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Category: Virtual Communities (Page 17 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Jessamyn West librarian.net to be here

NOTE TIME CHANGE! NOW at 2:00

Jessamyn's got the answers
Who: librarian.net’s rarin’ librarian Jessamyn West
When: Monday March 21 2:00 (Vernal Equinox)
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor, Carroll Hall
What: Postcards from the Other Edge of the Digital Divide. Political Choices and the Information Poor

About the talk: While we read blogs, tag content and swap lifehacks, people in rural areas are still learning to type. Public libraries are making many more technological choices just to provide basic information and Internet resources nowadays, yet the paradigm for learning to work well with technology differs dramatically from learning to work well with books. Jessamyn West will be talking about being a tech-savvy librarian in a profession struggling into the 21st Century.

More about Jessamyn West:
Jessamyn West is wrapping up her job as an outreach librarian at a rural public library in Vermont. She has worked in public, special and college libraries and done stints of on-the-fly reference at Burning Man, the WTO and the Democratic National Convention. She has maintained librarian.net, a weblog for radical librarians and other interested parties, since 1999. She is fascinated by the intersection of technology, the public sphere and politics.

A Dozen Years of ibiblio

Looking back for new ideas and successes that happened at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. You can add your own and/or correct me.

1992 – sunsite begun with a goal 10,000 downloads a month; we exceeded that in 2 days before we were officially announced.
Linux Software Archive begun (still ongoing). WebMuseum joined sunsite (still ongoing).
Tim Berners-Lee drops by and we set up a WWW server, one of the first in the US and likely the first outside high energy physics.

1993 – Presidential Archives work with Clinton White House using WAIS.
Linux Documentation Project begun (still on going).
Dr. Fun, first daily cartoon on the Web, begun (still ongoing). CEARCH (Cisco Educational Archive) started to provide information about networking in education.

1994 – WXYC first live 7/24 radio simulcast on the Net (still ongoing).
Virtual Shtetl, the first known Yiddish site on the Web (still ongoing).
Internet Poetry Archive begun with Nobel Prize winner Czslaw Milosz’s contribution in English and in Polish, in audio and in text (still ongoing).

1995 – Henriette’s herbal page is one of the oldest herb sites on the web (still ongoing).
Invited presentation to President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter at The Carter Presidential Library on digital Presidential Library futures.

1996 – “Documenting the American South” begun with first person narratives by enslaved people in the Amercian South (still ongoing).

1997 – Roger McGuinn’s FolkDen joins sunsite and changes to streaming formats for his audio collection (begun in 1995 and still ongoing).
Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy comes to ibiblio. First of dozens of Tibetan-owned sites on ibiblio (still ongoing).

1998 – Nobel prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi ‘s videotaped address on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (smuggled out from her house in Rangoon where she’d been detained for a decade) made available on sunsite.
Sunsite becomes MetaLab. 50 million files served in the month of October 1998.

1999 – Open Book Project begun (still ongoing).
Presidency Research Group and Pew Charitable Trusts establish web resources to assist the 2001 Presidential transition. (still active whitehousetransition.org) Served two presidential transitions and nine emerging democracies.

2000 – MetaLab becomes ibiblio with large gift from Center for the Public Domain.
Afro-Louisiana Slave Database by Gwendolyn Menlo Hall made available (still ongoing).

2001 – Interactive Native American Archaeology Project, Excavating Occaneechi Town, made available online for the first time (still ongoing).

2002 – VolunteerTibet officially launched its service on December 10th, 2002, commemorating the date His Holiness the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize (still ongoing).
Mental Health Association in Durham County (NC) founded and joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
A Living Stage: Reflections from South Africa Music and storytellers from the 2002 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa.
www+ftp traffic now averages 3 million files/day.
Data flow averages 150 Mbs.

2003 – Khawa Karpo-Tibet Culture Centre (KKTCC), Dharamsala joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
GrokLaw: Digging for truth: the law and the facts with regard to Free and Open Source Software joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
librarian.net: Jessamyn West’s library themed weblog of interest to rarin’ librarians and other information junkies joins ibiblio (still ongoing).

2004 – www+ftp traffic now averages over 10 million files/day. Data flow averages 250 Mbs.
NASA Educational Video added (still ongoing).
WCPE and WXYC become the first simulcast radio stations on Internet2 usingIPv6.
Institute for Museum and Library Services awards ibiblio and Folkstreams.net grant for digitization of documentaries on American folk cultures.

