mark-elliott.net

This is undoubtedly a fantastic video that highlights the interconnection yet independence of individual creative efforts on social media sites such as YouTube.

However I don’t think it is right to call it any form of collaboration - unless there were multiple people putting this track together (as opposed to simply contributing their individual elements). I call the individualistic input of contribution that aggregate to form a whole, ‘cooperation’. Collaboration requires multiple participants add/edit/deleting the same domain. Or at least, that’s what I came to in my phd :-). What do you think?

In any case, this video rocks and thanks Rob Stewart for bringing it to my attention!

Direct link to the whole album by Kutiman: http://thru-you.com/#/videos/

I’m in the process of migrating my phd from the wiki where I wrote it, to this site. I thought I’d write a post for each chapter as I get them up. You can find more out about my phd here, or in the links in the banner. So, here’s the first chapter!

This initial chapter sets the scene - how does a long time artist / composer move into the world of online collaboration? Easy:

• creative exploration + digital media + collaborative practice + research + synthesis = stigmergic mass collaboration.

Here’s an excerpt:

Having grown up in Alaska spending a great deal of time in small aircraft (my first fly-in camping trip was at the age of 3 months), I grew up accustomed to seeing and thinking about vast and variegated spaces from an aerial perspective (see figure 0.0). Later in life, I came to realise that my thinking had been dramatically shaped by this —I still experience a strangely disorienting feeling in new places if I don’t know what the terrain looks like from the sky. This desire for aerial, meta, holistic and encompassing understandings has stayed with me throughout my life, evolving in its application and complexity.

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.

I made a brief stop in Howard Rheingold’s beautiful garden office while passing through San Francisco in early July ‘08. He interviewed me for his vlog on the topic of stigmergy and the recent City of Melbourne wiki my company CollabForge designed and developed. (Too bad I look as exhausted as I was - traveling with 2yr old twins is way harder than I ever imagined!) Afterwards we went on a splendid walk on Mt. Tamalpais - great views (despite smoke from forest fires) of the SF bay.

click to watch on Howard’s site

I’m quite excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working very hard on for the last 6 months: 

• Future Melbourne wiki - Melbourne’s draft city plan currently in public consultation.
• CollabForge.com - the company myself and Marcus Leonard set up in response to this project and spin-off opportunities (our website’s not much to see right now - been to busy to even think about it!).

Here’s some background:

A month before I graduated (Nov ‘07) I was contacted by the manager of the City of Melbourne’s Strategic Planning & Sustainability Branch - David Mayes. David had a vision for reengineering the City of Melbourne’s process for generating its next 2020 ten year strategic plan. Previously, plans were produced using co-operative participation. A requirement of this project was that the new plan be produced by collaborative participation.

What followed was several months of meetings in order to map the existing process and redevelop it with the aim of taking advantage of ‘Web2.0′ opportunities and the emergent capacities of mass collaboration.

Fast forward five months: the city’s ten year plan has been moved to a wiki-based collaborative environment for both internal collaboration, and public consultation.

• Facilitated by the wiki, the plan has undergone internal collaborative development by the City’s special team in charge of the plan’s creation, Future Melbourne, City officers, Councilors, councilors, and hundreds of stakeholders (compared to Sydney’s recently released plan which was put together by more or less a handful of people).
• The project launched its public consultation last Saturday, May 17th, and so far around 60 public participants have registered and there have been approximately 50 contributions to the either the plan directly, or one of the many ‘discussion pages’ associated with the plan’s content. While this isn’t the first project to use a wiki for public consultation, it is (as far as I know) the first in Australia. It is also the first (in the world as far as i know) to use a wiki so extensively in a city planning process. It is also possible the wiki may play some role in the life of the plan post Council adoption in October. But one step at a time :-)… 

Yet more interesting are the implications: could this be the beginning of participatory governance, where the public relies less on the elected representatives and is more able to directly engage in the creation and implementation of policy?

While it’s true that editing the city plan wiki does not guarantee that your contribution will still be there when Council signs off on it, there can be no doubt that a well considered opinion demonstrated in the context of the document (not just as a comment in the margins) will not only be more persuasive, but will influence the downstream development of the plan.

In other words, the wiki is the plan’s content, even post consultation, and whatever form it takes in the end, the publicly edited version will be a step on that path. (Imagine sending a story you wrote to a team of editors and having them not only reply with meta-level commentary, but also edits directly to your story. If this went back and forth enough times, you’d probably lose track of whose words were whose, and in the end, really only be focused on the merit of the content. Well this is exactly the idea and potential behind mass collaboration, ‘the power of the many’ - by putting the primacy on the merit of the content instead of the reputation of the author, bigger and more complex results can be achieved (Wikipedia has almost done in 6 years what Britannica took 230 to do).

Anyway, as you can imagine, I’m very interested to see how this phase of the project pans out - will the public rise to the challenge and exert their will, interest and newfound influence regarding the future of Melbourne’s development, or are we happy for others to make those decisions for us?..

Oh, and btw, if you’re interested in more information regarding CollabForge’s services, or Future Melbourne, or in having a chat about project ideas, please don’t hesitate to email me: mark.elliott AT collabforge.com.