Dan Dixon, who worked with us to help us define our ’social architecture’ and to develop our initial product roadmap, has a chapter called Pattern Languages for CMC Design in the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. It will be a chunky tome, over 1,000 pages, but even so a list price of $495 does sound like they are actively discouraging individuals from buying it. If you are a student, or work at a large corporate enterprise, I guess you could hassle your library to pick up a copy. Otherwise you might have to settle for reading Dan’s blog.
As I said at the time:
The patterns workshop (which Dan and Ed ran for us) gave us a way of thinking about what we wanted to build that neatly bridged the gap between vague hand waving about ‘community’ and getting sucked down into the nitty gritty of interface design.
If you think you could use some similar help I highly recommend getting in touch with them.
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky, which is a cracking good read. There is one passage early in the book which really resonates with what we are trying to do with Beanbag.
From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action
For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state , directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.
The Web is enabling people with shared interests and common goals to come together to tackle old problems in new ways and to challenge the status quo. It allows large numbers of people with wildly varying levels of time, energy and commitment to all contribute meaningfully to a collaborative effort without the overhead traditionally associated with building an organisation. A group can be much more fluid and correspondingly more efficient at realising its goals.
Classroom 2.0 is US-based site which describes itself as a social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.
They seem to be making good use of social software tools themselves, including a wiki and a blog. And the site itself is built using Ning.
Tomorrow’s Professor Blog is:
A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education.
The blog and the associated mailing list seems to be aimed at science and engineering graduates embarking on an academic career, and tends more towards the longer ‘editorial’ type posts than some of the more conversational blogs or ‘tumblelogs‘ (like this one).