We’re going to use the approach taken by E-Democracy.Org and in the public issues forums in Minneapolis, St Paul and Roseville, Minnesota and in Newham and Brighton & Hove in the UK. OnlineGroups.Net has worked closely with Steven Clift and Tim Erickson from E-Democracy.Org as they have used GroupServer for all their online groups over the last few years.

The next step is to set up an independent and non-partisan steering team to support the forum. We are holding a public meeting for people who are interested in participative edemocracy, to introduce them to the public issues forum concept and to form a steering team.

If you are local, please support this initiative by publicising the meeting to people who are advocates for public participation in the democratic process. You can print and display this notice about the meeting (PDF, 37kb). And if you are interested in eDemocracy, please come along.

Although this project will help to build the profile of OnlineGroups.Net, it’s not commercially driven. I am doing it because I think it’s a good idea and I’d like to see it succeed.

In the adult world, the default is email. If nine out of ten people adopt the new technology and one keeps using email, everyone has to keep using email. That’s why we built GroupServer and OnlineGroups.Net to use email.

In the youth world, there is no default. It’s a highly dynamic mix of SMS, IM, social networking and MMORGs.

So what do you do if people won’t adopt your technology? I think do as the Halcum folks do and adopt theirs.

OnlineGroups.Net allows you to create your own site and then add online groups. Sites and trial groups are free. Our online groups work equally via email and the web. There are other tools that provide this but we believe that OnlineGroups.Net has the most usable interface. What other tools don’t do is allow you to have your online groups on your own site. With a little help from us, OnlineGroups.Net sites can be completely customised.

We want to have tens of thousands of sites running on this service so that we can make GroupServer better faster, and build our specialised services business. So please, start a site and try out our online groups, tell us what you think of them and, if you like them, spread the good word (web feed).

The course has literally zero content and zero face to face. The first cohort are completing their final requirements at present. Amazingly, only 40% of enrollees dropped out, the staff have not burned out, and Ultraversity hasn’t run out of money.

The “researchers” (students), typically mid-career in jobs like Teaching Assistant, participate in communities of practice along with “learning facilitators” and guest subject matter experts. Their “action inquiry” and “critical reflection” processes typically involve activities relating to their work contexts, and peer review in small groups.

It’s pretty cool that this kind of thing is succeeding. While I am excited about enquiry learning, and how similar it is to the learning taking place in organisations, the questions that jumped out for me were about online participation in general.

Firstly, this course has genuinely created engaging social contexts with no face to face. Of course it doesn’t work for all but those who stayed seem to have had a rich experience. The 100% online approach does not seem to have been an impediment to this. In fact, Gina actually suggested that, in some ways, the online environment creates a more intense social experience than face to face. Everything you “say” is recorded, including if you do not respond. You may have more time to respond but the readers have all the time in the world to evaluate your reply.

Secondly, Gina suggests from her experience that the key to successful online participation is facilitation. Now, I know the value of facilitation. We try to make sure that each online group has a Participation Coach and that that person is trained and supported. We also provide an eCampus where 700 post-graduate learners collaborate actively online with no facilitation whatsoever. And I know that, with all the facilitation in the world, an online group with a bad design will not succeed. Where I wonder are the research and conversations about the relative impact of design and facilitation on the participation that takes place? And, under what conditions is it possible to do without (expensive and difficult-to-scale) facilitation? Is it possible, in fact to embed the social principles that underpin facilitation and design in the very software?

The question that we explored was the relevance of the digital age to the five competencies that have been cooked up by the OECD and are being adopted into the NZ curriculum.

Here are some things that I learned on this weekend…

Not everyone is as optimistic about the online world as I am. To some people, the idea of deep human contact occurring online just doesn’t make sense. To them, the idea of people substituting online relationships for physical ones is appalling. Collaboration in MMORPGs seems like people “ganging up and killing things”.

I got to thinking about the notion of positive feedback received from a computer (say in a single player game) being somehow as nourishing as that received from people. It seems slightly shocking, even to me. What about the self-esteem building that can occur shooting baskets in the yard or hitting a fence-post with a stone? Of course, the inanimate objects are simply mediating social phenomena. Stone-throwing was once (and in many places still is) a highly valued survival skill. Shooting baskets can provide entry to the good team which then gangs up to try to beat the others.

Have you ever noticed how cut-throat sport is? Sure there’s collaboration within each team but there is no second prize at the end of the game. It often horrifies me how even kids’ teams will keep racking up goals when they are obviously mismatched with their opponents. And it horrifies me, the callousness with which players sacrifice pawns and even bishops in the abstraction of war on the chessboard.

To me, the gore of killing monsters in a computer game is actually less shocking than some of those things.

I am not an unqualified optimist, however. I know that psyberspace is a boundaryless and uncertain place. I know that inhumanity can occur here as much as humanity can. One area that particularly concerns me is the shortage of public space on the Web. OK, I can blog here and you can come and go. This is pretty close to public. My photos, however are on flickr and I don’t know that I could get them out. OK, I’ve got copies but not of my tags. My daughter spends lost of time on MSN where she has photos, blog posts and message archives (though I don’t think she can access those). To her it’s all free and just works. What is the price that she pays?

I want to use our software to build public spaces, a commons on the Web. I want it to be as easy to take your content out as it is to put it in. I want people to stay because they want to and not because they are locked in.

OK, there are ideas for some other posts here but this is what I have returned from the Symposium thinking.

It has categories but why not tags?

Would this work inside an organisation? Will it work here?

A lot of the questions look more like discussion-starters than Q&A candidates, to me. How does this do more than a good conversation medium with rich metadata?

Should I be asking these questions at Yahoo! Answers?

How many times have you beein in something like this:

7 Dec 1400: Simon, Susan & Sharon are OK. Sam & Sally to confirm.

How many times has it been much messier than this?

If everyone’s got an up-to-date digital schedule on the same server, free/busy searches can work well.

Here’s a low tech approach to using email for free/busy searches:

       December
       0                 1                   2                   3
       1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
       t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f S S m t w t f 
Janne  + + - - + + + + + ? ? + + + + - - - ? ? - - - - - - - - - + 
Ville  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + -
Kalle  - - - - + + + + e e e - - - + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
Sanna  - - e e - - - + ? ? ? + + + + + - - + + - - - - - - + + + +
                     * *           *

Someone to write a script to generate these (that isn’t in Finnish?

I said it in an attempt to provoke some controversy but to my suprise, people nodded their agreement. As I reflected on it, I realised that it is true. Despite the terrible interface, Elsie sends over 500 text messages per month and, presumably receives just as many. It’s all socialising with her friends but isn’t that one of the most important things for her to be learning to do? And, given that access to and literacy with this technology is increasingly ubiquitous, why shouldn’t it be used for other learning areas?

My son Ed has recently acquired an iRiver. For now he’s using its 5 gigs for expanding his musical awareness but he could easily carry his homework around on it.

Now, a report prepared by education.au for the ACT Department of Education and Training suggests that cell phones and iPods will soon be core accessories for learners. It’s called Emerging Technologies: A framework for thinking (900kb PDF).

Stephen Demming is a world expert in the use of stories to spread insiration and good ideas.