nm-x blog

• Times/Dates: 25th October, 1st and 7th November
• Locations: Central St Martins Innovation Centre (briefings) and The Young Foundation (workshops)
• Price: Free!

more info

• http://nm-x.com/event/2007/10/drupal-web2-0-briefing
• http://nm-x.com/event/2007/11/drupal-web2-0-workshops
• http://nm-x.com/project/open-business

The Drupal for Web2.0 briefing was hosted by Peter Brownell and Mori Sugimoto of Code Positive - a London-based Drupal consultancy and the London Drupal user group. They started out with a broad overview presentation of the technology and underlying ideas behind Drupal, and a cautionary recommendation: ‘most things are possible with drupal’.

First he related the history of Drupal - stared by Rees, a university student in the Netherlands, and how its name came from a misspelling of the name for ‘town’ in Dutch: ‘Dorp’, which was misspelt ‘Drop.org’ when they tried to register the domain. Eventually they settled on ‘Drupal’ when choosing an international name for their modular content management system.

Peter presented how using this system, it is possible to pull together modules from a large open source community of developers, and create new ones that are specific to the job in hand - which can then be thrown open to the community again for improvement, adaptation and maintenance.

He explained a bit more about the community: that the people are as important as the system: if you want to be involved in Drupal - you have to be involved in the communit. He also explained the development status: where the project is in terms of development cycles.

His warning was that Drupal is a powerful tool - and that apart from a sales pitch, he was also keen to warn people about what the tool is and is not useful for. If you want to do a basic blog, he recommended Wordpress - the tool we’re using for this blog! For more powerful engines and development, he recommended Drupal - which we’re using for nm-x.com.

Drupal moves fast - he said, so ‘Free’ as in speech does not necessarily mean ‘Free’ as in beer. There will have to be a long term investment in using Drupal - keeping up with development cycles and releases, updates and developments by the community.

Peter then began a demonstration of how Drupal actually works - by installing and customising a site live. The audience fired questions at him as he and Mori went through various installation and configuration processes.

Mori took over when it came to installing the TinyMCE the javascript text editor that allows editing of Drupal posts, blog posts or other content for your Drupal site as if you were using a normal word processor like - inserting images, bolding or italicising text - all the operations you might be familiar with from Microsoft Word (or better.. Open Office). Mori did this bit because Peter apparently hates TinyMCE - perfering (as many techies do) to keep text in a text-only environment, not worrying about special formatting and design issues.

Finally, a Drupal site was fully installed, set up and customised - despite many interjections and questions from the audience. You can watch a video of the start of this briefing below - or check out related images and aggregated links and content on this briefing’s nm-x page.

• Time/Date: 18th October, 18:30 - 20:30
• Location: Central St Martins Innovation Centre; Procter Street
• Opposite Red Lion Square (closest tube - Holborn Station), London.
• Price: Free!

- more info: http://nm-x.com/event/2007/10/peer-education-briefing

The Peer Education briefing began with a presentation from Andy Gibson handing around a tatty-looking piece of paper with lots of multi-coloured post-it notes stuck to it. This was his first version of the ‘Free School’ he started at the London School for Social Entrepreneurs.

The idea and the technology is simple: a notice board (the piece of paper) onto which participants stick post-it notes saying what they are interested in learning, and what they are willing to teach. This system, apart from the technical limitation that it lived in his bag - was the basis for all his later research.

His presentation looked at early experiments with peer educational systems in Stanford and Berkley in the 60’s - the hot-beds of Silicon Valley’s information revolution, then moved on to his own experiments with improving on the post-it system, which he also demonstrated with us the audience forming our own ‘nm-x’ free school, and witnessing the dizzying array of skills and educational requests were present in the room.

He culminated by talking to us about his latest project - the School of Everything, which is an attempt to take the Free School ‘out of his bag’ and make it work on the Internet, as a kind of global social entreprise to challenge and improve mehtods and contexts for teaching, learning for the better.

Mary Harrintgon took up where Andy Gibson had left off - also one of the entrepreneurs behind the School of Everything - her presentation on ‘offline social software’, focused on her Alice-in-wonderland-like journey from being an ‘Internet User’ to participating in a series of highly specialised and transformative knowledge-production processes and learning environments.

