Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

“Tish Grier of Assignment Zero and Lisa Williams of Placeblogger will co-host a meeting of the group on Thursday, August 23, at 7PM.

Tish will talk about lessons learned from crowdsourcing experiment Assignment Zero, the first large-scale crowdsourced journalism project for Wired.com. Tish served as Assignment Zero’s deputy director of participation (officially) online referee, uber-blogger, and last-minute
editor (unofficially). Quoting organizer Jay Rosen’s intro to the project, “In this project, we’re trying to crowdsource a single story, and debut a site that makes other such reports possible down the road. But we don’t know yet how well our site and our methods work. Our ideas are crude because they are untested. By participating, you can help us figure this puzzle out.”

Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger, will talk about what drives people to annotate the planet, or keep a placeblog going, even (especially) when they’re not being paid. Do these dogged types share the same do-good values that animate the best of journalism, or are
they a different breed entirely? Does the addition of “where” to Google’s “what” mean that our online time will help connect us to our RL communities in a way that’s less boring? “If I fly to — let’s pick a random city — Omaha — and all I see is a generic sprawling American city built from standard subdivisions full of brand-named chain shops, then I might as well never have left home. This is boring, and I am opposed to anything that makes the world a less interesting place to live.” — Mars Saxman

More about Tish Grier: http://spap-oop.blogspot.com/ and http://lavieonline.blogspot.com/
More about Lisa Williams: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisawilliams“

Upcoming events of interest:

• Dev House Boston 3: September 16th at betahouse
• See the Berkman Calendar for upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Various upcoming & potential stuff on our schedule:

• August 30 – Brett on EVDO, a kind of wireless, mobile Internet connection and j on Skype
• September 6 – See you at these exciting tech events: the second Ignite Boston and Tech Cocktail. RSVP for each event through their site.
• September 13 – Neither Erica nor j can attend the meeting. Should we take the week off or does someone want to organize something?
• Second Life – 1) a guided tour + how-to session | 2) a debate on it. Good? Bad? Both?
• Dan Bricklin, known for his work on VisiCalc and wikiCalc
• People to do sessions on maps & mapping: Ben Sheldon / Adam / Tracy Rolling of Platial
• Digital natives: ask Erin Mishkin
• For parents: what *are* your kids doing on the social web? Get a few students to lead it.
• What’s the latest in the Free Culture movement? (and what about the Miro player?)
• Skype: How does it work? Why use it? j can lead something
• People to do sessions on video: Steve Garfield / David Temez of Boston Media Makers
• OpenID – Why you should use it, why you should develop with it (ask Rod Begbie)
• Streaming radio – how to make your own streaming radio station, the new rules around it
• Principles of design/UI, how to learn as a beginner?
• Latest tools for blogging / Latest mashups and widgets / How have tools changed in the past year or so?
• you?
• If you want to help shepherd a potential future topic or if you have ideas of your own, please talk to Erica or j. We’d love – and could really use – your help!+