online communities
cpikas | May 1, 2010Anne Jefferson from Highly Allochthonous pointed me to a new essay from Geoscientist Online, the member magazine of the Geological Society (UK). That essay points both to the survey of women geobloggers (previously mentioned here) and a survey done by Lutz Geissler, Robert Huber, and Callan Bentley. (probably haven't mentioned before).
In the Geoscientist essay by Michael Welland, he discusses his own slowness in taking up blogging, but also his enjoyment of the geoblogosphere and the community he finds there. He learns of new things he wouldn't come across in his other readings and he…
cpikas | March 9, 2010Sometimes you have to just let go and release something to the wild. I have mentioned on a few occasions a qualitative study I did prior to the network study. To be honest, I think I actually did it in the Fall of 2007 ?! I thought (and was encouraged to believe) that I could get a journal article from it, but at this point, I've moved on. With the recent publication of another article on science blogs, I thought that this needed to be out there. Plus, it's really not fair to the participants who gave me their time.
After re-reading this just now, I don't think it's bad, but the title is…
cpikas | January 17, 2010Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist
SK â definition of civility at your site â if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about.
F-r - politeness or is it being a decent human â in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language â so itâs not just being polite. Itâs more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome.*
Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome â…
cpikas | December 10, 2009I've weighed in a few times on how to build online communities or support scientists online, but it's really worth paying attention to when you get an actual scientist who is also very involved in and interested in social software tell you what he thinks. Cameron Neylon did just that in a recent blog post (comments on ff). I'll quote liberally from his blog and feedback some ideas.
(he uses SS4S to stand for social software for science) All of the numbered paragraphs are direct quotes from his post.
1. SS4S will promote engagement with online scientific objects and through this encourage and…
cpikas | August 12, 2009Why Friendfeed's acquisition by Facebook concerns this user.
The title is an imitation of Walt's Monday, old, and insufficiently paranoid. I love friendfeed. It's really the porous boundaries between the groups that really does it. You get to know people because things they share/post are "liked" by people you know and trust. I've been introduced to tons of librarians and scientists I would never have met in other settings. A few scientists and I also wrote an abstract for a paper about how friendfeed works - each of us was from a different country! Blogs that never get any comments are "…
cpikas | August 1, 2009I've been fascinated by these projects, but I felt that I didn't have sufficient time to really do them justice here. Michael Nielsen has discussed them in several venues so it wasn't clear what I could add. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized that I probably do have different readers than Michael and my view is definitely different than his (plus he nudged me on friendfeed) so here's a discussion for you.
After that rambling preface - you might ask, what's Polymath? It's the name of this project to do massively collaborative mathematics first suggested by Tim Gowers on his blog…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Last set of comps readings, I talked about sense of community:
belonging, having influence, fulfillment of needs, and emotional
support. Now, let's talk about the physics version of
"community" - cohesive subgroups. In a graph, these are
groups of nodes in a graph that are more connected to each other than
to other parts of the graph. Clumpy spots. If you read old
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/30594217">Wasserman and
Faust, you'll probably think of cliques, cores, and lambda
sets... some how these didn't do it for me - literally, when I was
trying to
href="http://terpconnect.…
cpikas | May 31, 2009Sunday morning I was all set to do another essay - just had to pick a
question source and question - when my mother in law called to say she
would be stopping by at about the same time I would be finishing up the
2 hour window, leaving no time for emergency house cleaning (no, I
haven't grown out of that yet despite being married for >10
years). So here are a few readings on "community" which I'll drop like
a hot potato and then run to clean the house.
Both Wellman and Rheingold dispute the idea that we're all "
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/43599073">Bowling Alone"
and assert…