Collective Presencing development

I'm talking about the information and knowledge side here, along with the technology that supports that.

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. I had a good conversation with Cristiano, who, it turns out, is not only helping develop Collective Presencing, but has been involved with the Art of Hosting, and is also experienced in usability design.

The conversation was a great example of how I like to work with people. Plenty of ‘getting to know you’ space, where I shared a little of my two years in Italy, and heard about the places he has lived. Then dialogue over the common interest – around how the web presence of Collective Presencing could be developed.

Cristiano noted where the action is, or is not: Facebook (not a lot); The Collective Presencing part of Sacred Ground, an invitation space which lives on Mighty Networks; the Bridge on Discord (which I have left – it was interesting but didn't interest me enough); and then Ria's mailing list, which is of course occasional and one-way.

I was thinking about the different areas of web presence that we could have:

It is the wiki aspect which most closely maps to what most writers would call a knowledge commons, but actually I see the whole range as part of the wider knowledge commons – it all involves sharing information and knowledge within a community of learning or interest or practice. After talking, we found that we naturally differentiated our areas of greater interest: Cristiano with the forum aspect, and me with the wiki aspect.

Many groups simply use a service like Facebook to do much of their social networking, mainly covering the forum and messaging aspects. Personally I see Facebook as a problem. Their ethics are questionable, partly because of how they use the information they gather, but also because once you are on the site, it is designed to tempt you to stay on for as long as they can hold your interest. And they use almost any tactics to achieve that.

Discord is another popular solution for general conversation and information sharing, in some ways the leisure near-equivalent to Slack. But Discord is a commercial business. What happens with your data? Who makes the rules? What is within the terms of service? Is your data able to be saved? What do you only get if you pay? (It has the very common ‘freemium’ business model.) Mighty Networks is a newer offering, different in feel from Discord, and as far as I can see with no free service, only a free trial. Of the forum-type services available, the one I like the look and feel of more is Discourse, which is open source, and used by a few groups I belong to. I should also mention Basecamp, as we use its old version at Cetis.

What I would write here about wikis and knowledge commons I've written about enough before! Just to say that for Collective Presencing, I see this as potentially integrating with a similar service for the Art of Hosting, along with some kind of framework of skills or competence.

Another very pleasant outcome was that we saw how the two sides interact complementarily. A conversation on a forum can be condensed into a wiki article. People can talk about how to develop a wiki article on a forum. And many other possibilities.

What is nice about this for me is that it is a small example of looking at the wider question of a knowledge (and information) commons; it is for a good purpose; with a very pleasant collaborator!


Topics: Collective Presencing; Knowledge commons


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