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We are happy to announce that the website for [tag-tec]BlogTalk2008[/tag-tec], the 5th International Conference on [tag-tec]Social Software[/tag-tec], has now been launched.

The conference will be held in Cork, Ireland on 3-4 March 2008.As with the last BlogTalk (t d f) event in Vienna, the conference will focus not just on weblogs, but on social software (web 2.0) in general.

To view our call for proposals, please visit our website at http://blogtalk.net

We will announce the programme committee and other organisational issues shortly.Looking forward to seeing you in Cork (t d f)!

Chairs, co-chairs

John Breslin
Thomas N. Burg
Tom Raftery
Jan Schmidt
[tags]conference[/tags] [tags]social software[/tags] [tags]irland[/tags] [tags]appearance[/tags]

So what’s at stake in the e-portfolio business? And what’s the connection to Facebook?

It’s only a few weeks since I deal with e-portfolios. My perspective and interest is derived from my experience with social software and web 2.0 applications and concepts and of course my 10 years of working at a university.

My working definition for e-portfolios goes along those lines published by IMS.

ePortfolios are collections of personal information about a learner that represent accomplishments, goals, experiences, and other personalized records that a learner can present to schools, employers, or other entities. Typical uses of ePortfolios go beyond the traditional concept of a transcript to include applying for jobs, designing personalized learning, and tracking career planning.

and extend a little further: e-portfolios are digital representations of a person and thus need to be an integral part of a person’s digital life. Thus e-portfolios need to be either aggregators of data or citizens in bigger digital environments.

Now this somehow contradicts what is happening at universities, school authorities and in the software industry. And please hold on, in a view lines I’ll link to the Facebook revelation.

From my point of view 3 main issues are at stake (on different levels of course) in the gradually rising e-portfolio business. This is not a comprehensive list by any means and very unsystematic. Only a blog permits that opportunity .

So, well those three issues are:
- interoperability (portability)
- sales strategies (integration into administration software)
- adoption (is an e-portfolio really going to be a digital representation or just a little more than a storage for official data needed for school and work)

On Adoption: The most important issue is the decisive question: do I have an e-portfolio because I want one or because I need one. Well the latter is very likely. So after that decision the questions stays: can I make it my place or is compliance with institutions the overall guiding principle. If it’s going to be my place – and we are far away from that – than it needs to be some sort of personal space with extensions into institutional requirements and not vice versa. Well this approach might be different from an institutional perspective.

On Interoperability: Aside from that portability is a first concern because you might want/need to move from one (e-portfolio) application (=institution) to another. But does that really matter? It does at least as long as an e-portfolio is part of your institutional life. If the institutional compliance is achieved via webservices and mashups that might be different. Than interoperability is about using and displaying data that resides here and there and portability is more a question of moving your digital presence along your idiosyncratic preferences to other applications.

On Sales Strategies: to make this post short. I could imagine that Facebook or any other user-centered application (note: social graph) that is able to offer decent APIs could host those modules/plugins that are needed for institutional e-portfolios. I think it makes particularly sense to develop an e-portfolio at my preferred personal digital presence and mashup data with several institutions where necessary instead of having my real digital presence at – for instance – Facebook and my faked one at my school’s application.

And here is the innovation: schools, authorities and software vendors need to conceive of those requirements that are needed and offer either open platform (such that belong to users) that have APIS for that matter or better provide modules for existing platforms. And Facbook’s F8 is just a nice example.

Update:
An alternative take on that topc by Stephen Downes : Open Educational Resource

Update 2:
Very interesting remarks on that entire issue from Tony Hirst.

[tags]e-portfolio[/tags] [tags]innovation[/tags] [tags]social software[/tags] [tags]education[/tags] [tags]business[/tags]

I was an early beta user of Mindmeister today I received an offer to become premium member with a discount. I’m actually thinking about investing that money though I’m not sure it’s not more expansive than having all those desktop applications sitting around on my harddisk. It’s 38 Euro/year that’s something and no availability guaranteed – at least I couldn’t find anything on their website.

There is Freemind which is totally free and others like NovaMind for Mac cost 93 Euros but I think have paid 3 years ago and since then upgrades were free.

Hmmm – guess it’s a strategic decision.

Sourcing the In-Crowd: “[...] this alternative ‘in-crowdsourcing,’ and we both believe that it should take off. There are new technologies to make it easier to solicit and monitor the ideas of your most thoughtful employees, no matter what their job titles. Of course, the part that the technology supports is the easy part (as compared to evaluating and implementing the ideas), but that’s the subject for another post. However, I’m placing a public bet that in-crowdsourcing, [tag-ice]idea management[/tag-ice]—or whatever you want to call it—is poised to give crowdsourcing a viable opponent. To which group would you turn first for new ideas: the out-crowd or the in-crowd?”

