Sohodojo and Communities of the Future proudly host...
The Center for Open Source Collaboration Technologies
The Community Collaboration Platform Project

[ Project History ] [ Sponsors ] [ Core Team ] [ Extended Team ] [ Document Archive ] [ Recommended Reading ] [ What's Ahead? ]

Welcome

The goal of this project is to identify, then integrate into a convenient distribution, Open Source technologies which may serve as the web-based infrastructure for informal and evolutionary 'elastic networking' collaborations among members of rural and urban communities seeking a sustainable future.

The immediate beneficiaries and users of this collaboration platform will be the 'nodes', or Centers, in the Communities of the Future Network. This collection of community organizations and futures institutes which make up the COTF Network require a server-based web platform which will support a far richer range of interactive features than the typical informational web site.

The emphasis of this project is on the identification, integration, distribution packaging and documentation of existing Open Source collaboration technologies to be applied to self-organizing community collaboration.

Candidate Open Source technologies include the mod_virgule engine for trust-based community development at Advogato.com and the critical discussion technologies of CritSuite from the Foresight Institute. In addition, we are investigating the potential of incorporating a programmers' API for optional integration of the non-Open Source technology, The Process Handbook, developed at MIT.

The Community Collaboration Platform Project founding sponsors are:

• Communities of the Future - A grassroots organization which encourages the development of capacitities for transformation and process leadership among members of rural and urban communities seeking a sustainable future.

• Sohodojo - The self-organizing, self-managing Applied R&D Lab for entrepreneurial free agents and owner/operators of dejobbed small businesses which collaborate in 'Small is Good' business webs.

We have identified prospective organizations which we will approach to support this project. These are candidate supporters of this project:

• The Red Hat Center - With its mission to encourage the application of the Open Source business model to the development of transparent technologies, we are an ideal candidate for its applied research funding.

• The North Carolina Rural Center - COTF already has an active collaboration going with The NC Rural Center. The Global 21st Century Rural Network Project has a line-item in its budget for the development of its project website. The Rural Network project-specific web development work will be performed in a manner consistent with the vision and objectives of the Community Collaboration Platform Project.

If you or your organization are interested in sponsoring this project, please do not hesitate to contact us.

The Core Team members are actively involved in the selection, integration, testing and documentation of the Community Collaboration Platform to be developed under this project. The founding core team is:

• Jim Salmons - TechSIG Leader of Sohodojo
• Timlynn Babitsky - Sohodojo

If you are interested in getting actively involved in this project, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are seeking interested community members for both volunteer and contract-compensated positions.

Extended team members represent prospective users, technical resources, founding sponsors and research sponsors who each share a high-priority interest in the Open Source platform to be developed under this project. These are:

• Rick Smyre - President, Communities of the Future
• Andrew Cohill - Director, Blacksburg Electronic Village

As we develop additional sponsors and target users for the Community Collaboration Platform, we'll announce extended team members here.

This project is just getting started. We are developing a project plan and its associated milestone deliverables. Milestone documents, together with their current status will be posted here:

• There are no project deliverables yet.

In addition to project deliverables, this project is generating some useful working documents:

• Some baseline searches on 'community collaboration', 'collaboration technologies', 'web-based dialogue' and 'issue management' keywords provides a snapshot of "what's out there" on the web in our project's problem domain. These snapshots were useful for mining leads to relevant technologies, services and related content on the Web. More importantly, these mega-search 'doorway' pages work exceptionally well bringing web surfers to this project web site where they find out about the Open Source community's interest in and involvement developing technologies which address community-based collaboration systems.

There are a number of great, relevant print resources related to our project, including publications of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. We'll be collecting a list of the most helpful resources below. In the meantime, here's a relevant title from the Sohodojo RIBS Joint:

• No More Teams! Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration by Michael Schrage

There is a great and growing need for an innovative, flexible platform to encourage the development and evolution of action-oriented collaborative dialogue among members of rural and urban communities seeking a sustainable future.

Among the relevant articles at Communities of the Future are the following:

• More soon...

Additional relevant articles on-line include:

• More soon...

Our first order of business is the search for research sponsors to help fund this project. While the collaborating founders are incrementally evolving this project through volunteer efforts and small line-item funding in related projects, the Community Collaboration Platform Project could crank up the volume with dedicated funding for the larger vision of this project.

To encourage research sponsorship, the Community Collaboration Platform Project will be one of the first projects placed into the Sohodojo Great Game of Applied R&D which encourages the growing number of Open Source and Free Agent service providers to outsource a portion of their research and development to us, a self-organizing collection of their customers. Follow this link to learn more about the Sohodojo Research Sponsorship program and the Great Game of Applied R&D.

© 1998-2010 Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky for Sohodojo excepting project web pages and documents which are published under the appropriate Open Source documentation license.
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