2005 – www+ftp traffic now averages over 13 million files/day.
Data flow averages 350 – 400 Mbs.

Adding podcasting to wordpress

Bret and TJ are looking at adding a regular podcast to the ibiblio blog and to Bret’s irondog chronicles. Supposedly the support is in WP 1.5, but so far it looks like the way to get an enclosure is to create a custom field. Surely there is a better way.

Bittorrent-casting? (RSS + Torrent + Osprey)

I had an idea while reading Dave Winer’s 2001 notes about adding a payload to RSS. Podcasting came about because there needed to be a little more than a payload in RSS, but you had to have that first. Now you can hook the RSS payload into a number of enhanced aggregators like ipodderX and much is made seamless.
We saw that BitTorrent has some pretty big missing gaps and aimed to address several by creating Osprey to add permaseed and managable and searchable and distributable metadata to the BitTorrent bag of tricks.
So far so good. Now if the payload for an RSS subscription were to be the the B/T Download link, we’d have a nice B/T software release service (to think of one use). John says that we already “plan to generate several rss feeds in osprey,
the first batch of which will correspond to the 3 blocks on
http://torrent.ibiblio.org.
Hmmmm.

Direct from Darfur

Mark McCarthy writes that he’ll be in town mid-day Monday February 28 through the evening of Tuesday March 1 on leave from the UN group in Darfur. This means he will not be here during my class time, but we’ll be working on setting up a time when he can give a talk and share his experiences and insight on running an IT operation in the midst of a serious humanitarian crisis.

Watch this space for details of his upcoming visit/talk.

He writes:

I can discuss my role as the Data Coordinator in the Humanitarian Information Center (HIC) for Darfur. We are part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Our role is to fill the information gaps that are present at the early stages of a humanitarian crisis.

I am the number 2 in the office. My manager deals with all the politics, planning, and headaches that I am glad to avoid. I have a team of 3 internationals and 3 national staff. In Darfur, the most immediate need was mapping. We needed to help the humanitarian actors get to the areas of need. They needed to know where the internally displaced persons (IDPs) were and how to reach them. Then we focused on mapping the needs in different regions and who was working to cover those needs.

The stage of the emergency we are at now has us beginning to take a hard look at information gathering and sharing amongst the agencies. Our mapping is pretty complete and we are shifting as appropriate.

Here is a link to information about HICs in general.

ibiblio in 40 – 50 words

So, I have to describe ibiblio.org’s past 12 years and its future communicating clearly what the project is designed to do and how it changes and improves people’s lives while “situating the benefit within a specific business or institutional context” in less than 50 words!
Suggestions are welcome.
My first cut is:

ibiblio.org, which began its life as sunsite.unc.edu in 1992, is a contributor-run digital library and archive serving the world. ibiblio began as a way to share and support all kinds of free software, we now host over 1500 non-software related information sharing projects on almost every conceivable subject.

That’s 48 words.

Meet-up in Space?

Fred alerts us to a Space.com exclusive, “NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars .”
The article begins:

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

Meet-up last night

Anton has the Chapel Hill Blogger Meet-up going. It began last night during the Virginia game. I needed to spend family time with my 12 year old cheering UNC and booing (mostly) UVa and hoping for a Bojangles deal, so I couldn’t go.
The attendance looks promising, but I’m wondering if the active bloggers are somewhat divided politically. Will right meet left here?
Here’s a toast to Anton and here’s hoping to be at future meet-ups.
Looking for other impressions as well.

Gillmor visit things that happened

Friday. Got to hang with Dave Winer for lunch and for a little look at ibiblio. John explained Osprey (for enabling bitTorrent). Got Dave lined up with Ruby and Brian for the evening. A very good connection for all of them.
Dinner with Anton, John E, Phil and Sue Meyers, Fred and Sally and Dan Gillmor. Good to see Phil and Dan reconnect and to hear them talk about the future of news. The rest of us were interesting too, but these two are the ones.

Saturday. Bloggers Con. Much written on this below and on the wiki. Successful beyond our wildest hopes.
Lunch with Henry Copeland (of Blogads) at Allen and Son. Others had escaped to Franklin Street. But we needed to give Dan a culural experience.
Dinner that night with Dan, Dave, Ruby, Brian, and Carrboro Alderman Mark Chilton at Tallula’s (see Conis entry). Good talk of wireless networks, towns, blogging and new technologies including podcasting.

