Posts tagged collaboration

A growing number of subcultures, digital communities and guilds have turned their back on ad-supported social media and migrated their social and cultural activities to semi-private digital spaces, chat rooms and Discord servers. We believe these spaces have the potential to become decentralised institutions that are financed, owned and governed by their own members. To support this vision we propose Moving Castles, an organisational metaphor and real-time media type which combines collective agency and public participation in modular and portable multiplayer miniverses.

In order to be a viable alternative to clearnet stadiums, Moving Castles must reflect the following principles. The principles are adapted from the design goals described in Modular Politics.

1. Collective: Many contributors share control through transparent and real-time governance mechanisms.
2. Portable: To avoid lock-in mechanisms, Moving Castles have the ability to move freely between platforms, standards and protocols, from private to public, without losing any value, knowledge, or lore in the process.
3. Modular: Communities should have the ability to construct Moving Castles by creating, importing, and arranging composable parts (such as avatars, props and environments) together as a coherent whole while making these parts available for others to reuse and adapt.
4. Interoperable: They have the ability to interact with other communities; communicating, playing games, and sharing knowledge & skills in order to help these communities become Moving Castles themselves.

via https://trust.support/feed/moving-castles

ForgeFed is an upcoming federation protocol for enabling interoperability between version control services. It’s built as an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users of any ForgeFed-compliant service to interact with the repositories hosted on other instances. The goal of the project is to support all of the major activities connected to project management, including bug reports, merge requests, and notifications across instances.

via https://forgefed.peers.community/

The advantage of working together is to get a complex task right, to be successful at making the right decision. The higher the complexity, the more specialists cannot be successful, but teams can be. This is important in healthcare in addressing complex diseases and conditions that can interact with each other. It is also generally important in dealing with complex tasks of all kinds. The cost of having such a team in place might seem high, but for complex cases such a team will prove to be more effective and less costly than the alternative. The challenge is making sure the teams work together smoothly and efficiently. This will yield better results than specialists working separately.

via https://medium.com/complex-systems-channel/why-teams-c0a8c6c9acf7

If you’re already a coder: Glitch makes every other development environment feel lonely and old-fashioned, as coding starts to feel more like simultaneous editing in Google Docs and less like the chore of reviewing pull requests. Everything you create is automatically deployed in realtime onto cloud servers, so there’s no provisioning of servers or management of infrastructure, just the joy of creating. If you’ve never coded before: Glitch is the place to start. We’ve got a friendly and welcoming community (we don’t tolerate people being jerks) and you start by remixing apps that already work, running on real web servers that you don’t have to learn how to manage. If you do get stuck, anyone in the Glitch community can come in and offer to help, just as easy as raising your hand.

via https://medium.com/glitch/welcome-to-glitch-fe161d0fc39b

Death and change are essential to growth and evolution. The bird has to leave the nest. New trees spring up in the forest where old trees decay. A species only acquires adaptive traits with new generations. The old must make space for the new; anything else is stagnation. This is especially true of purposeful work. Because you’re there for more than just a job, achieving the larger mission in the future can require the end of something in the present.

via https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/on-firing-myself–6586512c6359

The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much more.

via https://jupyter.org/

Last year I turned off all my notifications. I stopped booking meetings. I started living asynchronously. Now instead of being interrupted throughout the day—or rushing from one meeting to the next—I sit down and get work done. I work a lot. I communicate with hundreds of people a day. I collaborate extensively. But I do so on my own terms, at my own tempo. You can live more asynchronously, too. I’ll explain the benefits. I’ll show you how.

via https://medium.freecodecamp.com/live-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea

Since Germany is one of the most successful economies in the world and Bavaria is one of the most successful economies in Germany, the thought did cross my mind that trust might be one of the secrets of economic success. Steve Knack, an economist at the World Bank with a long-standing interest in trust, once told me that if one takes a broad enough view of trust, “it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia”. In other words, without trust — and its vital complement, trustworthiness — there is no prospect of economic development. Simple activities become arduous in a low-trust society. How can you be sure you won’t be robbed on the way to the corner store? Hire a bodyguard? (Can you trust him?) The watered-down milk is in a locked fridge. As for something more complex like arranging a mortgage, forget about it. Prosperity not only requires trust, it also encourages it. Why bother to steal when you are already comfortable?

via http://timharford.com/2016/08/the-meaning-of-trust-in-the-age-of-airbnb/

Are global solutions impossible? Not at all. But global solutions are not composed of standardised identical units; they are ecosystems, organic mosaics of local solutions. For example, nature has a robust global solution to growing forests. It is not a single very large tree that covers 30% of the planet’s surface. It is not a single species of tree cloned in tens of billions of units across the whole globe. It is diversity: local adaptation, commensalism, some competition. A forest on the Mediterranean coast occupies the same ecological niche as one in Siberia, but the two consist of entirely different species, and are very different along almost any other dimension. Nature gets there by evolution: try many things, more or less at random (variation); then weed out those who do not work (natural selection); iterate.

via https://edgeryders.eu/en/blog/smart-swarms-vs-big-funding-how-to-build-a–100-million-dollars

And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all other things being equal. (And I’m saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for telecommuting - personal preference, getting access to people who cannot co-locate, etc. But for business productivity I’m not seeing much, if any, evidence).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145097

The overarching goals of the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) are to facilitate to emergence of a Web and resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections, to demonstrate the utility of this environment, and to see widespread adoption of this environment.

http://openannotation.org/