hack-a-Thon on Sunday.

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