What a hot discussion! I believe it needs some coolig down - otherwise people continue to discuss about their strong beliefs! While Kaliya certainly has a point, I don't think it is appropriate to insult Michael who has been a great servant to this community for a long time. Frankly speaking, Kalyia, your words aren't building trust in me. And building trust in virtual communities is more important for me when I chose with whom I collaborate - rather than the tools for collaboration. Just yesterday, I wrote an article about the issue of trust at http://radical-inclusion.com/2009/11/15/trust-in-virtual-teams-the-ri-case-study-1/. My conclusion is that we build trust by observing people's behavior. And I have a great trust in Michael.
It is true that most of the tools we use for social sites are proprietory and produced by companies. Well, most of the food I eat is produced by companies, the coffe at Starbucks, my Gym belongs to a chain, etc. While we should be conscious on our choice as consumers, we cannot avoid buying goods that come from big corporations (at least I am not ready to avoid them). Again - the choice should be based on the behavior of the companies, and we should boycot those which do harm to the world. With virtual hugs to the community Holger Nauheimer Getting back to the tool discussion. Our new team of Radical Inclusion has tested like 200 or 300 tools for virtual collaboration over the last 8 months. All of them have pros and cons, and we prefer to use a mixture of them. I often work with Ning groups for a simple reason: they are very easy to use, even for non-technology people (and there are many of those in the OS community). They are intuitive and encourage people to engage. I often recommend them to my clients. You might have a look at Otto Scharmer's Ning group, which has now more than 3000 members after less than a year! Personally, I prefer wikis. Our team has just bought a license for PbWorks (also a proprietory solution) and we love it. However, working with Wikis is not everybody's cup of tea, at least not for now. I am not sure - maybe we should test - how responsive the OS community is with regards to Wikis. As some of you might remember, we organized an open conference in May 2009, called Real Time Virtual Collaboration, where 50 people from around the world worked on issues of passion. We will repeat this exercise soon. Meanwhile, I will become a member of the OS Ning community... * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
