Open publishing systems tomorrow

November 4, 2009
By chiarabolognini

Open pub­lish­ing sys­tems such as Wikipedia and Indy­media state the suc­cess of het­er­ar­chy which is termed by Axel Bruns in Gate­watch­ing as “Rule by a diverse group, pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of a sin­gle per­son, group in con­trol or every­body (a hier­ar­chy, a monar­chy or a panarchy).

One of the aspects which I am ques­tion­ing is the tech­ni­cal open side, which means that the open source pub­lish­ing sys­tem is con­tin­u­ously revis­ited and read­justed by users, who can hope­fully fix bugs and evolve the sys­tem.
Well, all of that is great and it would be great if applic­a­ble to all soft­ware, social media, news web­sites etc.
Actu­ally, this is the sort of mat­ter I would argue about.
To what extent could we allow the changes to be done by users in all this software?

The web tools are in gen­eral the foun­da­tion of new ways for peo­ple to aggre­gate and share knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. In other words struc­tured and def­i­nite tools enable peo­ple of any sort to inter­act het­er­ar­chi­cally. So the tools should be cre­ated wisely accord­ing to cri­te­ria related to the goal the whole sys­tem has been built to pur­sue.
This would pre­pare the ground for poten­tial business.

Besides, tools should be pro­vided in a shape which makes the users’ inter­ac­tion much eas­ier accord­ing to the well known usabil­ity prin­ci­ples which involve the easy to cus­tomise prin­ci­ple. This would pro­vide all sorts of users with a demo­c­ra­tic usage of the web tools and as a con­se­quence an equal oppor­tu­nity to share and interact.

All of the above is related to the fact that we should start think­ing to the future, which is not today, obvi­ously.
A future when peo­ple will need to get money by these open source sys­tems in a more struc­tured way, beyond adver­tis­ing.
Actu­ally this is a dan­ger­ous tran­si­tion which all open sys­tem devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers will be involved in.
On the other hand it would reduce the noise, canalise the viral spread of infor­ma­tion and pro­duce revenue.

How­ever, imag­ine if one day we had to pay to use Wikipedia. What would hap­pen?
It is a sort of sce­nario which could com­pletely change the cur­rent roles of users and mem­bers and the entire open source folk them­selves.
Let me know what you think about it.

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BLOMAP & Co.

Web-development and usabil­ity improve­ments

The web-developer com­pleted only today the html link func­tion­al­ity for Blomap because he had hol­i­days and other com­mit­ments. All usabil­ity improve­ments are pend­ing. I have to accept the delay and let it accept to the team

The sec­ond event in chrono­log­i­cal order on 7th of April is a free sem­i­nar organ­ised by Gold­bach Media, time: 10.30 in the morn­ing, lan­guage: Ger­man, loca­tion: Das Schiff, West­quais­trasse 19, Basel, title: “Social Media Mar­ket­ing: Vom User Gen­er­ated Con­tent bis zur Com­mu­nity. Wie wirbt man dort überhaupt?” http://tinyurl.com/yfu7vzn

Posted via email from chiarabolognini’s pos­ter­ous

Let’s pre­pare your alarm-clock for the Social Media Gif­pel in Zürich on 7th of April at 7.30 in the morn­ing (come at 7 if you want to chat, a place and your break­fast). The meet­ing for­mat is par­tially made up of net­work­ing and par­tially of pre­sen­ta­tions. It’s in Ger­man and the main topic this time is: Libya… and mobile net­works. Take a look at the inter­est­ing panel
I cre­ated a Social Media Basel Group on Face­book and I con­sider very impor­tant to post the Man­i­festo of the group, which could be con­sid­ered a sort of Best Prac­tices and Terms and Con­di­tions to be part of the group. 

One of the scope of this group is to pass on the social media cul­ture, to share the cul­ture itself and what­ever infor­ma­tion rel­e­vant to the scope

Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling ’10 – sup­ported by the BBC Col­lege of Jour­nal­ism.http://digitalstorytelling10.eventbrite.com/ A unique event for jour­nal­ists and cre­atives of the future. Bring­ing together pio­neers of dig­i­tal media and the tech­nol­ogy behind them to solve the question:

How do we cre­ate bet­ter sto­ries using dig­i­tal media?

The event is free! Any spon­sor could get the atten­tion of more than 100 impor­tant journalists. 

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