Blue Oxen Associates - that is, Eugene Eric Kim and Chris Dent - had a launch party in San Francisco last week with their first official piece of output: a 20-page research report on how open source communities function.  The report features case studies of the communities that have formed around the TouchGraph and SquirrelMail software development projects. It was sponsored by the Omidyar Foundation, the very same foundation that awarded a grant to Tom Munnecke's GivingSpace initiative a few months ago.

On the occasion of the launch, Chris wrote a statement of what motivates him in this enterprise. Here it is in full.

We live in a time when the decisions of our governments are made outside any appreciation for reasoned and reasonable consensus. Information is delivered to us, packaged, shiny, and full of persuasive power but often lacking in the awareness of past, present and future required to make wise, lasting and honorable decisions.

I am tired of this. I'm tired of feeling powerless and listening to my self, my friends and my colleagues, filled with good ideas, swing in and out of a lonely and ineffectual desperation.

While it took me some time realize it, helping to start Blue Oxen is my small way of saying I've had enough, it's time to do something. I'm here to suggest that we can make the better world we believe is possible: one where people truly communicate and communicate truly, one where ideas are shared, one where the goodness that is our nature is allowed to emerge, in concert with one another, our neighbors down the street and our neighbors around the world.

I want Blue Oxen to catch and enhance the building wave of people who have acknowledged that sharing ideas, openly and frankly, is a creative force for improving the world and for motivating action. I seek not a free marketplace of ideas, but a free community of people collaborating to create and refine new thought.

Collaboration is a fully buzzword compliant term these days yet it is still an undefined discipline. Eugene and I connected over a casually tossed phrase that I made in response to the question of what is augmentation for. I said, "To make me less dumb." It's now several months later and while I still believe this is an important aspect of what collaboration is for, my close association with Eugene and the members of our first collaboratory and the looser collaboration with disparate voices discovered by the simple act of making some noise has revealed a larger focus: Less dumbness emerges from open communication.

When the internet reached the public, it was hailed as a compelling democratizing force. The power of personal publishing was going to alter the face of society. It didn't quite happen like that. I remember being disillusioned as the significance of my own web server faded in the face of the shine, the gloss and the money of centralized media.

We are, today, thanks to motivated and idealistic people, in a new phase of enthusiasm. Systems such as weblogs and wikis and the developing genre of social software are birthing dynamic social networks that produce new understandings. In and of themselves these tools are nothing, it is the people who use them and what they do with them that matters. People are exploring, communicating, generating and accepting feedback; using their freedom to generate more freedom.

I want Blue Oxen to be an experimental gardener in this realm. Our task is to participate in the discovery, engenderment, development, evolution and facilitation of the patterns of behavior and process[~]and the tools the patterns use[~]that bring the ecology of collaborative evolution we need as a society. Our challenge is to see that the communication facilitated by collaborative systems continues, stays open, and creates artifacts that are accessible and reusable by others. Openness leads to shared and knowledgeable understanding, shared understanding leads to shared goals. Goals lead to motivation and motivation leads to action. Let's do what we can.

Chris is interested in the politics of collaboration, which seems like a hugely interesting topic. A later post of his is titled Anarchic Emergent Collaboration, and reflects on the ways in which we structure collaboration. Chris speculates that "emergent and loose collaboration is the most natural style." (which seems to resonate fairly well with Chris Corrigan's musings on Open Space Technology). Chris Dent writes,

"So I wonder if there are threads of connection that we can draw between extremist political theory (and history), systems theory and discussions of collaboration. Even if the threads prove ephemeral the exploration will probably be productive."

[Seb's Open Research]

Sounds good to me. A good read and a place to keep an eye on. Thier mission has my interest! It seem little by little folks are focusing on the getting great "stuff" done.

from Denham Grey's KMWiki, a large collection of links to various knlowedge tools, including

ThinkingTools

OpenSpace

SharedSpaces

InformationEcology

KnowledgeCommunity

KnowledgeExchanges

CollabTools

BuildingCommunity

LearningCommunity

VisualThinking

PersistentConversation

PatternPromises

KnowledgeSharing

SharedMeaning

OntOlogy

 

[EdTechPost]

VERY LARGE Collection!

