open source

"Free as in what? A debate on open source vs. free culture" at Eyebeam 10/29/09

October 29, 2009
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Eyebeam - 540 W 21st Street, NYC
http://upgrade.eyebeam.org/2009/10/free-as-in-what

Open Source/Drupal Week in the Northeast: February 23-28

February 23-26 Code4Lib 2009 in Providence, RI costs money, but has been sold out for weeks anyway
February 27 Drupal4Lib Camp in Darien, CT FREE, also sold (freed) out
February 28 DrupalCampNYC6 in NY, NY FREE, meals provided, and there are still seats available

Another ShinJames Yeocabs project

Two Radical Reference volunteers, James Jacobs and ShinJoung Yeo, both librarians at Stanford University helped develop an Open Source Lab "to be a nexus on campus for the discussion, advocacy, and technical support of community-based technologies and information systems" at the institution, and it was written up in Red Hat Magazine.

Radical Reference at the Mid-Atlantic Radical Bookfair

Radical Reference will be conducting two workshops on Saturday October 20th in lovely Baltimore. You can see a full schedule of speakers, tables and other workshops here.
Descriptions of the workshops we are conducting are here. We'll have a table with (hopefully) some exciting crafty stuff too, so come over, it should be pretty great.

QUESTION: documenting peer to peer practices in all social domains, where to find volunteers?

question / pregunta: 

Since November 2006, I have been documenting, through the wiki at p2pfoundation.net, the emergence of open/free, participatory/p2p, and commons oriented social movements in all areas of social life. We (but mostly myself) have created 5,491 pages of documentation which have been viewed 1,732,364 times. I have often thought that only librarians might be really motivated by collaborating in such a project to build a free knowledge base, and my question is: how would I find the forums where I could appeal for such assistance.

Answers


Answer posted by:
jim miller

I have been mulling over your question for the past couple of weeks, and after looking into the P2P Foundation web pages for a while this evening I can better understand why volunteers may be reluctant to come forward. It appears you and the other organizers of this site have already done a
formidable amount of work, and those of us browsing through the pages quite understandably may be thinking "what could I do to improve on this project?". One approach might be for you to pick out the several or possibly half a dozen things that most frustrate you about the site. Are
there things that seem inconsistently cataloged? Hard to find? Hard to pin down just what is the major topic of particular pages?...

Possibly there are problems with how content is added - including reviewing or vetting, or indeed even pinning down who SHOULD have the option to edit or make changes. In any case, I wonder if there isn't a way to break this into smaller, more manageable tasks. The newcomer probably
does not see most of the shortcomings that may be obvious to those of you who have plainly invested a LOT of time and effort into building these pages.

Given the number of hits you are getting, it appears you are already attracting potentially interested researchers and activists. But few people want to volunteer unless they see a benefit to themselves personally. You quite rightly guess that librarians are the logical people to build a knowledge base, and indeed Radical Reference is at least the beginnings of a good one. In the larger library world, Questionpoint and lists such as Stumpers are others. So it was a good idea to put your call for volunteers to us, in case there are readers of our site (maybe even some of us regulars) who may have ideas on how to help out, once we read more in the P2P Foundation pages. Another possible source of volunteers might be Library and Information school programs; possibly even Public Affairs schools, where students might help out as part of a school or
research project. Even some undergraduate level programs might be a source of volunteers - for example the few schools such as Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC - where volunteer service is part of the requirement for
graduation. What you would need to do is read carefully in the college's web site and publications, to see who decides what the projects are - or who you would contact to inquire about possible interest in your project. One way to find out what colleges offer work-study or volunteer programs
might be to search sites such as www.collegeview.com , using the phrase "community service" in its main search box in upper right. Web directories, such as www.google.com/dirhp can get you into lists of colleges and universities such as
www.google.com/Top/Reference/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/Directories/
These seem to be mostly directories of names, states, and major fields of study; but it might be worth looking through the list to see if they mention public service, or community service, etc.

But I would think the first step, in any of these approaches, is to figure out just what you most want to improve in the P2P Foundation - what few most important things are not working as well as you would like them to?

Drupal Camp NYC July 2007

I hope folks will go to Drupal Camp NYC on July 14 at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. Check out the sessions page to see what's appropriate for you. Notice that the whole things starts with PHP 101 for Non-Programmers!

Massachusetts Library Association Conference -- Radical Reference Presentation

Radical Reference:
Community Librarianship and Free/Open Source Technology

Presented at the Massachusetts Library Association Confererence, Friday May 4, 2007 11am-12:15pm.

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