ACM: The Curse of Professional Societies

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the professional society for computer scientists, and it is one of my favorite examples of how organizational networks often impede their own missions. I was reminded of this just now, as I attempted to download a paper from its Digital Library.    (N1Y)

Although you can search its archives for free, you usually have to pay to download individual articles. No problem. I was more than willing to shell out $5 to $10 for an article I knew I wanted, thus saving me the convenience of driving down to Palo Alto to copy the article from the Stanford library. But when I tried to download this particular article, I discovered that not only would I have to pay for the article, I would also have to pay an annual subscription fee for the ACM Digital Library — a cool $99 a year.    (N1Z)

What’s wrong with this? Here’s ACM’s self-description (emphasis added):    (N20)

ACM is widely recognized as the premier membership organization for computing professionals, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession; enable professional development; and promote policies and research that benefit society.    (N21)

If your goal is to advance computing as a profession, why would you put 50 years worth of knowledge behind a firewall? The reasoning, of course, is revenue. But if your revenue model is conflicting with your mission, isn’t it time to reexamine the model?    (N22)

Computer science is special because of its living history. However, as sciences go, today’s programmers and computer scientists are more ignorant of their history than pretty much any other science. If the ACM wanted to advance the profession, it would do its part to make that history more accessible, not less.    (N23)

Wiki Developer Meeting Today; WikiWednesday Tomorrow

Two important events are happening in Wiki-land today and tomorrow. First, this afternoon at 2pm PDT (21:00 GMT), there will be a worldwide IRC meeting for Wiki developers on #wikiohana at irc.freenode.net. The main agenda item: WikiCreole. This was one of the outcomes from RecentChangesCamp last month. The cool thing is that folks have been hanging out regularly on the channel, and that Andreas Gohr whipped up an IRC logger for us. If you do any Wiki development, please join us!    (MBM)

Tomorrow night, WikiWednesday will be moving to Citizen Space in San Francisco, and I’ll be the inaugural speaker at the first non-Palo Alto event. I’ll be talking about my recent work on Wiki Interoperability:    (MBN)

Market growth is healthy for everyone in the Wiki world. More Wiki companies and technology means greater market awareness and innovation. But Wikis are also about community and collaboration. Are we as a community collaborating as much as we could? Are there opportunities we’re missing by not collaborating more? Eugene Eric Kim will preview his upcoming paper on Wiki interoperability, where he describes real-world end-user pain, concrete opportunities (especially ways Wiki developers can help the entire space by improving their own tools), and a practical strategy (WikiOhana) for achieving interoperability.    (MBO)

Hope to see many of you there!    (MBP)

March Conferences

This weekend, we’re having our fourth FLOSS Usability Sprint, once again sponsored by the good folks at Google. Participating projects will include Mozilla, WiserEarth, Social Source Commons, and Drupal! It should be a fantastic event, and we still have some slots for usability folks, so if you’d like to participate, please apply by the end of the day today.    (LYO)

Tonight is another installment of WikiWednesday at Socialtext‘s offices in Palo Alto. Bryan Pendleton of Xerox PARC will be discussing his research on conflict resolution and coordination on Wikipedia. I had a chance to talk briefly with him about his work last month, and his talk should be absolutely fascinating.    (LYP)

Finally, there’s going to be an unprecedented gathering of folks in the facilitation, Organizational Design, and collaboration community on March 21-23 called Nexus for Change. It will be held at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio (near Detroit). If you’re interested in catalyzing transformation in your organization and in society via collaboration, this is the place to be. I am tremendously bummed that I’m going to have to miss it. I did everything I could to rearrange my schedule, and it just wasn’t to be. Many of my colleagues and friends will be there, as well as some of the deepest thinkers and practitioners in the business. I highly recommend it to everyone, but I’d like to make a special pitch to those of you in the Collaborative Tools business to attend. Should be a tremendous event.    (LYQ)

February 2007 Update

A month has passed, and the blog has been silent, but the brain has not. Time to start dumping again. But before I begin, a quick synopsis:    (LR8)

  • The month started off inauspiciously, with a catastrophic system failure that occurred over the holidays. Quite the story. I hope to tell it someday.    (LR9)
  • Last year, I joined the board of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC). It was an unusual move on my part, since I was also in the process of clearing commitments off my list in order to focus more on my higher-level goals. In the midst of saying no to many, many people, I found myself saying yes to LLC. We had our first 2007 board meeting earlier this month, and I participated in their subsequent learning circles. Let’s just say I have no regrets. A week with these folks generated enough thoughts to fill a thousand blog posts.    (LRA)
  • This past week, I co-facilitated a three day Lunar Dust Workshop for NASA, using Dialogue Mapping and Compendium. It was an unbelievable experience, also worth a thousand blog posts. For now, check out some pictures.    (LRB)
  • For the past few months, I’ve been actively involved with a project called Grantsfire. The project’s goal is modest: Make foundations and nonprofits more transparent and collaborative. How? For starters, by getting foundations to publish their grants as microformats. I’ve hinted about the project before, and I’ll have much more to say soon.    (LRC)
  • For the past year, I’ve been helping reinvent Identity Commons. Again, I haven’t blogged much about it, but I’ve certainly talked a lot about it. Not only are we playing an important role in the increasingly hot Internet identity space, we’re also embodying a lot of important ideas about facilitating networks and catalyzing collaboration.    (LRD)

In addition to a flood of blog posts, other things to look forward to this month include:    (LRE)