Mail & Schedule for the MetaCAugs Meeting of June 23

Dear Co-Learners,

PROPOSED ACTIVITY

(Charles will add activity for second hour MetaCAugs meeting)

PROPOSED ACTIVITY

Lauren Nignon proposes to facilitate an "Appreciation Circle," an easy, low-tech technique for generating deep profiles where we just go around the circle with each person and say what we appreciate about him or her. I then cut up the videos and post them individually on Youtube (listed and unlisted, according to preference) and generate a word cloud and a 2 or 3 word role description. Each person has full control over their profile and gets to choose what is on it. The purpose of this is for group onboarding: with this technique, new people can jump in and get a good sense of everyone's role in the group. It also feels good to get positive feedback. It will be identical to what I did with the GCC Saturday Barnraising group: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ksF-a44=/

ONGOING ACTIVITY

This is ongoing on the Discourse forum: what will durably change in education because of our response to the pandemic? "Education" can mean formal education in schools, higher ed and corporates, but also peer learning. Please add your ideas, preferably based on something concrete you see changing, and eventually add a link.

Here you'll see the list of discussion topics, you can add topics of course but first read the above mentioned post.

PROPOSED ACTIVITY

Pete Forsyth proposes to discuss the role Wikipedia has played, and should play, in society as it approaches its 20th birthday (January 2021). I will begin with a brief (or if desired, not so brief) recap of the Juneteenth Edit-a-thon I participated in this weekend, which was a call to action for people to improve Wikipedia's content related to Civil Rights on the anniversary of the emancipation of Black slaves in the South.

What has Wikipedia achieved?

• Only major website that does not harvest user data for profit (see this trilogy of short articles)
• Living example of how hmans can collaborate at a scale never seen before
• Early tweaks to wiki software created a complete system (OODA loop) enabling contributors to guide themselves. See my essay Trusting Everybody to Work Together
• Central (rather than federated) knowledge platform applies a traditional publishing framework to the interactive web; among other things, this creates a need to come to consensus, countering some of the negative behavior we see on other sites
• And let's not forget the knowledge resource itself – many millions of encyclopedia articles

What's coming that might influence it?

• Increasing concern about spread of misinformation online will naturally draw attention to Wikipedia, a site designed to combat it
• Wikipedia is a major resource, for instance, in establishing what news sources are "real" or "fake"
• The organization that stewards Wikipedia is in constant conflict with its user base, and perhaps has not created the necessary skills and culture within itself
• One consequence is that much of the newer software (see the "Trusting…" essay listed above) deprecates or even subverts the mutually-supportive collaboration features of wiki
• Regulation in western countries seems to be focused on other kinds of sites (see first link above), but that could change; and some countries (China, Turkey, Russia…) have interfered with Wikipedia in various ways
• Cognitive surplus that drove Wikipedia's early growth now has many other sites. (See Clay Chirky's work in the 2000s. Note that when Wikipedia launched, we did not yet have Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, YouTube… there were few opportunities for regular folks to contribute to the web.)
• Institutions (museums, libraries, and to a lesser degree governments, journalism) are taking a more focused interest in Wikipedia

UPCOMING ACTIVITY

Roland participates this week in a Foresight Essentials Online Training of the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Next week he'll report about the experience.

We have a Diigo-group where everyone can curate that stuff, just by adding a link and some commentary.

The recordings of our sessions collected in a YouTube playlist.

We have a rather impressive online whiteboard on Miro which could provide inspiration!

The meeting starts on Tuesday June 23, 2020 at Noon Pacific on Zoom. Any other questions or themes you want to suggest? Please join the MetaCAugs channel on Telegram.

The MetaCAugs Team