Death of Usenet, film at 11. February 25, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , add a commentA few weeks ago AOL pulled the plug on their news server, ending the perpetual September. By itself, this would not have a major impact on a system which was designed to survive continental nuclear destruction. Then came news that the university of Berlin free newsserver once called news.cfn.de and more recently news.individual.net and popularly referred to as ‘the german newsserver’ which has served usenet afficionados who can’t get a decent feed from their own ISPs, is to end the free service and begin charging, albeit a nominal 10 euros pa.
So although usenet continues to provide a useful service, including searchable archives accessed via googlegroups, many people seem to think that it belongs to the past and is on its way out.
Who would miss it?
Although I don’t take part in newsgroups a great deal at the moment I think it would be a terrible loss. The reason being that there is no other place on the internet where it is possible to create a discussion which isn’t ultimately owned by somebody with the power to interfere.
Much is made of the empowering nature of blogs for the individual, but any discussion taking place on a blog is only taking place through the grace of the blog owner. Articles by the owner/author are dominant whereas comments are secondary, and could easily be removed or amended. Even a wiki has to reside on someone’s web server and can be taken offline at a moment’s notice.
So the eventual demise of Usenet could mean losing the only piece of genuinely neutral territory on the internet, and would be a dangerous loss in my opinion.
Communities of Practice PART 4 February 21, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, internet, Art , 4commentsAnother example which is barely a community but I’d like to mention because of the speed at which it came together. I think the rapid formation can be attributable to the social photograph hosting service at Flickr.com, which has been built especially to enable social interaction and is attracting a growing core of active users. So maybe it’s the use of graphical images as the basis for building relationships, maybe it’s the functionality of flickr or maybe it was just a good idea, facilitated at the right time.
The group, “scanned objects”is for people who use scanners, not to scan photos or documents, but scanning objects mostly for the purpose of making art. This idea gathered 20 people together who were each doing something similar on their own, to form a proto-community in no time at all, just through the power of images, tags, and a minor recruitment campaign over just a week or so. Since January the group has grown to 32 members with 111 images in the group pool.
Measured against Wenger’s criteria, the group has a shared domain of interest - Art, Technology, Imaging.
it has a shared practice - using digital scanners to create unique art from found objects.
it has an embryonic community - Artists remain subscribed to the group, view each others’ work, and are inflluenced by what they see and the comments left attached to the images. There is some discussion as to which scanners are best, the use of backgrounds, problems of condensation when scanning seafood!
So the community would appear to fit or at least begin to fit the criteria according to Wenger and yet I would be very reluctant to describe this as a COP. Why?
Brainstorming now…..
It isn’t a COP because
[Quantitative reasons]
There aren’t enough members yet - 32
There isn’t enough conversation yet - words or pictures?
There isn’t enough practice yet - merely a trivial sideline for most.
[Qualitative reasons]
The members are mainly hobbyists rather than professionals.
[Other]
Calling this a COP devalues the meaning of COP.
There’s something wrong with Wenger’s criteria.
The investment required to join and to remain a member is trivial. It’s too easy.
There’s something about the way the group rapidly emerged into being which reminds me of other sub-communities within larger online environments.
The group homepages on H2G2 for instance, some of the subcommunities within Ultraversity, the JellyARTclub on JellyOS. Web bulletin boards and newsgroups which were created in a fit of enthusiasm by a handful of people, or even one individual. 
The thing that seems to drive them at first is a sense of group identity. Some people, perhaps all of us, just feel the need to to belong to something. So we come across something which interests us, note the apparant energy of one or two instigators and we happily sign up to the club. We identify ourselves with the group by adding our name onto the group’s growing list of members, we reciprocate and reinforce by proclaiming our membership of the group on our own homepage. It’s all about identity. But then after we have done that, what is there for the group to do? In some cases absolutely nothing. The group just sits there doing nothing, proudly proclaiming it’s list of adherents. Over time, the members lose interest because there is nothing to do, the instigators get bored and go awol, passers-by try to join in but find they are talking to ghosts.
While some might call these ‘false communities of practice”, such groups do seem to serve an important purpose. at least for a while.
