Education/Open Source Workshop

Technically Facilitated Collaboration

• Historically, projects have been less complex and people more focussed: Someone spent an entire lifetime carving a staircase out of a single tree trunk. As the size and complexity of projects increases, and the volume of prior knowledge in the project's context increases, the number of people needed to work together on a project increases. As does the complexity of their communication and collaboration. So we have more people exchanging more information about a project than ever before, enabling very advanced projects, such as going to the moon, Linux, other better examples? But the collaboration has overhead. So discovering new social and technical processes for highly parallel, highly collaborative work is key.
• What does this have to say about diversity? I have some material on privileged, dominant groups. Is increased collaboration anti-oppressive or does it favor dominant social norms? On the one hand, the need and capacity for more participation is involving people from around the world. However if the tools or processes are designed by and for dominant social groups like straight, white, North American men, they're reinforcing dominant norms.

Open Standards

• One example of the overhead of collaboration is the web. The web is a common denominator, an Open Standard. There's some material on Tim Berners-Lee and open standards and their contribution to the success of the internet.
• However the web has considerable overhead compared to other modes of communication: News groups and email. Modern web browsers have exorbitant system requirements. The proliferation of non-interoperable social networking sites. Editing encyclopedia entries with the facilities of a browser's form field data entry.
• Hopefully more open standards evolve to allow web applications and desktop applications to interoperate: CalDAV so Evolution, Sunbird, iCal, Exchange, Google Calendar, Emacs calendar mode work together. WebDAV to edit MediaWiki articles with a desktop word processor. An open standard for realtime collaborative editing, so SubEthaEdit, Gobby, Google Docs and maybe in the future MediaWiki could work together.