Sunday. Off to G’boro to visit the folks at the News and Record where John Robinson and Lex Alexander are leading the paper into new areas of interactivity, transparency and citizen involvement. JR and Lex had invited local bloggers as well.
Good to spend time with Ed Cone and to have an expansive discussion of G’boro history and futures with him.
Dinner with faculty from SILS and JOMC — Jeff Pomerantz, Tom Kelleher, Deborah Barreau and Martin Kuhn (Martin is a PhD student who will be faculty soon enough). Talk here about new Public Relations developments through blogging and the net. Ethics. News libraries and access to archives and law.

Monday. Dan visited my class on Emerging Tech and Issues. The class has read his book and so Dan could also talk about his view of Silicon Valley and the future of jobs in tech and the internationization of all things tech especially.
This led nicely into a lunch with Matthew Szulik of Red Hat. Matthew was just back from India. Good talk about internationalization, open source attitudes outside the USA, varieties of attitudes toward intellectual properties and the like.
Got to spend more time with Matthew and even got to hear TJ explain the differences between covers, mash-ups and remixes.
Fred explained Lyceum to Dan.
Dan’s talk drew a nice crowd even on a rainy afternoon. He went over what he means by citizen journalism and about information sharing in the form of news. Good discussion followed and went on before I had to cut it off at 5:15.
Exceptional evening with Jennifer O’Bryan, Megan Barrett, Frank Daniels, Bob Young and Brett Dougherty. I cannot begin to capture all the good fellowship and talk that was had. I can say that few Americans can carry on such an indepth discussion of Canadian Football or even more specifically of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as can Brett. I am impressed in a very odd way. Bob, who owns the TiCats, had as you might imagine some amusing insights into the business of Canadian Football. I was sorry to hear that the TiCats’ mascot Bengal Tiger had passed on.

Gillmor visit

Just winding up a good and long visit with Dan Gillmor. Not only was it great to meet Dan and to spend time with him, but I also managed to catch up with some old friends and to meet some new neighbors and to get a peek inside the experiment at creating and maintaining an online town square at the News and Record.
I’ll be spending most of today catching up with the work that I set off to the side while spending the good time with Dan and others. But that is a a small cost.
The folks that work at ibiblio really made the whole, occassionally complex, visit a delight by digging in and helping out often above and beyond the call and by being creative and smart about it all.
We should have Dan’s talk online shortly and the bloggers con as well.
Dan’s ideas about how to help organize citizen journalists and how to make news more of a conversation are world-changing, but built on close observation and exerience reporting on technologies in Silicon Valley.

Triangle Bloggers Afters.

It all came off rather well despite having grown to over 5 times the size of attendance that we had originally anticipated. Good discussions. Good behavior. Good people meeting good people. Props to Anton for getting this going and making it happen. Props to Fred for being on top of the wireless access and much more. Props to Jen O’Bryan who made it possible for us to know each other’s names and sites. Props to TJ and John for taping the event. Special thanks to Ed Cone and to Dan Gillmor for leading discussions. Thanks to the folks at lulu.com for providing the drinks and donuts.
What was it like? There is a nice collection of live-blog postings on the conference wiki. If you have notes, pictures and/or live blog entries, please add yourself.
I’m learning what went on from the wiki myself. When you are in the middle of things, you don’t get to pay the attention that you’d like to –especially if you are me and the laptop that you brought ends up being the one projected for folks to see the blogs in question and then it starts dropping the wireless at random intervals –grrr. my ancient T-book needs to be traded in.
Sally Greene took some pictures.

Blog Together – Feb 12 (winer and Murphey Hall)

First here’s what Murphey Hall looks like from the outside and what the room for the conference looks like. You enter from the middle of the building and go behind the Ashcroft-offending status. Do not show these statues on televisions during the Super Bowl. Dave Winer is here blocking David so that he will be decent for viewing.
Anton reports news coverage on WCHL, this morning in Chapel Hill Herald. I did brief interviews for the Daily Tar Heel and for WUNC. Blogomania continues.
Jen O’Bryan is printing name tags based on the sign-ups on the wiki, so sign up or look like a luzer with a hand written tag tomorrow.

Blog Together – Feb 12 (press mentions etc)

Nice story in the Chapel Hill Herald about the Triangle Bloggers Convention tomorrow! Arrgh! We need signage and more. But all will be great in time. The room is very high tech and very nice. Power outlets are built into every seat. The place is covered by a wireless mesh. There are cameras. There are projectors. There are cushioned seats. This is uptown.
Lulu.com is bringing coffee and pastries. Don’t bring them in the auditorium tho.

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