From communicating with obscurantist individuals and niche knowlege troves - like the Psychogeographical Markup Language of socialfiction.org - to the uncharted educational territory of the University of Openess. Her account was a kind of history of alternative educational structures on the early Web 2.0 - and was also a tour of the development of that genre of ‘collaboration tools’.

She then talked more about the School of Everything, focusing on the tools they explored and used to learn and work together over the Internet. Photo and media sharing sites, wikis, twitter, Google Docs and other social-software/web2.0 tools were reviewed, but the ‘killer app’ of all the collaborative tools she talked about turned out to be ‘The Office’ - physical proximity and group working.

This didn’t detract from her enthusiasm and excitement about the School of Everything, but in looking at ‘offline social software’, and recognising its benefits and uniqeuness, Mary Harrington’s talk really focused on what the useful bits of online social software really are.

Ben Vershbow from the Institute for the Future of the Book began with an introduction to his ground-breaking organisation, which is specifically focused on looking foward to the future of publishing and knowledge production beyond the dreaded ‘e-book’. Ben’s rant about the e-book, and how it is a poorly adapted tool, primarily devised for retaining publishing rights rather than actually using the digital medium was almost a manifesto for what the ‘networked book’ could and should be.

He talked about the experimental methodology of the Institue - working with authors who want to do something different with their work online, and helping them to devise new technologies and strategies for doing so. He talked about Mitch Stevens - one of their first authors, a journalism professor at NYU who wanted to write a book on Atheism - but knew that it was somewhat outside his immediate area of expertise. Working with Stevens, the Institute managed to help him harness the ‘wisdom’ of a crowd of experts, who helped guide the development of his project.

He then talked about his work with Mckenzie Wark, theorist and writer from The New School in NYC on ‘Gam3r Theory‘ - a book already very much in production, that Wark wanted to develop into an experimental format. Because Wark had worked with a highly stylized format: the paragraph-book, in the style of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, they were able to use this text to develop a new technology that could break up the text into commentable chunks - then allowing online contributors to post comments, and have conversations based on each paragraph - a kind of shared ‘marginalia’, adding up to a shared critical reading of the text in question.

This was developed into a new piece of software ‘Commentpress‘ that is now available to download as Free and Open Source Software - and was also instrumental in the later publication of Gam3r Theory, in which an edited selection of comments and marginalia was published as a part of the index. Although this eventaully turned into paper and ink - the ‘networked book’ was still in effect, and ‘Gam3r Theory’ continued to grow after publication.

Vershbow then talked about how Commentpress was being used in education to help classes produce critical readings of texts, also accompanied by video and other resources. We rounded off the evening by uploading live transcriptions, taken by Saul, of the entire event to a new commentpress blog: The Free School - where you can read (and comment on) the entire evenings proceedings and their ongoing annotations!

Technorati Tags: NMX418, NMX417

Open for Business is a programme of introductary briefings and in-depth workshops run by the New Media eXchange exploring the economic and social potential of Open Source technology and associated methodologies for business, innovation and cultural creativity.

Open Source Software is the most exciting and fastest growing market for new media products and services, where innovation, evaluation, distribution are driven by the needs and abilities of an active, highly skilled and community of software craftspeople.

Over the next two months, nm-x will be offering briefings and workshops
on:

• Peer Education: the application of Open Source practices and technologies to peer-led education and knowledge-transfer.
• Drupal: an introduction, and in-depth workshops to get you started with this fast, flexible open source Content Management system.
• Open Source publishing: an introduction and then two workshops to help designers and publishers free themselves and their ideas from established proprietary workflows.

The Open for Business briefings introduce creative initiatives that are pioneering in this opportunity space, challenging the status-quo of how business is done. They are evening events followed by networking and socializing.

The Open for Business workshops are two-day in-depth training sessions during which participants will gain a high level of proficciency with an Open Source system that will enable them to apply it to their own work.

Watch this space for updates as the workshops and briefings unfold!

Technorati Tags: NMX417

Hi! We are currently beta testing the first version of nm-x.com, getting ready to launch the site. So far we have had invaluable feedback from you - our intrepid first users.

We are looking for more feedback! From the technical (”this page is broken!”) to the theoretical (”I have privacy concerns about using a site that shows my connections…”) - we want to hear it all!

Please do pull off the kid gloves and lay into us - we can take it. In fact - we want it! The harsher, the better.

Thanks!

NM-X team.

Technorati Tags: NMX23