Archive - 2004

September 29th

FOAF

Today, I received an email that Tribe.net is now supporting FOAF.

I added it to PLINK, and now my PLINK listing only has my first name.

So, now, I have three good FOAF files:
Ecademy
Tribe.net
LiveJournal

The three FOAF browsers I've been playing with most these days are:
PLINK
FoaF Explorer
foafnaut(no listing there, yet)
FOAF: Web View

September 28th

Random Links

As I dig through my emails and messages of the day, I am finding a few interesting things.

I received an email from Intelliseek. They have two interesting sites. http://campaignradar.com provides an interesting snapshot of what is being discussed in the blogosphere with regards to the upcoming election.

If you go to http://www.blogpulse.com/index.html, you can do your own searches on the blogosphere. It looks like a nice tool.

In blogland, my article Herding free-range cats is on CivicSpace.

September 25th

New York Times Magazine

Well, my blogging at Greater Democracy makes the New York Times Magazine, sort of.

I am the greybeard sitting behind and to the left of Markos Moulitsas. However, my name, nor Greater Democracy, isn't mentioned in the article.

September 24th

Better?

(Originally published in Greater Democracy)

“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

This is a question that gets asked during just about every election, and the answer usually seems to be more, “Do you want the current administration to remain in power?” People who do want the current administration to remain in power, cite examples of how they are better off, and point out that the places where they are better off are not a result of the current administration. Those who want regime change site examples about how things are not as good as the were four years ago, and how the things that are better are not a result of the current administration.

(Categories: )

Herding free-range cats

Herding free-range cats: An exploration into the organizational dynamics of an open software project

On a mid-September weekend in 2004, about two dozen people sat around a table on the fifth floor of an ecologically friendly building in San Francisco. Almost everyone there was under twenty-five, almost everyone there was male, almost everyone there had a laptop fired up and connected to the internet over WiFi, and everyone there was interested in finding ways to better use technology to bring about social change.

It was the first CivicSpace Summit. A year and a half earlier, a couple college kids who had become excited about electoral politics through Howard Dean’s presidential campaign had started talking together. They wanted to build the ultimate open source campaign tool. It would use some sort of content management, syndication of articles, maybe some sort of buddy list, etc. All the sites would be connected together.