Browsing Opie's blog

Opie's blog

News, Roots, Shoots and Seeds (greenhouse, seed catalogue)

Thursday, November 30:

Surprisingly warm day, but skies are gray, here west of Boston.

The good news is that the activist agenda is moving along.

And the software base is solid and reliable. New releases every two days. We have had not a single major bug in new code for a very long time--testimony to the underlying architecture and the continuing care in coding.

We are learning each day more about Agile development. Agile development requires daily discussions and daily goals, lots of close, careful interaction. Agile development requires the ability to "helicopter" between architecture and strategy, to use cases, implementation, to resources and micro-schedule. At heart, it takes a village that wants to live and work in a particular way. Thanks team!

I can write something here, responding to the news and opportunities of the day.

Thanksgiving morning!

Lots to give thanks for this year...The software is coming along nicely, lots of cool stuff out there in the world of citizen-created content, including widgets, video, open source code, as well as academic course notes, bibliographies, lots of interesting things being done by librarians with wikis, etc. etc. etc...

A wonderful cornocopia of the commons!

My biggest discovery, by way of my kids, is rap music, or rather, rap, as a wide, deep, creative world of commentary and reflection..Reflection from the bottom up, sometimes, but increasingly thoughtful..

Saturday afternoon, November 18: I am having a lot of fun with the new site design. Really fast coding, really fast ajax inclusion.

Pretty cool. The funny thing is, none of the people working on this design are professional designers (mary, diane, me). We are systems architects and coders--what we did was simply make the cleanest possible interface.

If you are looking for somewhere to go for lunch on election day, and are in the Cambridge area, or can log into Second Life, here is a suggestion. Our friend Lisa Williams' remarkable Placeblog is focusing on the election:

From Lisa today:

Hi!
It may still be possible to get a seat at this event, one of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society's regular lunch talks. If you're interested, email the wonderful Erica George at egeorge@cyber.law.harvard.edu. If you're not near Harvard Square, this event will be available as a Webcast and a live broadcast to Second Life, the massively multiplayer online environment, where the Berkman Center has its own island and conference center. *Participating in person or online is free and if you want more details you can find them here*:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/fellows_luncheon_series

*Placeblogger will also be entering a limited alpha release on Election Day -- we're looking for a few people who are interested in blogs and citizen journalism to poke around the site* and tell us what your favorite blogs are (we're doing a feature on the Top 10 Local Blogs in America. We have our picks, but we want to know what you think). People who use RSS readers and can load an OPML file into them are especially welcome, as we're testing our ability to provide custom OPML reading
lists of blogs to visitors. If you're interested, email me at lisa@cadence90.com.

Lisa Williams
lisa@cadence90.com

*Placeblogs Across the Nation on Election Day*
The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society
23 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA
Thursday, Nov. 7, 2006
12PM

*Lisa Williams of H2otown.info*, a notable news and community site for Watertown, MA, will discuss Placeblogger.com, a browsable directory and live aggregator of 650 placeblogs. Williams is building Placeblogger in cooperation with the Center for Citizen Media and Pressthink. *Dan Gillmor, executive director of the Center for Citizen Media*, will also be on hand.

*Placeblogs are blogs devoted to a geographical community* -- town, city, county. They are online watering holes to gather and knit up increasingly frayed communities where, in winter, people leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark -- and don't know their neighbors.

Good Monday afternoon. We are still playing with the software, getting ready to do some sort of a quiet launch by next Monday. Today we are putting in a new WSWIG editor into the outliner. And continuing to work on features for our next release.

I am acutely aware that I don't know what a workstation for peace should do. All of the things that make online communities so much fun--shared purpose, posse, chance meetings, action and creativity--they still have to be invented in the context of working together here online to create ecosystems for peace.

The good news is that we have been building, layer by layer, a foundation for communities of practice. The technology is strong. The feature set is powerful. The tool for site and site ecosystem creation is flexible and quick to implement ideas.

But I admit it, I'm a platform inventor, not a community leader. So I am looking for collaborators.

I am doing some informal recruiting of friends and acquaintances (and new friends and acquaintances) who know more than I do about social revolutions and how to make them.

Get in touch if you have ideas you want to share or implement.

I can be reached at secondsuperpower@yahoo.com

Or just sign up for an account and start experimenting tonight.

Best,

Opie

Technology for Peace

Click here for Opie's morning meditations..for Saturday, November 4, 2006

The trends ("there is nothing so significant as a good trend")

Steps toward a theory of technology for peace ("there is nothing so useful as a good theory")

Welcome to the new version of OPML Workstation

Thanks to the OPML Community

Thanks to Dave Winer

OPML Workstation is a test-bed for next-generation applications