Sohodojo and Communities of the Future proudly host...
An Applied R&D Lab and Community Resource
The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies
Making 'Small is Good' Real in the New Economy

[ What's New ] [ Active COSTC Collaboration Technology Projects ] [ Other Open Source Collaboration Technology Projects ] [ 'Mindset' Links ] [ Recommended Reading ] [ What's Ahead? ]

Welcome

The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies (CCCT) is co-hosted by Sohodojo and Communities of the Future. We are an applied R&D lab and study center.

Our mission is to develop and facilitate the application of community and small business collaboration technologies, with a special emphasis on Open Source technologies, within community organizations and 'Small is Good' Business Webs in urban and rural communities seeking a sustainable future.

The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies is a 'node' in the Communities of the Future Network.

• SourceXchange Rest In Peace - This early mover in the Open Source market has closed its doors. Sohodojo was the lead developer for the first and only developer community-oriented Wish List project chartered by this now defunct Open Source service. [ More info... ]

• 'What Makes a Virtual Organization Work? Lessons from the Open-Source World', is MIT researchers Markus, Manville and Agres insightful investigation into the dynamics of Open Source projects appearing in the Fall issue of the Sloan Management Review (Volume 42, Number 1, pp. 13-26). [ More about article ]

• 'The Yin-yang of e-Commerce Engines', a sidebar article in the fifth installment of The Nanocorp Primer, illuminates design points for framework architectures to support 'Small is Good' business web business models. [ Read the article ]

• Community Collaboration Platform Project annouced by founding sponsors Sohodojo and Communities of the Future. [ More... ]

• Click your _____ red heels together, Dorothy! We have a new Open Source language to be excited about... [ More... ]

• We've revised our name to the Center for Community Collaboration Technologies to reflect our designation as an R&D 'node' in the Communities of the Future Network! [ More... ]

• Some way-cool Open Source technologies are added to the Projects list -- CritSuite, NeuDist.org and ERights.org are briefly profiled and linked below.

• Milestone 3 deliverable completed by core team of the Spec Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software project. Read the HTML version on-line.

• 'Distributed Trust Metrics' article and discussion at Advogato.com - Check out this timely and thoughtful thread. Trust metrics will be an essential element of role/actor executable business models and other collaboration technologies. Have you joined the free Advogato developer community? Have you rated 'Sohodojo-Jim'?

• SourceForge updates, Advogato.com, Software Carpentry project and Udell article heads-up - Check out highlight post from the Center's mailing list. Best tip? Advogato.com rocks!

• CCCT discussion mailing list announced for relevant Open Source project announcements, book and on-line resource pointers, comments, questions and discussion related to collaboration technologies generally and the Center organization and development, in particular.

• Sao Paulo-based Bazilian developer, Renato De Giovanni, brought two Open Source collaboration projects to our attention, OpenSched and Xen. Thanks, Renato, they're listed below.

• Gero Kohnert's TUTOS project added to the Active Projects list.

• Milestone 2 deliverable completed for the Spec Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software project. Read the HTML version on-line.

• Milestone 1 deliverable completed by the Spec Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software project. Read the HTML version on-line.

• Sohodojo opens The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies. (Opened as the Open Source Collaboration Technologies Competency Center, the Center was renamed in November in recognition of our designation as a 'node' in the Communities of the Future Network.)

Here are our current Open Source projects:

•  Community Collaboration Platform - This project will be developing an Open Source platform to support informal and evolutionary 'elastic networking' among members of rural and urban communities seeking a sustainable future.

•  Specification Writing for Web-based Project Planning Software - This is the sponsored Open Source project which helped to kick-off this self-organizing tech community.

•  phpPolls-extras Goodie Pack - Polling opinions of a community, group or team is an important component of successful collaboration. Here's a PHP/MySQL-based project we're hosting at SourceForge.

Although we have no formal affiliation with the following, here are some Open Source projects which interest us:

•  Ruby is the coolest, fully object-oriented programming language to come along since... Smalltalk! So much to like and it's web-savvy and Open Source, too! Check out Ruby's official English language home page. Windows users can go here for a one-click installable binary distribution. The Observer pattern support rocks! Together with its distributed computing features, Ruby looks like a strong candidate for developing role/actor executable business model frameworks! For more on Ruby's wickedly cool language features, check out this presentation by the Pragmatic Programmers.

•  CritSuite is both an Open Source project and a powerful free service for issue-based, open annontation of web-documents. The Open Sourced collaboration server software is there for your dedicated use if that's what you need. If don't want to or can't afford the server-burden of running your own Crit proxy service, the good folks who funded the development of this technology, the Foresight Institute, are providing free CritSuite-based collaboration server access through http://crit.org. (Bear in mind that the free Crit.org service is very 'prime time load sensitive'.)