I call them “Communities of Identity”
“Fans” would seem to be another example. People who are fervent fans of a particular rock group, a cult TV program or a 
football team need to identify themselves with a fan community. They seek each other out through fashion, wearing badges, attending fan events and buying merchandise. Perhaps it’s an ancient tribal thing, this need to belong. To make visible the difference between our tribe and everybody else. This is what communities of identity do, and I suspect there is an element of it to be found behind the magic properties of Communities of Practice as well.
Communities of Practice PART 3 February 13, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : soundvideo , add a commentIt has been said that the thing to do with communities of practice is not to create them, but to join them.
I recently found and joined a community which was a wonderful discovery. It’s a community for videobloggers, people who are developing the practice of making quick video for publication on blogs in various ways.
Although only in existence for less than a year, the community has a great sense that they are pioneering something which will come into its quite soon. They are creating their own tools, swapping experience, building a pool of knowledge and when somebody suggested a face to face meeting it turned into a seriously organised conference with members flying in from Europe at just a couple of weeks’ notice.
This is the mailing list page on yahoogroups
Mac OS 10.3 users can also download this freeware to watch videoblogs: AntNotTv.org This application lets you subscribe to your favorite video feeds and downloads new video to your computer automatically. It comes with some great default feeds.
This is the state-of-the-art Video RSS aggregator portal
and here’s the link to vloggercon 2005
Communities of Practice PART 2 February 13, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, Wiki , 2commentsukcider
I’m looking at a particular COP for my Action Research project, it’s one which I know well since I facilitated its coming into being, a process which took a couple of years or so starting in 1998.
ukcider began as a splinter from a real ale group, and gained momentum only slowly, beginning mainly with consumers. Then a few craft cidermakers joined and began to swap advice about tending orchards, experience with different ciderapple varieties, fermentation problems, presses and other equipment. That was the point where it changed from being an interest group into a COP, and people began to appreciate the group as a fountain of scientific microbiological advice as well as friendly banter and useful tips. The strength of the community ties have been demonstrated as the group migrated through various platforms, held debates and arguments, but retained a solid core of long term members who are always ready to help out with the best of their knowledge and occasionally express appreciation for the community itself. So that’s the cop I am doing my Action Enquiry with, investigating the effect of providing a Wiki for it.
tracking progress with SMART tasks on 43things
Communities of Practice PART 1 February 13, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, internet , add a commentCommunities of Practice have existed for centuries, as skilled workers have gathered together to swap experiences, share knowledge and build up their joint trade. But the internet has allowed distibuted Communities of Practice (CoPs) to come into being, where the practitioners may be continents apart, or isolated through the type of work they do, and these distributed CoPs benefit greatly from the powerful effect of Many-to-Many communication afforded by newsgroups, mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.
The term ‘online community’ has been somewhat overused though, applied as it is to any kind of interest group with a few recorded conversations left up on a bulletin board, or more recently, to an exchange of comments and trackbacks on a disparate collection of blogs or a dedicated wiki.
Etienne Wenger defines COPS thus
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. Not everything called a community is a community of practice. A neighborhood for instance, is often called a community, but is usually not a community of practice. Three characteristics are crucial:
1. The domain:
A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.
2. The community:
In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone.3. The practice:
A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice.It is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.
Comments February 11, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , 2commentsI’ve discussed Furl vs deli.cio.us in the past and for myself, concluded that Furl has better functionality for research purposes, but I’ve started using deli.cio.us as a way of tracking my comments on other people’s blogs, and I’d like to share how simply that works.
*step 1 go to http://del.icio.us/ and register for an account
*step 2 drag the “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet up to the Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar
*step 3 whenever I have made a comment on a blog, click the bookmarklet and type “comment” in the Tags box, that’s all.
*step 4 subscribe to the RSS feed for my own comments.
