One of the best things about working at a big university is the abundance of cool stuff happening across campus, though it’s always a challenge to keep up with it all. I’ve been meaning to throw up a blog post on GUSSE (Global Urban Sustainability Solutions Exchange) for a few weeks now. It’s one of the latest generation of repository-type sites that are employing tools and practices associated with social software to enhance the experience, promote engagement, and make it easier for contributors to participate. So blogging and tagging are key to workflow and organization, and approaches such as Creative Commons licensing are integral to the content ownership model. I like this formulation for soliciting content:
Participants are rewarded helping to refine and improve the tools that are essential to their professional success. GUSSE applies the network
effect, where millions of small, individual contributions of knowledge
assemble into a trustworthy authority.
It reminds me of a slogan my colleague Novak Rogic and I came up with this morning to describe our office’s disaggregated intranet (which draws on blogs, del.icio.us, wikis, Basecamp, Flickr, and a whole lotta RSS): “Act selfishly, enrich organizationally.”
This is short notice but tomorrow, Thursday October 26 at 10 AM,
David Vogt and Lee Iverson (two of UBC’s most prominent thinkers and doers in this area) are presenting an overview on one underlying approach in a talk entitled GUSSE: Teaching and Learning with Social Bookmarking.
Alas, I’m scheduled to deliver a workshop elsewhere on campus while this on. Double drat.
the presentation on GUSSE was really quite interesting! I was impressed with how well organized it was and its potential.
Lee Iverson also talked about other applications including connotea.org (reference management system)and how embedding it deeply in a research library situation would create opportunities for engagement among researchers. It’s something that Librarian’s dream about at night….