Principles of Collaboration

In preparation for a meeting tomorrow, I went back to my Gaia University Master's Degree Output Packets 2 & 6 to re-distill the Principles of Collaboration and put them in a more visual format.

I've posted them over at the 'Meta-Collab Wiki', which claims to be "a collaboration on collaboration". However, nobody except me seems to be using the site -- I welcome collaborators from far and wide to take a look at what's over there (much of it fairly academic) and start adding your thoughts in.


Whad'ya all think of these principles? Anybody find them useful in your work in the world? What other principles or directives have you found useful?



P.S. As a sort of meta-note, 'Wikia' uses mediawiki software, which is the same software used for wikipedia. As Greg Landua and others can attest to, adding or changing information on wikipedia can be a complex social & technical design challenge -- I encourage everyone to work through the technical part of things by experimenting with the mediawiki software on less-trafficked sites like Wikia.

Digiphon: A Digital Colophon

Here's a useful new word for the digital web 2.0 age:

Digiphon

A digiphon is

• A digital colophon
• A written piece of metadata
  that describes the digital tools (including computer hardware, computer
  software, and any other digital equipment) used to create a piece of
  digital media.

The word digiphon is a conjunction of the words 'digital' and 'colophon'. A colophon is "a brief description usually located at the end of a book, describing production notes relevant to the edition". Based on this definition, a digiphon is "a brief description, usually located at the end of a piece of digital media, describing production notes relevant to the digital media".

In the quickly-evolving world of digital media, including a digiphon in a piece of work can help other creators of digital media learn from each other's work. The digiphon is a succinct description of the production tools and process.

Examples

We currently see something similar to a digiphon at the bottom of many webpages -- "Powered By MediaWiki" or "Powered By Wordpress".

Here is a digiphon from a multi-media learning object created on Moodle:

Digiphon

• This media was produced on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) with 4GB of RAM.

• I recorded and edited all the video using my computer's built-in camera, QuickTime Pro, and iMovie '06

• Audio was recorded using Audio Hijack Pro, edited with Quicktime and uploaded directly to GEL. Direct embedding was done using the embed tag.

• Survey was constructed, completed, and analyzed using SurveyMonkey.

History

The word digiphon was coined by Ethan C. Roland during his time at Gaia University working on a MSc in Collaborative Eco-Social Design. The program
encourages thorough documentation of work through, shared digitally with the Gaia University community on a Moodle-based Elearning platform.

Farmer's Market Report for the FPC

Here's the link to a Winrock report on Farmers' markets in the mid-atlantic:

http://www.winrock.org/agriculture/files/wallacemktrpt.pdf

Should be useful for the farmer's market folks...