Now I can easily check back and see if there are any further replies to the conversations I’m involved in. And by publishing here, anybody can follow me around should they feel so inclined :-/
Expert Ants in Wikiworld February 6, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, wildlife, internet, Wiki , add a commentPart of the pedagogical philosophy at Ultraversity is against the idea of teachers
as "experts", which is probably just as well. So when we do need an
expert, we have to go out and find our own. I managed to engage in email conversation
with a Professor in Sydney for one assignment, and in another I made use of
the services of a local entrepreneur. For the current module it seems to be
my family who are coming up with the goods. One of the recompenses for being
a single parent is that you try to teach your children everything you know and
then in no time at all they are teaching it all back to you again! I would have
really struggled with the wiki hosting and installation without the experience
and technical support from Frankie, but then he is a Linguistics student so
obviously he would know more than a professional helpdesk forum.
Then last night, I had the attention of Evan during an insightful online chat, and it turns out
that he has recently accumulated some experience and wisdom about the social
side of wiki community building, which nicely complements the technical knowledge
of the other one. What Evan is saying, in a nutshell, is the antithesis to the
old "build it and they will come" argument, slightly changed to "organise
it, and they will join in". I had failed to spot that tendency from myself
in the current circumstances, despite having been on the receiving end of the
idea that you can build a community by first imposing a tightly bound and pre-conceived
structure all over it and then letting in the crowds and expecting them to populate
it. So definitely a critical incident for me there, and one which you, dear
reader, may now benefit from.
Take a look at this ant house for example:
The ants have made their own passageways, rooms and connections through the blue jelly.
Now imagine if you suddenly took the Jelly away and replaced it with a set of opaque steel tubes, organised in a way which you have already decided will make the most logical anthouse.
How do you think the ants will feel about that?
Anyway, here’s the formatted transcript from the highly useful discourse I had with my 19 year old son yesterday. It contains a fair amount of detailed exploration of syntax, but worth persevering for the generalised theory of participation and structure development.
Evan speaks in blue, Andy in dark brown. (My retro-highlighting in bold)
Been up to much so far this weekend?
Not really, slowly developing the wiki
You need a new logo for ukcider
Oh dear, do I?
But I want continuity from the old website for now, until I have a wiki community
Yea old graphic isn’t good enough. Font is horrible,
lines aren’t smooth
Ah, you mean a new graphic to the old design -
good idea
Something smarter looking thats all
What do you think is the key to getting people to
contribute?
Ttricky question
Sense of ownership perhaps, or a good initial
structure to add to. They need to be able to see the vision
Get people to create a homepage for themselves
on the wiki
Ah, identity. So people who don’t have a website
of their own can have a presence
Then encourage the practice of putting your name
before any comments you add
Have a look at http://senseis.xmp.net/?UltimateGoServer%2FProtocols
, and you can see the differential between information and comments
Ok that page wasn’t the best example
Since we already have a well established mailing
list, I was thinking of the wiki as a place for information, but it could develop
the other way as well
Well I think you’re going to have a hard time if
you discourage discussion on the wiki
Mediawiki seems to have seperate pages for discussion
So does senseis
I just want to get a few people started on it,
that’s all so I’ll be posting messages to the list saying "hey look, we’ve
got a wiki" and "how about putting all the local information on it"
Yes, but if the wiki isn’t alive people will stop
caring for it, which is why you need to have people discussing entrys on it
though that can be done on the mailing list, but I doubt that will work very
well
Is that right? So it needs a big impetus to get
it going then, not a slow build up
well I wouldn’t say that’s the point really
I reckon two communities will develop. Some will
stay only on the list and new ones will join the wiki
It needs to be able to keep going even when it’s
quiet
what’s the problem with quiet times, if a few
people are subscribed to RSS
There is no problem
ok
that’s why I don’t think you should get into the
mentality of worrying if it suddenly gets quiet
people need to feel attached to the pages, that’s the key
I’m only really worried about getting something
started in time for my degree module, the real growth will be over years to
come
Well often you need to get things going yourself
to start, then when you see others helping, start slowing down
but you know all this
Yes, so I carry on making seed pages in the hope
that someone will join me, and making suggestions on the list
No, don’t make seed pages
oh
seed pages are bad
seed structure then?
wikipedia came to the same conclussion
empty links?
