Facilitating Change

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.

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.

How do I get Wordpress to display everything in my website tagged “publications” AND “employability”? After looking for “WordPress multiple tags” allover the place I realized my novice self was not even searching for the right terms. What I should have been looking for is “Wordpress taxonomy intersections unions” (e.e.: always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question).

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.

I was telling a friend this weekend that bike-sharing — a la bixi — is one of the fastest-growing forms of transportation in the world. But then I faltered: Really? I forgot where I got this little factoid. Good thing for me the lovely peeps at Station C posted the video up on their blog — pointing out that coworking is also part of this trend. So… I still don’t know if it’s true for real. (I want it to be!) but at least I know where my factoid came from.

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.

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.