By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Platforms for Collective Awareness and Action
Unattributed, European Commission Information Society, July 31, 2011.
This is a new European Commission Information Society project intended to create online environments to support collaboration. "The vision is that individuals can "save the planet" if they are given the opportunity to act socially, based on trusted information. The key is enabling access to trusted knowledge about the state of their environment, the actions underway in their Communities to improve that situation, and the impact of their own actions." I think there is merit to the underlying idea of feeding external data and information into social communities. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A taxonomy for measuring the success of open source software projects
Amir Hossein Ghapanchi, Aybuke Aurum, and Graham Low, First Monday, July 31, 2011.
Open source software is a lot like education: everybody wants it to be successful, but there's no definition of what counts as success, and traditional definitions ('sales', 'grades') are wholly inadequate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interview with Rick Schwier – connectivism
James Johnson, The Blog Herald, August 1, 2011.
This is totally what Google+'s hangouts needed - the capacity to support a live YouTibe audience. I can easily imagine using one of these in a MOOC. More...