Tools for Dialogue and Deliberation on Wicked Problems
Feedback on Ning and suggestions for alternatives
What are your immediate thoughts on Ning as a potential collaborative/ communication platform for the group?
What other tools should we consider?
What other tools should we consider?
Views: 70
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mark Klein on
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Ning seems pretty good, but it might be good to (also) use one of our online argumentation tools once we select some promising topics we'd like to explore.
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Permalink Reply by Jack Park on
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As I see it, there are opportunities for improvement to the basic process here, which would include:
* granular addressability of each post
* subject indexing
That's if we do nothing more than use it's blog and forum capabilities.
Recent contacts to me regarding setting up epistemic communities have all offered to start with Drupal as a core platform. Drupal is very popular, very powerful, and flexible to the extent that it offers a huge array of plugin widgets. But, Drupal is still a conventional wiki/blog/forum platform and could use some improvements. Unlike Ning, Drupal is open source and capable of being extended/enhanced. I'm even starting to think in terms of installing a Drupal on my server for my domain webquests.org and see what it takes to make it talk webservices with my TopicSpaces subject map.
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I think we could probably all agree that this inquiry is ripe for DebateGraph or Compendium.
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Permalink Reply by David Price on
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Jack,
My sense of Ning so far is that it works reasonably well at the surface level of group interaction (and this may be an asset as the group opens to wider participation), but that its utility diminishes as the strands of communication deepen.
A key question, therefore, is whether we are looking for a tool that provides a basic meeting place from which deepening conversations tend to spin off to other forms of communication (including the use of our own tools) or for a single tool that can handle (most of) the social networking aspect and the deeper forms of communication.
If your sense is that a Drupal-based site might offer the latter, then we should give serious thought to migrating (at some point).
I agree that granular addressability and subject indexing would be definite pluses too.
Suggestions for other tools will be welcome from everyone as well.
David
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An interesting OSS platform is Deki Wiki. Like Drupal, lots of features.
I should say that I like Ning, but have a preference to be able to form deep links into the content; perhaps I just haven't found out how yet, but I'd like to be able to link to *this* post, for instance. I'd like to be able to lift ideas out of some posts at cohere. We do know that Ning knows this post's URL because they send us email links to it.
But, I don't see how to get the address short of reading the source HTML with View:Source. For instance, the href to the message to which I am responding is http://collaborativeclimate.ning.com/xn/detail/2052744:Comment:1771
That's a minor quibble. In fact, I take all that back. Dopey me. I just noticed a "permalink" button at the top of each post. Check that box, folks: Ning does granular addressability. Moving right along.
I'd like to form web services queries from this post to, say, grab something from my topic map. It might be worth trying to drop an "iframe" in one of these posts and see if it would bring up a DebateGraph instance. Right now, I don't feel like I have the flexibility in user interface control necessary to wrestle Ning into a site that would cooperate with the other sensemaking portals that exist or will soon exist. We could grant subject indexing to any site that would allow us to perform web services queries to my topic map, and that would allow us to harvest the site to find those queries.
One last quibble: I'd love to plunk tags on entries here. What am I missing? A tag cloud on the front page would be nice.
I'm going to follow this post with an experiment to see if I can pull in a web services query from TopicSpaces. Wish me luck.
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A TopicSpaces query embedded in an iframe
Well, Ning ate the html that paints an iframe with my query in it. No dice!
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Jack and Mark,
I have just embedded the Debategraph climate change snapshot in a "text box" at the bottom of the main page.
If you create a sub-group using the Groups feature (bottom right) you should have access to text boxes to experiment with this as well...
...which is a rather roundabout (but potentially useful) way of achieving this.
Experiment with it—and let me know what you think.
David
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Permalink Reply by Mark Szpakowski on
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What you might want is an OpenSocial widget that does the DebateGraph transclusion. Up side of implementing that is that such a widget would then be available on all sites that support OpenSocial.
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Mark,
It appears that it's possible to use Ning's "text boxes" to accomplish this (see my reply to Jack's post above).
David
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I just discovered another worker who is doing sensemaking portals based on tagging and trust, with a ruby-based OSS platform called opntag with instances here, here and here. And, he (Lee Iverson) appears to be very interested in participating in this work. I plan to invite him into this tribe.
Please tell me if I am straying too far from the larger interests of this group.
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Opntag looks like a great application—and it's fine (by me) to invite Lee to join the group.
David
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Deki Wiki is a good thought. I haven't used it before—but I have heard good reports from others who have.
Does any one in the group have any first hand experience with Deki Wiki?
David
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