•  Pelle Braendgaard's NeuDist.org is 'bearing' it all with a bold plan to support secure, fine-grained 'small business' collaborations based on a generalization of object-oriented concepts related to responsibility-driven design. Pelle's on the scent! Here's a link to a relevant article reply at Advogato which explains how Pelle's ideas and software fit into the 'Small is Good' business web technology interest of the Sohodojo TechSIG.

•  ERights.org, home of E, offers a secure distributed object platform and scripting language for writing Capability-Based Smart Contracts. This choice, quality stuff, along with Pelle's ideas/software at NeuDist.org are pieces of the financial 'transaction space' essential to 'Small is Good' business webs... business models which are all about effective collaboration.

•  Raph Levien's Advogato.com is both a sandbox and an Open Source developers community with a twist... serious graph-theoretic exploration of peer trust ratings for self-organizing and self-managing teams. Read Raph's description of his trust metric algorithm.

•  wftk: Open Source Workflow Toolkit - Michael Roberts' wftk holds great promise as a candidate technology in a role-actor executable business model platform. We are just beginning to discuss these possibilities with Michael.

•  TUTOS: Open Source small workgroup tools - Gero Kohnert's TUTOS is a multi-lingual, task-oriented groupware project which Gero describes as "filling the gaps between planning and reality or people and software"... Right on, Gero. His package includes calendar, task management, contacts, bug tracking features, etc.

•  Xen - A Zope/Python Project Management System - The Aussie-based Netizen IT consultancy has released an alpha version of their flexible, extensible Open Source project management system. See their press release for details, especially Netizen's plans for sponsored development.

•  OpenSched is a project scheduling software offering from by Calgary Canada-based M-Tech, a network security products and services company. OpenSched takes a project description file of information about tasks, resources and scheduling constraints which guide its scheduling process and it then produces many, varied reports reports including a task lists, management reports and GANTT charts. The project is currently maintained by Alan McIvor.

•  Your project here...

If you are involved in a relevant Open Source project we should know about, please tell us about yourself and your collaboration technology project.

Highly Recommended
Open Source projects are increasingly global and multi-lingual. Here's an innovative service provider with an exciting business model and collaboration software offerings made to order for our growing community needs. Multicity.com provides a range of free services which include multi-lingual, real-time translation chat, forums, polls, instant messaging even profile matching! (The free offerings are ad-sponsored, subscription service can eliminate the ads.) Most of these multi-lingual features can be freely used via email or incorporated into your website. Find out more.

While our interest is in collaboration generally, we are especially interested in technologies which enable entrepreneurial free agents to collaborate in elastic networks through the creation of dejobbed small businesses and self-managing projects.

The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies is hosted by Sohodojo, home of the nanocorp. A nanocorp is the legal incorporation 'wrapper' around an entrepreneurial free agent.

Entrepreneurial free agents are portfolio people who nurture a collection of dejobbed small businesses and team-based projects as a means to their livelihood.

Here are some links to help you better understand our core beliefs and interests:

• The Nanocorp Primer - The first piece lays out our basic beliefs, the second is about how venture capital will be affected by the New Economy dynamics which give rise to the nanocorp business model, the third describes how 'role-actor' scenarios form the basis of entrepreneurial free agent elastic networking and the fourth installment shows how 'Small is Good' Business Webs can help bridge the Digital Divide.

• Collaboration: The Foundation of Entrepreneurial Free Agency - This issue of our Rants and Raves newsletter discusses the importance of collaboration technologies for free agents, includes a case study example and a review of Michael Schrage's No More Teams!

We'll be continuously expanding and refining our resources for Open Source community members interested in collaboration technologies. In the meantime, here are a few inspiring titles to start things off:

Books

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

• Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox: How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean by David Gelernter

• Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate by Michael Schrage

On November 17th, we tweaked our name from the (mouthful) The Center for Community Collaboration Technologies to the Center for Community Collaboration Technologies. This is in recognition of our designation as a 'node' in the Communities of the Future Network.

COTF is a network of community centers and futures institutes dedicated to the research and development of capacities for transformation among urban and rural communities seeking a sustainable future.

We will be announcing more here soon about what this strategic partnership means for us and for the COTF community. Please stay tuned by bookmarking this page and subscribing to its for notification of changes.

In the meantime, we are just getting started. Currently, there is little more than a few static HTML pages that we call 'home'. As a self-organizing R&D Lab and community resource, our utility and success will be a function of how well we support interaction and collaboration among community members.

We are considering a variety of hosting and/or content management options to support our community. We will announce our plans here. In the meantime, if you are interested in getting involved, please drop us an email to Contact Us.

Thank you for visiting the Center for Community Collaboration Technologies,
  --Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky--
      Hosts, Sohodojo
  --Rick Smyre--
      President, Communities of the Future

© 1998-2010 Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky for Sohodojo | Our Privacy Statement
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