Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

It’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday time!

Continuing our 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series,
Vanessa Peters (PhD Candidate, OISE) will lead discussions next Tuesday at Toronto Wiki Tuesday
at another new location, GROUNDHOG PUB.

http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/twiki/bin/view/TorontoWikiTuesdays/WikisInEducationMay2008

Here’s Vanessa’s description:

In this meeting I will discuss a new wiki-based scripted activity that was created for secondary school biology students. Using a co-design method, the researchers collaborated with two experienced science teachers to create a curriculum unit where 114 grade-ten biology students developed a knowledge base of ideas about human physiology, then drew upon those ideas as resources for subsequent curricular activities. Results demonstrate that this innovative lesson fostered collaborative knowledge construction as well as individual student learning. This suggests that a carefully designed wiki-based activity can complement and enhance the value of a collective knowledge building community within secondary school settings.

Please sign up at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/468369/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

Toronto Wiki Tuesday’s May Meeting is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professionals.

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

Toronto’s tech sector is on fire!

When I first arrived in Toronto in 2004 I found very little in the way of Tech community. I was told that the Dot Com Crash had pretty much annihilated every shred of enthusiasm this city had left to offer.

Today, in 2008, there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a vibrant community, with many events competing for our attention.

Here’s tonight’s choices:

1. Startup Camp - startups get together to practice their pitch (closed event) http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/22/startupcamp-toronto-2-what-we-expect-from-you/
2. Toronto Tech Talks - in preparation for Toronto Tech Week (Sept), “The event brings together professionals from the technology industry, and other industries such as advertising, accounting, public relations and finance come out to exchange ideas and make new business connections.”. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14399969049
3. Case Camp - PR and Media firms look at case studies of Social Media http://www.casecamp.org/index.html
4. CIPS Unified Messaging http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?402

Finally, if you are interested in Tech in Toronto, no matter where you go before, you need to end up here:

SummerCamp Dance Party, A Toronto Creative Mashup
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want any part of your revolution.”
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12682267965

Start Time: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 9:00pm
End Time: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:00am
Location: CiRCA - Ballroom and Kid Robot Room
Street: 126 John Street

See you at CIRCA!

You may have forgotten, or simply not know, Canada has reached the crunch point in deciding whether the Canadian ISPs should be allowed to govern what type of traffic is sent over their wires.

Last year I commented:

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

While it is fair that ISPs should be able to charge for the amount of traffic, (this bears down on their infrastructure) why should they have the right to select what that traffic is used for.

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Last week, Bell Canada took this to a new level. They started not only filtering their own customer’s traffic, they started impacting resellers, wholesale providers that buy bandwidth in bulk from Bell and sell to their own customers. In filtering the types of traffic those ISPs could deliver doing so they excised force in the market, trashing the business models of tens of ISPs across the country, directly impacting millions and scuppering technology innovation by organisations such as Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation:

On Sunday, CBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. The release was an experiment for the public broadcaster in new ways of offering its programming.

However, downloaders who blogged about the experience on the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister site complained about very long periods required to download the show.

One user received a notice that it could take 2½ hours to download, while another was quoted 11 hours. The bottleneck is occurring because ISPs such as Rogers and Bell limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file-swapping on BitTorrent.

Michael Geist reports:

“The CRTC has to date largely avoided the net neutrality issue, however, that is about to change. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. The application, which was filed late yesterday and is not yet posted on the CRTC site, is the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet since it places the issue squarely before the Commission. The filing provides additional insights into Bell’s action - the throttling has reduced speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.”

What you can do
Check out Steve Anderson’s Campaign for Democratic Media and the Stop the Throttler campaigns. Share your story.

1. http://www.stopthethrottler.ca/
2. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10734109708
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5UvAKcxTGE
4. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=4ac678a5-38e7-40dc-8d80-80e6e8e01aeb&p=2
5. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/02/tech-bell.html
6. http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/407730
7. http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/04/03/and-then-there-was-two-bell-canada-seeks-to-wipe-out-isp-competitors/

My thanks go to my friend Sandy Kemsley for the link.

What’s being presented and about our speaker:

As part of the 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe, Here’s Adrian’s event description:

What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate

The problem:

To form a well-reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it’s content hard to contrast with your current understanding. While every wiki houses content, a method is needed to help the community express contrasting opinions.

