MacWorld ran an article on how to set up Apples Pages to print out Avery labels. This is helpful information because Avery doesn’t have nearly as many ready-made templates for Pages as it does for Word. So the article walks the reader through the page and table settings. Excellent.

But MacWorld left out one crucial step: When you’re done, share it on the Web.

Avery doesn’t have a Pages template for its Beige Design Filing Label, Clear, 30 per sheet (#5029), so you made your own? Great! Why should we all have to re-do your work? Share it on the Web. Thanks!

By this time, “and then share it on the Web” should be a reflex on its way to becoming an instinct. The work of one can now remove a task from the checklist of millions. This is of evolutionary importance. Do it once and let the species move on.

Please. Thank you. And share it on the Web.

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Douglas Kaye, founder of IT Conversations and the Conversations Network, has launched SpokenWord.org. Here’s part of the announcement:

There are perhaps millions of audio and video spoken-word
recordings on the Internet. Think of all those lectures,
interviews, speeches, conferences, meetings, radio and TV
programs and podcasts. No matter how obscure the topic,
someone has recorded and published it on line.

But how do you find it?

SpokenWord.org is a new free on-line service that helps you
find, manage and share audio and video spoken-word
recordings, regardless of who produced them or where
they’re published. All of the recordings in the
SpokenWord.org database are discovered on the Internet and
submitted to our database by members like you.

This is another public-spirited work from a public-spirited guy who has assembled and inspired a public-spirited collective. [Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisers.]

[Tags: spokenword aggregators collaboration doug_kaye douglas_kaye ]

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Nature Magazine, which should be the stodgiest of the stodgiest, continues to show an admirable flexibility (stopping short of doing the full open access Monty). It’s now created Scitable, “a collaborative learning space for science undergraduates.” It’s got articles, online class tools, teacher collaborative tools, student collaborative tools, discussion areas, consultable experts… I haven’t yet gone through it all.

This initial implementation focuses on genetics. Nature is planning on expanding the topics.

On top of all that, it’s great to contemplate how blase we’ve become about the primordial value of collaborative tools. Collaboration is the new greed.

[Tags: nature_magazine education collaboration genetics teaching ]

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Ars Electronica is a festival with a conference embedded in it as one of dozens of tracks. It’s held in Linz, Austria, a beautiful city on Danube. Artists, geeks, academics and others gather, this year to discuss “A New Cultural Economy.” [Note: I am live-blogging, writing badly, making mistakes, missing stuff, and just generally going wrong. The conference is streamed, I believe]

This morning, Joi Ito, the conference “curator,” welcomes us. He talks about AE’s valuing of artists as those who (especially in Europe, he says) push technology forward by imagining uses. He shows a stack: Ethernet (computers), Internet (network), Web (content), and knowledge (Creative Commons). It took ten years to generate enough user-created content to be worth searching for, he says. But now we’re there. But we need to unlock the knowledge we’ve created via tech, open licensing, and the Semantic Web. We need to get past the copyright holders vs. the pirates bifurcation. We need to look at nuance and at the hybrid projects. And that’s what we’re going to do at AE, he says.

He argues against the idea that amateur vs. professional means good vs. excellent. Amateurs have access to high-quality tools and do what they do out of love. How do we adapt our culture, economy and government to adapt to a generation that would rather produce and remix than consume?

[This is a very rough overview of Joi’s remarks.]

[Tags: ars_electronica joi_ito copyright collaboration ]

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There’s an excellent story on the front page of the Boston Globe today, by Carolyn Johnson, about scientists who just go ahead and blab about their data before the village elders have given them permission.

Yay.

The article says:

Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up.

“Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn’t want to blab to the whole world about why it’s interesting,” said Michael Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not post “all the gory details of what someone is working on, because I don’t want my grad students necessarily to be scooped by someone else.”

Laub is just saying what everyone knows.¹ But the fact that everyone knows it and we’re ok with it is a sign of the problem with the system: The system we want maximizes knowledge and innovation, but the system we have swerves in order to preserve credit for individuals. From the discovery of the shape of DNA to AIDS research, we’ve seen some of the problems with the competitive model of science. But we also routinely see the benefits, as scientists work overtime in order to get credit for a discovery.

And yet, the mix seems wrong. The competitive model made more sense when it was more difficult to share data anyway. The collaborative model is proving itself in unexpected places. It’s clear that a mixed model works — some competitive, some collaborative — but it’s not clear how far we can push the slider toward the collaborative side. My hunch, and my hope, is that it’s way further than we would have thought, especially since experience shows that the satisfaction of being recognized as a continuously generous member of a network can at least equal that of authors of intermittent, officially-sanctioned publications.

[Tags: science open_science collaboration ]

¹I’m totally guessing about his, but I suspect that Laub actually talked with Johnson, the reporter, mainly about the virtues of open science, but noted that his group doesn’t give away absolutely all of its data…and it was only the last part of the sentence that made it in. As I say, I’m totally making this up, but the quotation had that sort of ring to it.

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Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and Ned Gulley of MathWorksMathLab are giving a Berkman talk called “The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse.”

Karim begins by looking at research by Meyer on the airplane’s hidden collaborative history: It didn’t spring whole cloth from the brow of the Wright brothers. E.g., Chanute served as a hub for pre-Wright research and innovation. The Wright brothers actively corresponded with him. Once the Wright brothers patented their inventions, innovation moved to Europe (which is why so many of our aviation terms are French … l’fusilage, anyone?).

Ned talks about the contest MathLab (where he works) runs every six months– sixteen times so far — designed to encourage the free flow of ideas. It’s a week-long open collaborative competition for MATLAB programmers. Entries are displayed, scored, and ranked immediately. Anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own. The leader is determined objectively by putting it through some hidden tests that judge its efficiency. (They don’t make the optimization suite public because they don’t want people to “game” it.) The prize is a t-shirt or baseball cap, although the real prize is reputation.

Ned shows a graph of entries and processing times. It’s quite a dramatic set of cliffs. On the other hand, there are lots of dots representing people who make “improvements” that aren’t improvements. This may be people with bad ideas or people whose ideas happen not to work the way MATLAB prefers.

The winning entries on average have contributions from 30 people. Ned says that when some code leaps ahead, you’ll see “splash” as tweakers try to improve it marginally, often making it marginally worse.

Q: In the commercial realm, what happens when an early innovator patents it?
You don’t get collaborative innovation.

People name their entries, and sometimes sell social signals with them: “Tweakfest” or “I wish I knew how this works.”

Ned says that if a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, then a hacker is only code’s way of making more code.

Karim talks about some statistical analysis of entries into the contest. He looks at how many lines an entrant borrows and how many times the entry’s reused. There is a power law distribution: A few lines are used thousands of times, but most are used zero to three times. His analysis shows that when it comes to entries that become leaders, borrowing pays off more than novelty.

Q: Have coders evolved in these games?
Yes. More collaborative. And more sophisticated in their gaming of the contest.

Topcoder.com uses this model to develop code solving practical problems. [Tags: berkman Karim_Lakhani ned_gulley collaboration ]

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Massify is a collaborative site for filmies. For example, you might view this audition tape and decide that Jannette Bloom should be given a role. If enough of you do, she will. The competition ends at midnight on Monday. The fact that Jannette, who is a really talented director who also sings real nice, is a friend of my daughters really shouldnt influence you.

Go, Jannette

Tags: hollywood film peer_production collaboration jannette_bloom

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