diskurstools News

Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia unter Druck

tagesschau.de: »Eigentlich sollen die Selbstreinigungskräfte vom Wikipedia dazu beitragen, dass solche Fälle schnell entdeckt und korrigiert werden: Jeder kann Korrekturen anbringen oder falsche Veränderungen rückgängig machen. Da alle bisherigen Versionen gespeichert sind, werden solche Fälle üblicherweise schnell behoben - sofern sie denn jemand bemerkt. Trotzdem mehren sich inzwischen die Fälle, in denen fahrlässige oder vorsätzliche Fehlinformationen auf Wikipedia entdeckt werden: So blieb Ende letzten Jahres ein Wikipedia-Eintrag über Monate im Netz, der den US-Verleger John Seigenthaler beschuldigte, in die Morde an John F. Kennedy und Robert Kennedy verwickelt zu sein. In der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia-Ausgabe fanden sich zahlreiche inhaltlich umstrittene Artikel aus Nachschlagewerken der ehemaligen DDR. Der Schweizer Informatiker Bertrand Meyer wurde in seiner Wikipedia-Biographie sogar fälschlicherweise für tot erklärt.
Auch wenn das Grundprinzip, dass jeder an Wikipedia teilnehmen kann, beibehalten werden soll, haben die Macher aus den Vorfällen inzwischen Konsequenzen gezogen: Zumindest die englischsprachige Wikipedia will Artikel nur noch nach einer Registrierung des Autors freischalten. Im Rahmen einer "Qualitätsoffensive" sollen die einzelnen Fachgebiete einer Revision unterzogen werden. Langfristig soll neben der "Live"-Version, die im Prinzip von jedermann bearbeitet werden kann, eine "feste" Wikipedia stehen, kündigte der Gründer des Online-Lexikons, Jimmy Wales, an. Sie werde "wesentlicher Bestandteil" des Wikipedia-Internetauftritts sein. Wie dieser aussehen soll, ist jedoch noch offen - ebenso, ob der redigierte Teil von Wikipedia wirklich auch der zuverlässigere sein wird.«

Group Decision Making Styles and the Design Process

»Working as a consultant, I experience a range of organizational cultures and group decision-making styles. This page has a good run-down on decision-making styles, from autocratic to leaderless. I've been toying with a visual to help communicate how decision-making style...« [via IA THINK]

The Conccinella: Jabber chat client with whiteboard communication

»Share a common window on your computer with two or more other Coccinella users. Some of its features:

Write text with any font, size, normal, bold, etc.
Toolbar with basic drawing capabilities
Flexible editing of each item in the canvas window
Support for foreign language character sets, from swedish å, ä, and ö, to Chinese (Unicode)
Extended functionality via plugins, see Extensions. This includes mp3's on all platforms, video, synthetic speech of written text etc.
Full QuickTime support on Macs and Windows
Open source with the Gnu public license

It runs in two different network topologies, each with its specific feature. The peer-to-peer mode allows client to connect directly to each other, without an intermediate server. The Jabber server system of instant messaging (IM) contains central management of user resources, such as buddy lists, gateways to other IM systems (ICQ, IRC, MSN Messenger, ...), and much more.«

Speech software makes concept maps

»Researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Leipzig in Germany have devised a tool that uses speech recognition software and a database of word associations to automatically generate a map of concepts and associated terms as they are addressed in a discussion.
The tool, dubbed SemanticTalk, could eventually be used to support and document meeting activity like brainstorming, and produce raw concept material for tasks like Web site engineering, software development and product marketing, according to the researchers. «

MoinX 1.0

»MoinX is a Mac OS X desktop Wiki, built with ease of use in mind and rich with features. MoinX gives you a full blown and unmodified MoinMoin wiki without forcing you to run a web server. To summarise: MoinX is ideal for keeping notes and howtos, organising links and much more.«

Interview mit Ray Ozzie

»Tom Austin spent part of the afternoon of 7 October in Groove's headquarters in Beverly, MA talking with Ray Ozzie, the visionary who launched an industry and a new way of thinking about how technology can help people work better together - or apart. It was Ray's handiwork, leadership and inspiration that lead Lou Gerstner and IBM to pay almost $4 billion for Lotus in 1995. Ray's at it again, this time with yet another startup, Groove Networks, working on perfecting the science, art and technology of augmenting cognitive performances. This interview provides unique insights into why Ray felt compelled to start fresh with Groove, why it's so hard to get this right, what types of situations spell failure for collaborative projects and how and why he thinks his team at Groove finally has it right.«

Visual Facilitation

Aus dem Visperanto-Seminar: Visual Facilitation ist ein Trend aus der Unternehmensberatungs- und Moderationsbranche.

