[p2p-research] mass collaboration projects in australia

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends




Dear Darren and Mark,

on May 5, I publish this excerpt, and I wonder if you could not add some
commentary for publishing at the same time, based on your own experiences,
adding  your expections for the next five years?

see bottom of
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/248/is-mass-collaboration-all-its-cracked-up-to-be

Michel


Luckily in Australia we have many bold institutions, or more to the point
bold individuals in the cultural and public sectors, who are dipping their
toes or even a whole foot, into the 2.0 Web. I will mention just a few, to
demonstrate the breadth and inventiveness of our experiments so far.

WikiNorthia <http://www.wikinorthia.net.au/> is a wiki local history project
coordinated by a few community libraries in Melbourne. The City of Melbourne
put their 5 year plan into a wiki as part of public consultation, called
FutureMelbourne <http://www.futuremelbourne.com.au/wiki/view/FMPlan>. Founders
and Survivors <http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/> is an Australian
Research Council project, tracking Tasmanian convicts and their descendents
by combining detailed historical records with publicly contributed family
history artefacts. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney was the first Australian
institution<http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/04/08/powerhouse-museum-joins-the-commons-on-flickr-the-what-why-and-how/>to
take part in the Flickr Commons project, and engages with its online
community in a consistent and considerate way.
OpenAustralia<http://www.openaustralia.org/>is an open source project
with no institutional backing that reworks Hansard
records to make parliamentary proceedings more accessible and politicians
more accountable.

Lastly I could not talk about mass collaboration today without mentioning
the National Library’s Australian Newspapers Digitisation
Program<http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/>.
After OCRing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition>newspapers
spanning some 150 years, Rose
Holley<http://www.slideshare.net/RHmarvellous/enhancement-and-enrichment-of-digital-content-by-user-communities-the-australian-newspapers-experience-march-2009>and
her team put their millions of pages and
OCR text up on the web and invited the public to correct the texts. With
little publicity, it has found a niche of people who enjoy correcting the
text from old Australian newspapers. Thousands of users have collectively
corrected <http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/hallOfFame> millions of
lines of text, and told the Library how addictive and interesting they found
it. This project has really found a sweet spot for user contributions and I
am already looking forward to hearing how it evolves in the future.

The range of projects being undertaken shows there is no shortage of good
ideas and interested users in this country. If we keep up the same pace we
may soon be showing the rest of the world how it’s done.
Where to now?

Mass collaboration offers a way for groups to organise without having an
organisation. But organise to do what? Mass collaboration has been used very
effectively to organise around single issues or single events, but it is yet
to really cross over to the kind of sustained action that we so far only
know how to do through lobby groups, politics, charities and the like.

A major part of the problem lies in crossing back from the online landscape
into the political world we are so used to, where groups need to be
incorporated to be taken seriously, political responsibilities may stop at
an arbitrary border, and the law marches at a speed that could be considered
glacial in internet time. These difficulties mean that mass collaboration
projects struggle to be taken seriously and often don’t bother, preferring
to stay in their sphere of influence — the online sphere.

Wikimedia Australia
<http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia>is such a group
— we want to take the interesting, amazing things we’ve
learned about mass collaboration offline, and help more sectors and more
individuals take part in similar projects. Not only should everyone have
equal access to use free cultural works, like Wikipedia, but just as
importantly, everyone should have an equal opportunity to participate in
creating them. We have certainly struggled at times to meet the expectations
of meatspace <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meatspace>, and
so a challenge I see looming for us as a society, is: how can we better
accommodate mass collaborative projects making changes in the real world?
What organisational structures might we be able to support? How might they
be accommodated in law <http://vermontvirtual.org/Main_Page>, especially
given their borderless nature? If we can find answers to these questions,
then maybe we will see the potential of mass collaboration as a genuinely
revolutionary force.


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

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