[tags]business[/tags] [tags]Social Software[/tags] [tags]Enterprise 2.0[/tags]

After 2 months of usage that certainty made it evident for me that with blogs and the related networks we do have a very powerful personal publishing tool available that will augment our personal scope of networking as a base for learning enourmously. I was quite certain that this will not only effect the private usage but even more the organizational usage of it. Since then I am most interested in transfering the lessons learned in the open web into the professional and organizational context.

So in 2002 after a brief introspection I decided to organize a conference on that topic and together with Max Scheugl the first draft of BlogTalk – the first international conference on weblogs – was created. It turned out to be a huge success and had a successor in 2004, thanks to Markus Toyfl for helping to design it, and eventually turned for its third edition – that was conceived and organized together with Jan Schmidt – into a more general conference on social software – a practice and phenomenon that took shape already in late 2002.

The conference and the people that dropped by – from all over the world – to either present their visions, research, projects and ideas or to listen and to talk to each other represent what you could call a gathering of lead users that sought and are still looking for innovation – on several sometimes contradictional levels. We all – and I dare to claim that – are still looking for better ways to communicate and relate to each other be it for the exchange of knowledge or the exchange of experiences. And finally we are all aware that it is about connecting with like-minded people. A connectedness that primarily benefits us personally and on a second level it somehow creates what you might call a collective awareness and value that surpasses what we were used to accept as the boundaries of human intellect.

That might be entirely conventional from an anthropological perspective. Human beings are here for conversations as a prime base for anything else that can come to one’s mind. After all we humans represent and create networks of conversational animals. To imporve on that by shifting it to the virtual realm makes it a relevant aspect for me: it is where the virtual becomes indistinguisghable from the real.

During the last years I had the change to participate in a paradigm shift. On the one hand the web is clearly an effect and cause of what is termed globalization on the other hand it has a lot to do with innovation. And I am extrmely happy about that latter part. Experiencing innovation, even being part of it is exciting in itself and challenging on the the other hand. Just think of transfering your experiences into a world that does not participate in that innovation. A world that by the very virtue of not being part of the innovation is creating that notion of innovation at the same time. Just think of translating that for them and it becomes quite clear what is at stake. I realized – mediated through the conference and its aftereffects – that language and images are the relevant membranes that separate innovation from its acceptance. And if something truely new is here to stay than you first need to find the right words (metahphors) for it.

Hence, a new media evolved from being a mere instrument for doing a lot of things better and faster into a phenomenon that now constantly creates new concepts of how to make use of it. Concepts that by far transcend the simulation of existing media. The last 5 years were the most exciting ones and I have to thank the the people that build the web that connected me to that pieces and people.

Thus please go ahead and consult this volume as a representation of what the conference BlogTalk and its related conversations were about.

Thomas N. Burg, March 2007

Trampoline: Harnessing Social Behavior in the Enterprise: “Trampoline’s SONAR platform brings a fresh approach to information management, by harnessing the social behaviour that occurs within organizations. SONAR plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems, including email servers, contact databases and document stores. It analyses this data to map social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise”
Read/Write Web

On the contrary I think [tag-tec]Social Software[/tag-tec] or [tag-ice]Enterprise 2.0[/tag-ice] is – at least not only – not about making things visible via decoding [tag-tec]meaning[/tag-tec] and/or social action but essentially about enabling an organizational framework that supports collaboration based on people, objects and the needs of those people on an individual level. To get there you need a change in mindsets first, proper tools that help you to associate on purpose and only eventually tools that make the hidden things visible. Paradoxically by the same token, however, I think those tools – the social software ones – need to support making things visible and invisible at the same time.

I myself wouldn’t trust the data-mining tools of the SONAR kind if I were a knowledge worker. I’d like to be in control and like to freely choose what is in/visible. In German I’d call the impressive SONAR Rasterfahndung (dragnet investigation) which has a rather bad connotation. Somehow this tool is some kind of travesty of the visions of social software by turning some of the basic principles into toolsets of control. Sounds like the old Foucauldian dispositif (thanks to Martin for the link) – a net of un/spoken discourses, institutions, tools, and laws – creates and analyzes the “You” newly from the perspective of the social networking analysis. [tags]Social Software[/tags] [tags]Business[/tags] [tags]Politics[/tags]

The Peer to Patent Project – Community Patent Review
Community Patent Review will deploy an online system to allow the scientific community to provide input into the patent examination process. This “[tag-ice]open review[/tag-ice]” process is designed to provide the patent examiner with relevant information for assessing if an invention is patentable. The goal of the project is to improve the quality of issued patents.

ThinkAloud – Web2.Ö trifft sich zum lauten Nachdenken − ThinkAloud
Social Software und Web 2.0 sind für das österreichische Web- und Mobile Industry Geschäft von großer Relevanz. Doch noch gibt es kaum Gelegenheiten, sich zu diesen Themen in Österreich zu vernetzen. Die ThinkAloud Unconfernce ist ein neues Format das diesen Austausch ermöglicht.

Jaiku | About Jaiku
Jaikus main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence. For us, presence is about everyday things as they happen – what youre up to, how youre feeling, where youre going. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing presence updates with them on the Web and mobile.