By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bill of Rights for the Social Web?
Eight years ago I wrote and posted widely something called the Cyberspace Charter of Rights. Now along come people like Marc Canter and Robert Scoble promoting a shortened and Americanized Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web expressing basically the same principles. Canter's announcement. Scoble's announcement. Peter Cashmore's hot air alert. That's the way of the web - things are deemed Not To Exist until the Right People invent them (and which point they are credited as the inventors). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Managing Complex Adaptive Networks
Nice paper submitted in one of the comments on the other blog describing how a complex adaptive network can be managed to enable the communicating, developing and sharing of knowledge. In the course of the discussion, the author looks at the theories of Actor-networks, Foucault's Discourse, and Complex Adaptive Systems, which means that we're getting not just the technology of the systems but some understanding of (what I would call) the semantics behind them. The paper rewards a close reading. Take note especially of the outline of a 'complex system' in part 4. I'm less happy with the representation that results in terms of equity and capital, but I think that this is a matter of perspective rather than of any substantial disagreement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Beware These Six Lamest Social Networks
This article published in Wired has resulted in the Stop Cyberbullying network on Ning being, in Andy Carvin's words, "flooded with a number of new users who were vandalizing the community in extremely obnoxious ways." I don't know what it is about writers who fling misogynist derogatives about as though they are funny, but I do know that the editors who pass such material through to the publisher have sacrificed any sense of journalistic integrity. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Network Portability
My own contribution to some of the discussion of social network portability. I outline three major needs: first, social network portability itself, that is, a way to export lists of OpenIDs from social networks, to manipulate those lists, and then to import them into new social networks; second, a way to facilitate attribute exchange, that is, to describe myself and to describe other people; and third, network traversal functions. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour August 21, 2007 [Link] [Tags: Networks]. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social Networking As LMS: Problems and Opportunities
Christy Tucker explains that her 'Facebook as LMS' post was "thinking aloud" and not some final conclusion. Of course not; we wouldn't think otherwise. 'Thinking aloud' is a good thing and something I would encourage. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Social Networks to Socialize
My recent work to implement OpenID is especially relevant in view of articles like this one as it considers the need for social networks to communicate with each other. What this requires is a system of personal identification that is not owned by any of them - and that, to my mind, is OpenID (as people like Marc Canter are saying (here too - lots of links) - odd that Michael Geist completely misses this, talking instead about Plaxo and Liberty). Today I managed to get the OpenID Consumer script working. I'm thinking about how to implement this into my login system. As I ponder these things, I read a lot and write a lot - which results in today's jam-packed issue. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Research and Guidelines On Online Social - and Educational - Networking
I've been working all day on code, trying to speed up some functions (my website has been staggering under the load recently) and also to implement OpenID (which crashed my server this afternoon - it's frustrating to work with very badly documented pre-alpha modules). So I'm a bit hesitant to put too much into today's newsletter. More...