Facilitating Change

Innovation Grounds 1.0

21. November 2011

This mind map lays out a framework for thinking about “innovation grounds” — spaces where people can come together and generate ideas, solutions, knowledge, culture, and relationships. It emerged from perceiving coworking spaces as next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create (especially information... and we’re in the information age, Hello!).

Note from Seattle

9. November 2010

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For the next two weeks I'm in Seattle. Working with my TASCHA peeps, mostly to get our new website launched. Today it was sunny, not enough to see the mountains but nonetheless magnificent. Today I saw a home for sale with the sign: 100% Financing. I thought: Good god, people. Isn't that how you got into this mess in the first place?

More on open development

18. October 2010

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I realize from delving more into this that several of us have come to the same conclusion. I'm repeating myself but here goes: It's not about building a big repository. Stop that. It's about aggregating, not centralizing. Making it easy to find, aggregate, and mash up.

Global Impact Study: Montpellier workshop report

13. October 2010

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I'm finally sharing this workshop report. It's a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard.

Create an open access repository

8. October 2010

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Joe and I are overhauling the Technology & Social Change Group website. I took a step back this week to think about what's most important for this first version, and how we're going to transfer over our existing content. I've dubbed TASCHA website 1.0 the "does-not-suck version" in order to keep us focused on the basics, pull together all of our content, and push discussions about feature requests to the point in time where we have something up that works and something concrete to react to.

Microhistory, margins, methods

20. September 2010

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All historical narratives are hypothetical to greater or lesser degrees, but what makes them plausible? By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norms. Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence. They illustrate the function of the formal institutions in power and how they handle people’s affairs.

Open research, open data, open development

16. September 2010

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I've been thinking about this for a while now, gathering resources, printing out stuff to read. Waiting for the right time to pull it all together into a tidy package. Well forget it. Instead I'm going to dribble it out bit by bit.

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Innovation Grounds 1.0

Note from Seattle

More on open development

Global Impact Study: Montpellier workshop report

Create an open access repository

Microhistory, margins, methods

Open research, open data, open development

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