[h2o-discuss] Open Discourse

["Jon Garfunkel" <garf@look.boston.ma.us>]

Hello h2o fellows--

I listened to most of the conference on RealAudio. (I live near Cambridge,
but could not free up time from my job to get to the conference.)

Here's my summary of the conference summaries:

           ------------------------------------
Open information and its jurisdictional/economic ramifications.

1. As information is longer bound to a physical (scarce) resource, it
becomes more availabe, thus less expensive, and can even open new markets.
1a. Such a new market is the University classroom (no longer bound by
seats)
2. To counter the expanse in availability, more sets of information are
necessarily being bound to licenses and patents.
            ------------------------------------

This is all important, but I do not have any expertise to comment on these
points.

I was expecting to hear from the comments about "open discource" systems. To
me, this seems to be the core technology of the various h2o "open-" forums:
legal, educational, governmental.

By "open discourse" I am referring to the process by which a set of issues
get discussed in the various forums (e.g, live conferences, courseware,
openlaw). An example of an issue to be addressed: how can a large group of
open contributors be accomodated in an accountable, and organizing way?

I expect that this is an issue of how such software is designed. If h2o does
not want to get in the work of writing software, it should at least be in a
position to push for certain standards.

FYI, I have some more details about open discourse (as well as a bit of
personal
introduction for purposes of this list) at
http://look.boston.ma.us/garf/webdev/

If their is sufficient interest from the h2o leadership to open this point
for discussion, I would be happy to contribute. Otherwise, feel free to
email me in private.


Jon Garfunkel
Brookline, Mass.
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