The Debatum solution:

Debatum is a wiki with a method that guides uses to document and interconnect arguments. Examples it uses include debating controversial issues such as:

1. Can computers think?
2. When is a declaration of independence reasonable?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Should there be Net Neutrality?

Debatum overlays a methodology over the wiki to encourage the growth of disparate viewpoints to inform and persuade readers. This provides users to enrich the arguments and powerfully inform and influence others.

While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Debatum wants to be an interconnect of arguments, ideas, and lines of thought. While Wikipedia stresses a Neutral Point of view, Debatum’s goal is to write the best arguments of each side and include weak, yet popular arguments together with (strong) counter-arguments. Unlike Wikipedia, which accepts content only if it is written outside, Debatum seeks to mesh arguments with original thinking from participants.

Debatum’s goal is to well-thought-out opinions, rather than to facilitate “winning” debates. Debatum’s motto is “Knowledge by debate”.

Additional topics:

• We will discuss other attempts to approach online debates (wiki-based or not) and compare them to Debatum.
• We ask whether Wiki is actually the ideal format for documenting debates.
• We question whether (controversial) subjects be learned faster from a “debating construct” instead of a “plain” layout?
• We discuss whether a wiki format discourages rhetoric and ask whether this is a good thing.

After Adrian’s talk we’ll turn the conversation to the audience to discuss how, where and why Wikis are usually used in Politics and in what ways Debatum offers something new. Expect a lively discussion of the opportunities and resistance to wikis in politics.

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 8th April at 502 Queen Street West in the Front Room: http://www.theepicure.ca/event.html
Please sign up for this event at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/444745/
Join our mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/torontowikituesday/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion or unique use of a wiki? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Parties interested in expression of contraversal or political material on wikis.
• Wikipedians responsible for promoting a neutral point of view
• Anyone who thinks that wikis are not the place to express dissent
• Technical writers responsible for documentation tasks
• Managers and leaders trying to understand the potential of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Wiki users and Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:
Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives, a wiki consulting firm based in Toronto, and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

• http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/03/toronto-wiki-tuesdays-march-april-and-onward-2008/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/05/wikisym2008-im-chair-for-demos-and-posters/

About our Sponsor:
April’s Toronto Wiki Tuesdays is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professsionals. See http://www.sipgroup.org/ and http://www.sipgroup.blogspot.com/

Upcoming Toronto Wiki Tuesdays
See http://www.torontowikituesdays.com for the dates and the topics for Toronto Wiki Tuesdays for the next 3 months.

From the team at Avaaz:

Dear friends,

In just 7 days over 1 million of us have signed the petition supporting human rights and dialogue in Tibet - the fastest growing internet petition in history! After decades of injustice, the Tibetan people are crying out to the world for change, and the world is answering.

As China’s leaders decide whether to respond to Tibetan grievances with increased repression or dialogue with the Dalai Lama, an International Day of Action has been declared for Monday, March 31st. In 4 days, thousands of people in cities across the world will march to Chinese embassies and consulates, and stack hundreds of boxes containing our petition outside them. 1 million signatures makes a mountain of boxes - it’s a powerful way to deliver our message.

We have just 4 days left until the petition delivery, so we’re redoubling our efforts to build the petition even larger - to 2 million signatures - in that time. Please sign below, and then forward this email to all your friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/73.php/?cl=67201776

China’s hardliners are lashing out publicly at the Dalai Lama–but many Chinese leaders believe dialogue is the best hope for stability in Tibet. Governments around the world have begun calling for dialogue, and there are many hopeful signs that, if we can keep the pressure up, China will agree. Already, we have had constructive discussions with Chinese officials about the message of our campaign.

Chinese President Hu Jintao values his country’s international reputation, and he needs to hear from us that the ‘Made in China’ brand and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will succeed only if he chooses dialogue over the hardliners’ repression. An avalanche of global people power is moving to get his attention. Our petition recognizes the concerns of Chinese leaders that riots and separatism could lead to dangerous instability. But we support the position of the Dalai Lama, that the best path to stability and development for China lies through dialogue and respect, not repression.

This is the most promising moment in decades to address the injustices of Tibet - but already the media is moving on to other stories. We need to seize this moment with a massive statement of global support this Monday — for the next four days, let’s pull out all the stops for Tibet.