One of the great challenges in knowledge sharing, and in asynchronous communication, is to provide your audience with enough context to understand where your message 'comes from' -- what mental models, preconceptions, hidden agendas, historical baggage and motivations filter and taint what you say. Conveying this context makes it easier for the recipient of your message to internalize what you're saying more accurately and fully. It can also prevent misconceptions that lead to argument or disparagement of your point of view. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to let you know not only who I am (in the sidebar About the Author ), but also why I blog -- what motivates me, on top of a heavy business workload, to spend at least 25 hours a week reading blogs and other resources, and writing my own blog posts. So here goes: I do this for three equally important (to me) reasons: Improve My Writing Skills: I love writing, and always wanted to make a living at it. By reading a lot on many topics, and practicing incessantly, I hope to learn to: write powerful, persuasive essays (like this one of Toby's) that stake out radical positions without sounding strident, write humour (like Dave Barry ), once I figure out what makes humorous writing funny, write clear, motivating, informative and actionable business essays, incorporate these 39 steps from Frederick Barthelme in my fiction writing, and  broaden my eclectic intellectual reach so I have more knowledge to draw on in my writing (the way Mark Woods can). Institute Weblogs in Business: As Chief Knowledge Officer of a large professional services company, I've been grappling with two major cultural obstacles to knowledge sharing - employees' reluctance to contribute their knowledge, and the absence of context sufficient to make knowledge that is contributed easy to assess, internalize and re-use. I think employee weblogs might solve both problems. Environmental Activism: Although the title of this blog is ironic, I am a hopeless idealist and really would like to make the world a better place. I'm about ten years from retirement, and plan then to dedicate my life full-time to environmental activism. I'm dissatisfied with existing environmental activist programs, which seem to me rear-guard, ineffectual, naive, inadequate, and often too little, too late to have major, lasting impact. I'm equally dissatisfied with the lack of coherent and actionable blueprints for environmental action, and I'm hoping that by blogging environmental manifestos like How to Save the World and The Third Way, SETI-like, I will be able to find like minds with whom I can work to drive a powerful, effective, broad-based environmental movement. For those that have read my posts before, is this helpful? Should we make it part of the blogger culture that each of us provide some context for our writing with both a bio and a 'why I blog' summary?

[How to Save the World]

Love this narrative on why the author blogs and till continue to blog

Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute gave a live speech on CSPAN regarding the Patriot Act and the new draft of the Patriot Act II. I give credit to the CATO institute for raising serious questions regarding giving the government more power and more money. The Patriot Act was brought up as a perfect case on how not to pass a law. It was a law that was rammed downed the throats of Congress to pass. The bill should have been submitted in chunks. In addition, there were no sunset provisions so that parts of the law could be evaluated after a couple of years. Kudos to the Cato Institute for standing up to the Administration. Though the administration is Republican, it is trying to expand federal power at the expense of civil rights. It would seem that "true" Republicans would look at the growing expansion of Federal Power to be philosophically the opposite of what they believe in.

Knowledge management and weblogs. Knowledge management has been premised on the notion that the knowledge to be managed already exists and simply needs to be collected and organized to obtain the promised benefits.

One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.

This is similar to the argument about the important split between tacit and explicit knowledge but much simpler. There is a category of knowledge that lies between explicit and tacit--what a colleague of mine, Jeanie Egmon, labels as "implicit." This is knowledge that is actually fairly simple to write down once you decide that it's worth doing so and once you have tools that make it easy to do so. It's the knowledge of context and the whys behind the whats. It's the knowledge that's obvious at the time and on site, but mysterious even to its creators six months and six hundred miles later.

In the knowledge economy that we all live in, even if we keep trying to stay comfortably ensconced in the industrial economy that used to make so much sense, we need to reflect on and learn from experience on a daily basis in order to maintain any sort of edge. That reflection and learning depends on having high quality raw material to work with. That's what weblogs provide.

[McGee's Musings]

It is called Praxis, which deals with the construction of knowledge in the here and now. That cyclical endeavor of making sense of our endeavors in light of new insights and information. It is lifelong learning in the concrete. If anything, this is the stuff that we need to be passing on to our students. We need to model this behavior. As a faculty, we need to practice this behavior as a group. If a faculty is not about focusing on practice and refining it, then there is no praxis on an organizational level, and most likely lacking at the classroom level. That is why I think that weblogs may be one tool to expose our practice. School districts should honor teaching professionals with time in the day or at least during the week to reflect alone and with ones co-workers so that looking at the practice and student work is a meaningful ritual.