Weblogs sollen Österreichs Forscher verbinden

»Wie der STANDARD berichtet, sollen Österreichs Forschungseinrichtungen via Weblogs, WIKI und RSS miteinander verbunden werden.« [via Denkzeug]

Weblog as Online Community Management Tool

»Aside from participation in discussions, the community manager often needs a consistent and accessible place to have an independent voice to relate community news and information. Below you will see how a weblog may be used to fill this need.«

Weblogs an der TU Wien

»Die Technische Universität Wien bietet ab kommendem Wintersemester in Zusammenarbeit mit Twoday.net allen StudentInnen und MitarbeiterInnen die Möglichkeit, ein Weblog zu führen.« [via DIENSTRAUM]

Groove 3.0 beta

»Mit der neuen Version verspricht Groove Networks eine radikal überarbeitete Oberfläche, drastische Geschwindigkeitssteigerungen und eine bessere Integration in Windows. So können so genannte Shared Folders direkt im Dateisystem von Windows liegen und werden um Groove-eigene Funktionen erweitert. Am linken Rand des Fenster erscheinen dann beispielsweise die Präsenzinformationen der anderen Nutzer des gleichen Ordners. Groove 3.0 wird auch Endanwendern die Eigenentwicklung einfacher formularbasierter Anwendungen ermöglichen, ähnlich wie das ursprünglich auch bei Lotus Notes vorgesehen war.«

What the heck is an ontology???

Denham Grey »Ontologies help to orientate new folks and act as the stores for key learnings & distinctions accumulated through experience. Ontologies have a large influence on identity and help with the tacit transfer of context. Ontologies (in my opinion) are destined to become a very influential part of knowledge work as the semantic web evolves.«

DUNES: EU Project to Develop Software for Dialog and Argumentation

»DUNES (Dialogic and Argumentative Educational Software) is an EU project whose goal is to develop "a novel methodology and advanced software tools to enable collaborative learning and the acquisition of 'soft skills' through Internet-mediated discussion, argumentation and social interaction." The two and a half year project started in March, 2002.«

Meta-Blogging

Weblog Communities -- Betrachtung eines Praxisbeispiels (PDF; 681 KB) heißt die Master-Thesis-Arbeit von Lucy Traunmüller. Als Praxisbeispiel wurde Twoday.net ausgewählt und untersucht. [Schockwellenreiter]

Critical Thinking in Online Threaded Discussions

Allan C. Jeong: »This study explored and developed tools to examine patterns in student interactions in online threaded discussions, focusing on interactions that support critical thinking and argumentation (e.g. state position, state agreement or disagreement, provide supporting arguments, evaluate arguments, define evaluation criteria, etc.).«

Vertrauen im Internet - noch möglich?

»Heute ist in Bielefeld die dreitägige Konferenz über Vertrauen, Reputation und Gemeinschaft zu Ende gegangen, auf der Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Disziplinen das Thema behandelten. Soziologen, Juristen und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler berichteten vom Vertrauen in Rechtssicherheit oder auch davon, wie auf eBay gehandelt wird und sich Vertrauen in Kaufakten herstellt, ganz ohne große Party für die Community.« [heise News]

User innovation networks

»Clay Shirky links to an interesting paper by Eric von Hippel from last year describing a model for diffusion of innovations that doesn't rely on businesses. The open source software movement is his primary example of an arena in which innovations are developed, ideas are shared, and products are freely distributed, all at the user level. I then came across MIT's User Innovation website which links to a whole pile of fascinating-looking papers on all this Lead User kind of stuff.« [Overmorgen]

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Clay Shirky hielt einen Vortrag über »Social Software« am 24. April auf der O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara. Sein Text formuliert viele Gedanken zum Thema, so z.B.:

You have to find some way to protect your own users from scale. This doesn't mean the scale of the whole system can't grow. But you can't try to make the system large by taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon; human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon. It either dissipates, or turns into broadcast, or collapses. So plan for dealing with scale in advance, because it's going to happen anyway.

Blogs & Boards

»Tom Coates' delightfully thoughtful piece Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere differentiates weblogs and discussion boards. He illustrates how weblogs generate better discussion by helping hide bad content and making it easier to find the good content.« [Corante: Social Software]

ThreadsML

Threads ML ist ein Versuch die Daten von Diskussionsforen in einem Standardformat auszudrücken. Eine ähnliche Idee ist das Dialog Mapping, die allerdings in den Kinderschuhen steckt.

ClaiMaker

»The ClaiMaker system for modelling and visualizing claims and argumentation in research literatures.«

Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web

RSS, FOAF, XML, Instant Messaging zusammengiessen und umrühren, dann kommt raus: »... a Semantic Web location model; an RDF map of physical spaces and the connections between them. The tools, including a REST-ful interface and Instant Message bot, allow groups of people to build and annotate collaborative maps, building up a corpus of open geographical data and providing a group filtering system for recommendations.«

SocialText

»Socialtext enables teams to communicate, collaborate, and publish, without email overload. It's easy to learn and easy to use, so more people participate. This saves time, makes the most of people's time, and makes people and information easier to find. [...]
Socialtext Teamwork is designed for enterprise scale. It's designed to integrate with corporate information systems. It's easy to administer, and requires virtually no training.«

Social Software Alliance

»SSA was formed to assist, support and defend the creation of social software standards and practices. Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people using tools that support interactions within online communities, social networks, and virtual teams. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability among existing and emerging products and services.«

The 12 Principles of Collaboration

»All communities, on or off the web, adhere to basic principles in order to thrive. Mongoose Technology has codified these tenets into the 12 Principles of Collaboration which form the sociological basis of our product design. The 12 Principles function as a hierarchy. The chief principle, Purpose, is supported by the other 11 principles.«