empty links occasionaly
I don’t know much about how wikis develop at all
but most of the time, just leave it blank
I’ve tried two by myself so far, the first one
failed because the server was often inaccessible, the second one didn’t get
enough support
he he, I remember our first attempts
Well I’ve got a month to try and gather some evidence
to show what happens when you introduce a wiki to a COP
I guess I’ll have a lot of explaining to do to the ukcider members, plus there
are all sorts of political shenanigans going on between Another Organisation
and some of our members
Shouldn’t be to hard. I have a lot of confidence
in wikis at the moment
does mediawiki put a line under every heading?
seems to
seems to, and allows partial page editing
yea, same on senseis
I haven’t checked out the syntax properly yet
that feature comes in very useful
means you can have bigger pages
yea, big pages are good
syntax is a bit different from that at senseis it seems
ah, only major headings are sectioned
now it looks much neater
you can use bold for subheadings
no, just use === subheading === or even ==== super
subheading ====
thanks
that way you can still edit them but you don’t
get thousands of lines going across the page
what tag was it before?
just ==
Ah. I think I selected it from the wysiwyg tool
button
ah it has wysiwyg
not really, but a few formatting buttons at the
top of the editing window
seems you can’t use [/discussion] to link to the
discussion
saves looking up syntax when learning in a hurry
there’s a discussion tab
I know
but it’s veryuseful to add at the bottem of a page "see /discussion"
there probably is a way, just don’t know the syntax
I’m trying to work out how to link to a user page
http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/User:Andy_Roberts
[[Andy_Roberts]] doesn’t work
ah
that’s because the page is called user:andyroberts
silly name for a page
why didn’t you just name it andy roberts then
no idea. might have been frank
you can rename links though [user: andy roberts|andy
roberts]
agh! you named a page introductiontowiki not introduction to wiki
putting words together is a bad idea
I like CamelCase
no, it’s a silly way thought up by silly programmers
who are used to it
but you can move the page if it bothers you
worth getting things right at the outset
yea definitely
hmm I see user: creates a special page
maybe it’s best to use it then, just means you have to rename the links using
[link|description]
then it doesn’t get listed in "all pages".
There must be a shortcut
if you use user: then it gets listed in a users
directory
yep . probably worth doing then. All I need now
are some users
I’ve put a more prominent link on the old site
ah, discussion isn’t a subpage, that’s why it wasn’t
working
it’s Talk:main_Page
yea, how would you link to that. [[talk:]] doesn’t
work
[[Talk:Main_Page]]
ah, ok, no shortcut then. Mediawiki is a fair bit
more complicated than PHP wiki
yes a bit, but longer lasting I hope, and generating
more interest at the moment, so maybe people will arrive in time who are more
likely to have used the same
yea maybe. I changed http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Talk:Regional_Producers
to how I would have it
but then I probably wouldn’t have created a blank stub page in the first
place
hmm, I thought it simpler to have the initial
suggestion on the page, then overwrite it with the real thing
yea probably is, but it’s even better to have
the discussion on a existing page, otherwise people are constantly clicking
on stubs
I see yes, think about the readers not just the
developers
but it’suseful to link to the discussion pages
at the bottem of the page, to tell people something is going on in the discussion
ah
you could post advice to me on my 43things pages
subscribe to the RSS then add comments
senseis has a page called "wiki etiquete"
which would be auseful page to discuss it
I mean you should create a similar page
they also have one called wiki conventions
they kind of overlap
I don’t like the only link to the users guide on your wiki, is at the bottem
of the main page
unless I’m missing something
there’s a "help" link in the main navigation
the help page isn’t veryuseful at current though
but ok, I missed that
The main thing with wikis is to only create new pages when you have content
to fill the page
like all the info on pubs http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Cider_Pub_Guide
could all be on one page at current
it’s intended to be printable as a page for each
region
could be a large part of the wiki eventually
I see
yes, but at the moment it’s small
it’s all small, it’s only a week old !
if it’s all small then it should only be a few
pages
is that the only way to grow it?
