Oct
21
Originally written March 2010.
In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent book, “CommonWealth” the authors focus on the idea of the city as a location where the disenfranchised are able to organize and take what they have to contend their marginalized position. In other words, the authors look at the common resources available to people and how, when individuals come together,they can leverage their “common wealth” to overcome obstacles.
Sep
26
In the past year I have seen so many new bartering websites appear. Some are part of formal time trade circles and others are simply “I have/I need” posting platforms. It goes without saying that a link can be drawn between the rise of such platforms and the unstable economy, but whatever the reason, more people are learning about alternative models of exchanging value and this bodes well for insulating and supporting local economies. One great example of this is a health clinic in Portland, Maine, where people are bartering for health care using a time trade circle. While this is probably a stretch for a comparison, is it crazy to think these platforms as neighborhood knowledge management systems?
Sep
20
It can be argued that existing literature on neighborhood communication platforms are written with a socio-technical perspective, however it is my goal that this week’s entry will demonstrate the level of socio-technical detail that I am interested in seeing in future research.
This weeks reading of Brown and Duguid’s “The Social Life of Information” (2000) and Alavi et al “Knowledge Management and Knoweledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues” (2001), brought about two concepts in knowledge management that appear to be valuable to Internet-Based Neighborhood Communication Platform research: Common ground and knowledge creation.
Sep
11
Much has been written praising the value of neighborhood listservs and social networking sites. Keith Hampton, Barry Wellman, Randal Pinkett, Andrea Kavenaugh and others have demonstrated through various studies that such platforms increase the interaction between the residents and thus increase the stock of social capital of the neighborhood. While these studies are important, they all leave out detailed analysis of the socio-technical characteristics that describe how these platforms support and facilitate relationships and knowledge sharing. With a growing number of neighborhood social networking sites and listservs, the need to include forms of socio-technical inquiry is greater than ever. If our focus looks primarily at the outcomes of these artifacts and not at the details of how the platforms are used and managed, we run the risk of fetishizing them and in turn missing important characteristics that relate to the success and failure in their implementation, management, and use.
Aug
01
After firing up my browser on the free wifi at a Starbucks coffee shop, I was brought to the Starbucks Digital Network Home page. I assumed that this was just Starbucks foray into digital content aggregation and advertising, however my assumption that their intentions were narrowly set on corporate profiteering were quickly changed when I noticed a link titled “My Neighborhood.”
Jun
23
In April I led a class in the Technology as Public Good course at Syracuse University that looked at the relationship between proximity and democracy. I titled the lecture “proximate democracy” to highlight the necessary condition of democracy being the tight proximity between democratic actors. I looked at the idea of a functioning democracy being dependent on people understanding negotiation and having empathy and how both of these characteristics are related to people understanding how to negotiate the physical presence of others in dense urban environments as well as frequenting places where one becomes aware of the challenges and issues facing those around them.
Apr
14
The problem of silo’s plagues inter and intra organizational relationships in numerous contexts. I have seen faculty members shocked when they learn about colleagues doing similar research and dumfounded as to why they did not know about the others work earlier. Between organizations I have seen community organizers or nonprofits experience the same shock when the find out they are involved in the same work and are potentially competing for the same resources when they are trying to serve the same people. Overall, the problem here can boil down to lack of awareness between actors working on similar goals. In a world were economies of scales is becoming more of a necessity, the above scenarios should be primary targets to consider for those involved in the design of ICT based social platforms. Take for example, social platforms like hyper local social network.Many HLSN’s like a Neighbors for Neighbors or Everyblock are designed with the intention of being information sharing platforms about community related topics at the hyperlocal level. Some achieve this objective better than others, but the overall intent is for people to post requests for support, start a conversation, or broadcast news. While this is certainly a step in the right direction, a visitor to any of these sites will tell you that with a barrage of information on the front page, it can be difficult to sift through everything that is taking place, and thus it can be easy to miss conversations or activities that may be relevant to the visitor.
Mar
28
On Tuesday I will present to the Technology as Public Good course on the impact of social media on the Public Sphere. To give them a broad overview of the concept of the Public Sphere, I am having the students read Craig Calhoun’s Introduction to his edited volume “Habermas and the Public Sphere” (MIT Press 1992).For a good political economy perspective on the structural transformation of the public sphere as well as the impact of the Internet on communication ecology, I also assigned Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks Chapter 6 (up to page 198) and chapter 7 pages 212-232.
Mar
03
The concept of relevance is a challenging task for IR systems in that it is couched in context/position of the user. Here there is no universality of term use for a system to draw on, rather it is forced to engage in practices of using past use data to determine the relevance of particular queries. However a principle crux to the relevance function of IR systems assumes that, as Manning et al 2009 put it, the user has “sufficient knowledge to be able to make an initial query which is at least somewhere close to the documents they desire” (Manning et al 2009).
Feb
08
Originally Written March 2010
A few months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Nilan, a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. I spoke to him about my interests in local community focused websites and what role they played in helping residents find information on local resources. Immediately he challenged me to throw away the notion of information as something that people find, and instead think of it as the product of conversations.