Briefly in class today National Issues Forums came up. I got an email today from Taylor Willingham of Texas Forums and some of their efforts to use "innovative collaborative technologies like wikis and blogs to name, frame and report on public issues." Thought it might be of interest to someone, so here are the links:

http://texasforums.wordpress.com/2006/10/15/working-with-the-wikis/

http://texasforums.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/20-technology-meets-old-fashioned-town-hall-meeting/

At my last job at the Kettering Foundation, Unchat gave a presentation. This was several years ago, and I'm not sure about the status of this software. Regardless, I thought I would post a link to it as it is related to our Friday discussion on Civic Applications. I found a few organizations using it including MIT. Ben Barber and Beth Noveck were the brains behind this project.

Unchat hopes to provide a chat software program that encourages deliberation. From their web site: "Put to use in civic and political debates, learning and educational development, community building and non-profit communications, corporate meetings and knowledge management, our software will enhance discussion, nurture deliberation and facilitate the arbitration of differences and the quest for common ground."

June Holley writes this about the economic development work that she and Valdis Krebs have been doing in Ohio. For more background on their methods, see the paper at http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf

For the last 20 years, I helped co-create economic networks (see www.acenetworks.org) in Appalachian Ohio, an area with deep and chronic poverty and amazingly little business activity. Since 1982, I was also reading research on transformation in complex systems and trying to apply what I was learning.

What we found was the critical factor leading to transformation--as opposed to viral spreading of ideas--was collaborative projects--or rather a densely woven, ever changing ecosystem of people figuring out what they and their community needed and finding others to join them in doing something about that.

Brian Kerr and I recently got back from RecentChangesCamp, a conference for wiki developers and other parties interested in "Building Communities Worth Having." We've written up a small wiki to talk about our experiences, including a few CIC concepts. Check it out below!

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bkerr/asset/rcc-report.html

Announcement 
The Reuters Digital Vision Program (RDVP) at Stanford University is accepting applications for the 2006-07 academic year (September 2006 - June 2007). The deadline is April 3, 2006. Fellowships will be awarded at the end of May, 2006.
 
The Program
 
The Digital Vision Program supports social entrepreneurs who seek to leverage technology-based solutions in the interest of humanitarian, educational, and sustainable development goals. The Program fosters interdisciplinary projects and prototyping efforts that address real needs in underserved communities. For the 2006-07 academic year, the program will focus on the following broad categories:

Sahana means "Relief" in Sinhalese.

As the name itself implies, Sahana is a free and open source Disaster Management System.It mainly facilitates management of Missing people, disaster victims, Managing and administrating various organizations, managing camps and managing requests and assistance in the proper distribution of resources.

http://cvs.opensource.lk/

RecentChangesCamp is an open space conference in Portland. The conference conveners write:

"As caretakers of primarily online communities, we (the Wiki community) are especially looking forward to cross-pollination with folks who nurture offline communities (ProcessArtists) and those who develop the OpenTechnology tools we depend upon to build our wikis."

BiblioCommons is a Toronto-based initiative that is developing hosted web services to integrate with libraries’ OPAC and circulation systems. It will enable library patrons to easily annotate the libraries’ bibliographic records with evaluative, associative and synoptic “tags”.

BiblioCommons is premised on a conviction that libraries not only can, but should play a leading role in the emerging field of “social knowledge discovery”.

I pledged on PledgeBank to help Rebecca and Kyle bring a group of students to New Orleans. You can too: http://www.pledgebank.com/ArchivesNOLA

The best part was when I thought only 10 people had signed up, and it turns out they have more like 46 out of 50 necessary pledgers. Talk about social capital - what we cannot do alone, what we could never do alone - can be done with a group of people working together. Like sending a team of students to New Orleans.

In class today we talked about ways technology can build or even leverage social capital. This is a topic to further that discussion, or just aggregate ideas. (Possibly with an eye toward implementing some of them.) I was intrigued by the "couch network" idea for the CIC Web. I wonder, though, how that would work. It's not a question of posting comments to a forum, but rather a state that you want to be in: "I'm a CIC Couch offerer. Contact me if you're coming through area A." Perhaps a clickable map with flags where CIC-ers dwell. However, if students or others are posting their NEED for couches on which to crash, then a forum makes sense.