rWorld

rWorld2

We are developing a blogging platform for Oxford Brookes, based on WordPress MU. I have moved over there (rWorld2) for my more work and research-related occasional pieces. Some new stuff, and some republished here on the Emerge project site.

Participatory governance in Open Source Software projects

We all subordinate ourselves to, and participate in, groups. These may be states or other institutions at various scales: families, workplaces, corporations, education. In the context of a world in which "Absolutely everything is changing all the time," at a recent Harvard Berkman centre seminar, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, (read his blog) President Emeritus of the IBM Technology Academy and visiting/adjunct professor at MIT and Imperial College, argues, for a mixed mode of social control in which participatory governance models and hierarchical governance models share the challenge of institutional survival in a social darwinian market environment where, "... you make mistakes you die". The essence of the argument depends on one, metaphorised, aspect of darwinism: sexual reproduction; hierarchical governance can be crossed with participatory governance to yield a more robust hybrid. But, in the end, it appears that participatory modes of governance are only useful insofar as they produce innovation which enables adaptation for domination.

Simultaneously scary, inspiring, useful and banal, this is an excellent example of a totalising hegemonism, which only a representative of the really big and powerful can pull off. As he says, "Once you drink the Kool-Aid you understand this".

Technorati Tags: innovation, jisc-emerge, open source

What is needed for a community to function

ELESIG is a community of researchers that started with a small group of universities, which grew out of eLearning Pathfinding. Elesig has identified a number of functions that distributed (online) group/community members need to fulfill. I adapted these from Rhona Sharpe's presentation to Brookes eL@B on 20/11/2008. The slides may be forthcoming.

Eframework workshop 29 October

Workshop was organised to do three things:

• enable U&I Projects to produce outputs for the eFramework
  
• to help the eFramework team to validate its own elicitation processes
  
• to introduce participants to "Project X", the Innovation Base (IB)

So the proposition may be: can systems development language be applied to the description of a social learning research problem?

• organisation
  
• motivation
  
• what is the wow factor (impact)

Cloudfest at the open University

At Open University Learning Design "Cloudfest" or Cloudworks Summit, with U&I colleague Jim Hensman, Steven Warburton, Yishay Mor, as well as many other educational developers and LTs.

OSS Watch Symposium

On Monday 21 July four Emergers, Paul, Josie, Joe and I went to the OSS Watch Symposium, "Profiling the Community". I hope the Emerge community perspective added a dimension to the discussions, to which I'll post a link when I get it. I found the research communities' directions and nascent VRE (see here and here) very interesting. The model of the Experiment Life Cycle (ELC) has affinities with our own Users and Innovation Development Model (UIDM). The official Emerge presentation in slideshare is here. Or, you could read the story starting here. Some digital video is here.

Eportfolio reference group meeting Birmingham

I attended the ePortfolio Experts Reference group meeting on 27 March 2008 (agenda). This is a group coordinated by Becta, on behalf of the Centre for Recording Achievement, JISC, HEFCE, LSC, and the DCSF (ex DfES) and DIUS.

For a documents and links please see the groups growing wiki.

Themes, clusters and Projects

Thematic clusters are a component of the new environment for the U&I programme as we move into the benefits realisation phase. The purposes of clusters are to help support projects, to create a synthesis across project outputs, and facilitate serendipity.

Cycling Stalinists

I first wrote this piece in 2002. It is still true. It is both the selfish thoughtlessness of many cyclists and the boorish hostility of motorists that is the direct link to the yet un-won war against fascism.

Benefits realisation Stage 1

This is a very rough summary of the excellent presentations from the first round of benefits realisation activities, presented at the York programme launch.

• e-Volve (Graham Attwell),
  
• Innovation Networks and Communities of Practice (Jim Hensman)
  
• Librarians CoP - LCop (Paul Mayes)
  
• Virtual Design Studio (Miles Metcalfe)
  
• Personal Learning Environment - PLE (Mark van Harmelen)
  
• User Interfaces, Social Software Technologies and Learning Experience (Panayotis Zaphiris, Stephanie Wilson)

These case studies illustrated some of the good that came out of the first phase of the Emerge Project. The overarching concerns appear to be

• data management
  
• risk management
  
• usability
  
• platform-type tools.