With hope,

Ricken, Graziela, Ben, Iain, Pascal, Milena, Galit, Paul, Esra’a and the whole Avaaz team

PS - Here are some links for more information:

Reuters reports unrest continues:
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSPEK369654

China allows first journalists back into Lhasa, monks speak out:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/china/local%20news/tibet/2008/03/27/149167/Tibet-monks.htm

Europe and the US step up calls for dialogue:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/europe/27europe.php

Prominent Chinese Intellectuals call for fair approach to Tibet:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/asia/chinasub.php
———–

In the same week, Bell and Rogers have hit the Canadian public hard, imposing limits on how we use the internet.

DSL: Not only has Bell imposed this on their own customers but also on their wholesale resellers, organisations such as Teksavvy, who they have started traffic-shaping, cutting off many of the newest services on the internet.

Cable: Rogers have been traffic shaping for a couple of years now, but this week stated that they will charge overlimit fees.

That both operators act so definitively, so drastically, and within such a short pace of time must get the attention of our government and the CRTC who must act on their responsibility to ensure competition in the marketplace. From an economics standpoint, these simultaneous industry moves look nothing short of collusion.

While it is in industry’s interests to promote high fees and high profits on data delivery, technologies exist to make data delivery very cheap to deliver. Industry has a mindset and investment model for traditional business models. It is in the public’s interests, and society’s to get to low costs.

Below is a copy of an email I sent to Wordpress Pro mailing list addressing the dynamic between information stored in a wiki and knowledge spurred on by conversations in a forum. In it I make recommendations as to why and how to link the two assuming that the community won’t shift to a pure wiki platform.

> > On the Wordpress professional developer’s forum, Skaneateles Design said:
> > Working with and customizing WordPress MU requires quite a bit of
> > integrative skill, since the development docs are limited for the
> > program (often, the code itself is the documentation!), and the system is not trivial.
> >
> I wrote:
> Please excuse the off-topic, but just to let everyone know, there is an
> (underloved) section on Codex wiki for wpmu, at
> http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category:WPMU&hideminor=0&days=180&limit=50
>
> And… until someone revamps the forums to make the wiki prominent, the
> documentation will likely remain just as fragmented and limited.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:33 PM, kingler wrote:

Are you suggesting a better WPMU codex page with INDEX? Maybe it is time to start a new maillist for WPMU users and developers as well?

Hi Liang,

The http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU page is a reasonable start page. What is lacking is the wiki’s prominence in the mu forums. As the majority of people only use the forums the bulk of the most recent information is in the forums, and the pages on the wiki are not very useful.

Although a wiki provides the means to refine and os to accomplish terseness and high relevancy, blogs and in particular, forums, generate sprawl and disconnectedness. (See http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ and maybe http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/06/blogs-are-like-plastics-wikis-are-like-leaves/ )

Now, forums have their place for conversation but they are not the means for generating reference material. (People do summarise in forums, but these summaries also get swept away in the flow of conversation). We need both, conversation and reference, and we need the means to harness the people’s efforts appropriately.

Given that most content is already in the forums, we need to find ways to link the forums to the wiki, and indeed, the wiki to the forums.

Our audience has barely embraced the Codex wiki so there’s little mu-specific information useful to them (although the single user wordpress information is pretty reasonable). To make Codex appealing to mu-users and to keep it front of mind, I think we need to automate the linkage between forum and wiki. This will help the community navigate from knowledge socialised in a particular conversation, to information definitively documented in the wiki, and back again, so viewing the wiki shows conversations discussing the concepts of the wiki.

If this linkage can be made convenient and appealing enough for users to traverse, they will iteratively travel the conversation (forum)-documentation (wiki) pathway, pulling the concepts they have just internalised from the new conversations into the reference documentation. Then, the user editing the shared reference has the opportunity to consolidate their new insight or understanding into the logic shared with everyone else. The reference information, being the product of the many, is comprehensive (rather than the conversation, which will typically address only a few points).

Comparing an idea or notion proposed in conversation to the comprehensive helps the editor think through the idea inside constraining context of the knowledge already known. When a user edits the reference she align herselves with the masses, and begins to engage with all the factors needed to pull the masses toward her idea.

In a forum talking in one thread provides little or no exposure to users not following that thread. A mailing list has the same issue. The lack of exposure means good seed ideas can miss growing up, and that bad ideas get pursued for too long because their authors miss a constraint that is known somewhere. A wiki, with a community properly engaged on it, will factor seeds of ideas into pages where the idea can grow, be pruned and cared for. Ideas placed on forums and mailing lists can too easily get lost.

