Communities

communities of interest and practice

South East Asia Earthquake and Tidal Wave Relief

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From the Community Health Promotion Network – Atlantic, is this information for Canadians who wish to donate to the tsunami disaster relief effort:


Canadians wishing to make a financial donation may donate online, call 1-800-418-1111 or contact their local Canadian Red Cross office. The 24-hour toll free line accepts Visa and MasterCard. Cheques should be made payable to the Canadian Red Cross, earmarked "South East Asia Earthquake and Tidal Wave Relief" and mailed to Canadian Red Cross National Office, 170 Metcalfe Street, Suite 300, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2P2. For information on how Red Cross manages donations, please visit "How We Care For Your Donations". Donations of goods are not accepted.

You can also access the very busy Red Cross website.

Best aggregated information is at tsunami-info.org

Comment Approval Queue

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Given the increase in comment spam on this site, I have configured the comment function so that anonymous comments have to be approved before they are posted. I know that this may be a pain, but it’s my only option until I install Drupal 4.5. You should be able to log on to this site with a Drupal password (tell me if you can’t), or you can contact me and set up an account on this site.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m tired of cleaning up all the spam every day.

Update: And now everything you wanted to know about comment spam and how to fight it, from Six Apart. The recommendations are specific to Movable Type, but may be of interest to others.

The Past Year as a Free-Agent

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It’s been a typical consultant’s year for me — periods of feast and famine and never being able to plan more than a month in advance. An article by Rob Levinson in the Wall Street Journal shows that even with success, free-agents ask different questions than would a full-time employee:

In my past life as a full-time employee, compensation, bonus structure, benefits and title were all that mattered when comparing assorted job offers. What else was there? For a consultant, the criteria for determining next steps are less clear. What are the relevant factors for solo consultants trying to chart a career path?
…
That’s because I have serious personal questions for myself. Do I focus on partnering with my colleague Kate and building her consultancy? Should my consulting firm be my first — and only — priority? Should I chart a growth strategy and think about hiring employees?

From Michael Cage, I also learned business lesson #1 again, and I became seriously immersed in blogging — moving to my own hosted site after having used Blogger and Quicktopic. A blog is definitely the best marketing tool for free-agents and small businesses, and it’s not about publishing a diary, but more about the network effect that makes blogging so powerful for small business. As Jon Udell says:

We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

Probably my greatest work achievement this year was in extending my network of friends, colleagues and fellow professionals through blogging in order to expand my own scope of learning and work. Knowing that I have this extended network makes me more optimistic about the coming year, because I know that I’m not alone :-)

Worthwhile Reading

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Halley Suitt, in Worthwhile, refers to the 800CEOREAD list of top 25 books for business. I have read only one of these, The Art of the Start, which I believe is an excellent reference book for any business. In perusing the other 24 titles, I noticed that there is nothing that peeks my interest. I guess I’m not your "average" business reader. For instance, here are my best reads this year, though they weren’t all published in 2004:

These are some of the books on my list to buy/read:

Any other suggestions for a free-agent, consultant, learning/business/technology guy?

de Kerckhove: Communication in Evolution

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For fans of Marshall McLuhan, or those interested in knowing more than just the phrase, “the medium is the message”, there is an excellent interview [dead link] online with Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto. There is lots of stuff to chew on, as well as a concise overview of McLuhan’s tetradic Laws of Media:

“every new medium:

  • extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  • obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  • retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  • flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)”

The most enlightening for me is de Kerckhove’s view of a new kind of identity in our inter-networked world:

The key to the new identity is what I call “selving”, that is the self in progress, in becoming, as in quantum physics where “things are not, they merely tend to be”. The new identity is in perpetual formation and reformation at the moment of use and on line it is fluid and aggregative as when people meet and change their perceptions of each other during the meeting. I sometime suspect that screens were invented only for the purpose of allowing several persons, minds, identities to meet and share thinking and speaking at a distance. The new connective thinking system is the screen. Via What is the Message? [dead link]

Comment Spam

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I’m getting a lot of comment spam from some low-life who is sticking links to an internet gambling site on my blogs. They’re easy to find & erase with Drupal, but still a pain. I like Alan Levine’s solution to disrupt comment spammers, and perhaps I’ll enlist the help of the International Spam Counter Attack Force (SCAF):

They have tools and techniques I could never understand, but with their help, our Trackback scripts were modified to collect some interesting data from our roach visitor. The people who act as local agents for SCAF have the ability to unleash a series of strikes on this person, their assets, records, etc, and once I give the go ahead, the trigger is set to go off at a random time in the future, maybe today, tomorrow, next week, a few months from now.

I’m open to comments and criticism on my blog, but completely unrelated comments that link to a gambling site are not acceptable. Since I pay to maintain this site, it’s my editorial privilege to keep it clean. Here are the multiple hosts from which this roach posts:

61.62.229.235
165.173.60.25
212.234.28.89
195.194.158.17
12.43.53.137
198.252.39.226
81.169.133.166
66.91.206.165
68.44.79.29
193.252.229.134
136.183.135.54
62.47.166.17

17 Dec: And the roach struck again early this morning (already removed) – any Drupal experts have suggestions?

Most Popular Content

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For the community that actually reads my blog posts, here is the most popular content since I started blogging on this site in February:

  1. Drupal Theme Garden
  2. WebCT & Blackboard vs Moodle
  3. Drupal Review
  4. Free social software sandbox for teachers
  5. Dummies Guide to Change
  6. Training vs Education (but it’s all learning)
  7. Emergent Organizational Structures
  8. Collaborate to Compete
  9. Universities and Course Management Systems
  10. Analysing Human Performance

Thanks for your interest and please excuse the low number of posts until I’m better – which should be soon :-)

Natural Enterprise

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Dave Pollard can’t find a publisher for his book, Natural Enterprise. I have used parts of it in my own work and have found it to be a refreshing perspective on how to grow a business without sacrificing your values. You can read most of it online, and I’m sure that others have used it as well. I would gladly buy a copy, as it is destined to remain on the desk, not hidden on a dusty bookshelf, like The Fifth Discipline. Natural Enterprise ranks up there with The Art of the Start in usefulness for business planning.

Communautique

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My colleague at Mancomm Performance Inc, Pierre Harvey, uses a term to describe his field of study and work – Communautique. In North America, some people call this Community Networking, but Pierre’s definition means more than this English term conveys. He says that Communautique comes from the terms communication, community and networking, plus nautique or nautical/navigation. Communautique can be defined as the applied science of the analysis, design, co-creation and deployment of knowledge and understanding via networks. There is a strong cultural component as well.

Communautique is a multidisciplinary applied social science that links information sciences and communications theory. Communautique systems are not designed and built once, like traditional knowledge management systems, but provide a reference framework and a network architecture development cycle that adapts to the emergent needs of individuals and groups. It is the kind of methodology that leads to the creation of a network of "small pieces, loosely joined", instead of a monolithic system that individuals have to adapt to.

Blogs, wikis and socio-constructivist learning systems like Moodle are the current tools of choice for my colleagues who practice communautique. What I would like is a better term in English than community networking. Is there already one that I don’t know? Any ideas for a new term?