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.

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.

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.

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).

The main focus of work on schome is currently on the use of Teen Second Life to give people ‘a lived experience’ of radically different models of education.

You can also read about Schome on the Futurelab site.

Raph Koster is the former creative director of Sony Online who also directed the Star Wars Galaxies MMOG and was lead designer on the groundbreaking Ultima Online. For the last year or so he has been working as the founder and president of Areae producing an upcoming platform for online games called Metaplace.

But Metaplace is much more than a way to build games — it is promising to open up virtual worlds (like Second Life) and massively multiplayer online games to the Web. By providing a set of open standards and APIs it will be possible for anybody to build and host their own virtual world or game and, crucially, for people to move their characters between these worlds.

Exciting stuff!