At least as a temporary solution, I’ve created a blog at WordPress.com for SpeedTech, which I hope will serve to instigate some conversation around the event and facilitate its planning. If you’re interested in participating or staying informed with that experiment I encourage you to visit the blog and make your opinions known.
On a more fundamental level though, this experiment to me represents an initial attempt at developing a model of openness and participation that I hope will establish a road map for future projects in the same vein. Therefore above and beyond the prospect of success for the SpeedTech experiment itself, I believe pinpointing a healthy and vibrant ethos is of the utmost importance.
Much of the logistical elements and overarching philosophical beliefs have been adopted from my observations and support of the open source and free software movements.
My initial attempt at articulating my thoughts are expressed in SpeedTech’s first post “Initial Thoughts“, which indicate:
Ethos
My initial thoughts on the experiment – and I do like to think of it as an experiment – is that it should be open, highly participatory with minimal (if any) hierarchical structure, encourage back channel conversations and widespread discussion on related topics, and above seek to inspire the emergence of a vibrant nurturing culture of peer communication and collaboration.
In keeping with a core aim of inspiring the emergence of a nurturing collaborative network/community, I’d like to propose the adoption of Ubuntu’s Code of Conduct as as the guidelines for how we interact with one another.
On Openness
In keeping with this ethos I believe all planning for the event should be made publicly visible, and use freely available tools (either free as in Freedom or free as in Beer). Furthermore, given its collaborative nature in which participants will hopefully come from different institutions, levels of education, sectors, even languges and regions, I also believe the organisational spaces should sit neutrally outside the web domain of any one educational institution. It is hoped this will facilitate a sense of equality and shared ownership over the experiment and is this reason why a a WordPress.com blog was selected.
Given my other collaborations currently in the mix – most notably the unconference – I think devoting sufficient time to the philosophical exploration of this idea is very important. So I’d appreciate any thoughts on this.
This is a really interesting issue Mike. I would really like to flesh this out and convert it a little bit more so that the Ubuntu code might be adapted to a more genral code of object oriented knowledge production/exchange. Something that encompasses issues like the need to make knowledge objects that have good metadata, allow for reuse/recontextualisation, deal with licensing well, (there are others here) as well as the more complex issues around maintaining a positive culture..like criticism as object not obstacle…
I’d like something I can give to students and staff – and which would be universal enough to slap on events and so on…
It might be good to do this on the http://newsouthblogs.org/wiki once you/we have a basic model – its there and very relevant and useful for us.
I’m happy to work together on this if you have the time. It’s certainly not something I want to hand down as the end-all and be all – I think these sorts of things benefit from widespread public discussion.
Perhaps as a starting point I could just copy the Ubuntu statement verbatim and create a page on http://newsouthblogs.org/wiki and we can adapt it and pick it apart there?
This could lead into some useful thought provoking conversations on what makes a vibrant community, and the sorts of agreed frameworks that should be in place to help ensure its continuity.
I think expanding the conversation to emphasise reuse and sharing makes a lot of sense. Particularly at our uni, I think these notions are still largely unexplored and perhaps unknown. So developing an understanding on the how and why of it, and the benefits that can be realised can all contribute to increased awareness