It makes things optimal in terms of browsing, so
is important
It’s the only way it should be
at the moment it suffers from a kind of over organisation
I think it’s suffering from lack of content and
participation myself, but then it is only a week old
so you don’t rate my plan to create organisation first, then solicit content
It’s like a biologist who is sorting his collection,
having a draw for each genus, despite his collection only being about 100 objects
no, that’s a bad habit in my eyes
applies to life in general too
I’d be grateful if you’d comment that here:
http://www.43things.com/entries/view/13328
sure,
I take your general point.
maybe in the morning though
but how do you kick start something that doesn’t
exist yet?
just announce it and hope someone is interested,
have enough content at the beginning to show that atleast you are going to participate
in it
but creating a structure is just presumptious, doesn’t really show any real
intent to do things, doesn’t give the project any real momentum, small concentrated
contennt is better
I didn’t really want to duplicate everything from
the old site but maybe I should do that instead
then I’d have content, and it would be editable
start off making a few pages, maybe using information
from the old site, but make them good
quality
yes quality over quantity
well thanks for your advice. I’ll copy and paste
it somewhere
also, people like organising, and the people
who do the organising are more inclined to feel closer to the project and contribute
more in general, so by organising all the structure yourself, people won’t feel
so inclined to help out
I think that last point of mine is particilarly important now I remembered it!
I kind of sensed that, but you have explained
it better
good, then get rid of all the stubs!
I don’t want to spend too much time shrinking
the structure do I
well it’s hard to change the past, but if probably
is worth it
you’re not that far off the correct balance though
I’ll make some changes
is it possible for users to delete pages
doubt it , but you can just leave them orphaned
he he http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perfect_stub_article
suggests putting misspelled words in stubbs to get people to edit the page
well, you could deliberatley put in false information
as well but…
they must have the most experience
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Stub_Pages
interesting
"No page is better than a stub page"
too right!
sounds a bit evangelical to me
it sounds spot on to me
what about a link to "no page" is that
ok?
or should it be no link as well
well yes, no link
that’s what it means
ah. so not even the suggestion of the possibility
of a page then
most of the time, no
creating templates for new pages are ok
I did that on senseis libary
but that’s quite different to the concept of a stub
also having no content makes the link indicate that there is no content
but generally no link is better again
"On the other hand, stubs represent content that someone was willing to
donate, and why should we discourage people from contributing what they can?"
This is wrong, stubs represent content that people aren’t willing to donate
any time soon!
that’s the irony of it
I suppose they represent the hope that somebody
else will do it
yea, that isn’t a good thought to send out!
hope is a negative idea
hope is the antithesis of being productive
so the way to attract contributions, is to only
add good content yourself
Lead by example, not by organising
yes, discuss future direction, but don’t just create
stubs just hoping
yes, lead by example
image manipulation February 5, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art , 3commentsI wonder if I could get my blog club to produce work like this, using just “the Gimp” :
Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble February 4, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a commentAndrew Roberts latest book is out now:
Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble
Roberts provides not only a fizzing account of one of the most significant 48 hour periods of all time, but also a startling revaluation on the methodology of history — is it possible to create an accurate picture from a single standpoint? What we can say for certain about the battle is that it ended forever the one of the great personal world-historical epics. The career of Napoleon was brought to a shuddering halt on the evening of 18th June 1815.
Roberts sets the political, strategic and historical scene, and finally shows why Waterloo was such an important historical punctuation mark. The generation after Waterloo saw the birth of the modern era: ghastly as the carnage here was, henceforth the wars of the future were fought with infinitely more ghastly methods of trenches, machine-guns, directed starvation, concentration camps, and aerial bombardment. By the time of the Great War, chivalry was utterly dead. The honour of bright uniform and tangible spirit of elan, espirit, eclat met their final dance at Waterloo.
‘It is one of Andrew Roberts’s merits that, as well as being intelligent, hard-working and opinionated, he gets great fun out of his writing. His books are consequently not only genuinely important but also a pleasure to read.’ Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph
Buy Andrew Roberts’ latest book now from Amazon.co.uk
Confused? visit The Andy Robert FAQ
Connected February 4, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : hi res photos , comments closed
The islet of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, Bakio, Basque Country. There are 230 steps to climb, but when you reach the chapel you can pull on a rope to ring the bell.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