While some communities get away with hosting conversation on the wiki itself (and there are advantages to doing so - my favourite being that the conversation can be pruned of overly verbose, poorly written or just plain wrong information), the simple fact today is that many communities do have that separate forum that the community likes, so the question is not how to eliminate the forum but how to create the relationship between the wiki and the forum.

At mu forums, what I’d like to see is this:

1. On the front page it shows the list of mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point. This continuously informs people what reference information is being built.
2. At the bottom of every forum post show content from wiki pages. This linkage could be implied from the tags on the post in view, or via a tag generation method.

On Codex, I’d like to see:

1. a method whereby users can expand a twisty or something and get all relevant conversation items
2. the menu bar shows the mu entry points: mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point

This method could work for both multi- and single- user versions of wordpress. Indeed, I believe for many communities today it would improve the knowledge-information (SECI) flow.

Feedwordpress is a mechanism for automating syndication of blog entries from one blog to another. I use this alongside WordpressMU to power the blogs at http://www.wikiconsulting.com

Feedwordpress is documented at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/ and is run by the incredibly busy Charles Johnson (RadGeek). I think it would be better if Charles put a wiki for Feedwordpress at radgeek.com, and indeed I asked him to do so a few months ago, but until he does, at least people who need to use his software can collaborate with one another. You can find this wiki at http://feedwordpress.pbwiki.com/

It is a basic human need to collaborate. Cooperating with others saves us time, and helps us share our expression so at a minimum guarantees that we did what we can. Commenting on blogs does not provide the deep blending of perspectives needed for real value to be added to knowledge. In the FeedWordPress case users have asked for a forum or another means to collectively pool their time, but a wiki not only adds this but changes the sequence in which information is presented. (Actually, the password reset on the feedwordpress blog doesn’t work for me!)

Whether this Feedwordpress wiki will take off will depend on a lot of things. Whether it is seeded compellingly (including from the gems of existing content), whether people subscribe, whether people share their problems and help one another solve theirs, and what signal:noise ratio occurs on it.

We can each do our bit. Pooling our bits to be together can save us all time and energy. I hope this feedwordpresswiki will help.

A bit of news - I’ve been asked to be on committee to hold the position of Chair for Demos and Posters at WikiSym 2008 in Portugal this September.

This is great as I’ll not only see breaking ideas as they happen around the world, but also be responsible to evaluate them and help them meet standards to deliver for general interest.

Important Dates
* May 3rd: submissions deadline for research papers, practitioner reports, workshops, panels, and tutorials
* May 17th: notifications for workshop submissions
* June 11th: submissions deadline for posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* June 25th: notifications for research papers, practitioner reports, panels, tutorials, posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* July 19th: final revised pdf’s are due
* Sept 8th-10th: WikiSym 2008 days

Updates
Keep an eye on the Wikisym blog, and of course here, for updates.

Some of you may have noticed on the upcoming page that March’s date for Toronto Wiki Tuesday was preliminary, due to a schedule clash on my diary. I’m settling on the 2nd Tuesday of the month whereever possible, making Toronto Wiki Tuesday on the 2nd weekday of the 2nd week of each month.

1. This month only, Toronto Wiki Tuesday will be the following week, the 18th March. Damir Sudarevic (Industrial Design Engineer) is talking this month, will talk about on how he uses a wiki to drive a website. We will be in the Front Room at the EPICURE CAFE (502 Queen Street West, between Spadina and Bathurst) for this
2. April’s talk 8th, will be by Adrian Fritsch on a wiki-based debating technology called Debatum.
3. May’s date, 13th will be Nelson Ko, probably talking about Social Networking
4. June’s is by Vanessa Peters (OISE) talking through educational uses.
   • Vanessa’s title is “Co-
     Designing Pedagogical Scripts for Knowledge Building in Secondary
     School Science”
   • As not everyone knows, here’s what http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/ says about Pedagogicalisms
     

     Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. Presenting this information in a coherent and accessible form can mean the difference between every new instructor needing to relearn what is known by senior faculty and easy transference of knowledge of teaching within the community.

5. July is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
6. August is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
7. As September’s second Tuesday clashes with WikiSym 2008, in Porto, Portugal, and as I hold the position of “Posters and Demos Chair”, we’ll find another date so I can attend! I’ll likely run this session, to summarize the submissions into the posters and papers track.

I’ll likely and the group with updates from the WikiSym sessions throughout the year anyway, as its good to get your impressions of new innovations as we go along.

Regards and thanks,
Martin

–
Martin@Cleaver.org