knotes - planned support for collaborative negotiation of categories
21-January-2005
- Preamble:
-
I have been trying to concentrate on two site-development tasks over the past few days, leveraging knotes to support some particular activities in the NGRF and SIGOSSEE sites.
The NGRF activity was intriguing. Alan Brown, from the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick, is a key person in the NGRF development and a longtime colleague and collaborator. He recently became part of a TLRP project to assemble resources towards a big report on Work-Related leearning.
One of their first goals was to design a categorical structure to describe these resources and/or to delineate the conceptual territory (sorry, I've never been entirely certain which). He was eager to use an old systems-integration trick of ours, the Team Task, to provide online support for that activity. We recently made a first pass at upgrading the Team Task concept to embed a group weblog and a resource aggregator which would give a clean interface into resources however mesily they might have been thrown into the weblog.
I spent the past two days struggling to understand the activity they were engaged in, and how to make a framework in which to carry on discussions supporting their activity. The rest of this post consists of an unedited email I sent to Alan this morning when I finally got the point.
And the point is: knotes can quickly be adapted to make all categories inherently (cross)-discussable, and to provide an interface for the social negotiation of a categorical structure.
Further background to understanding the stream of text which follows is that I was also planning the upgrade of the SIGOSSEE site so it too begins to make good use of knotes for collaborative work. As part of that, I was working out which kinds of existing SIGOSSEE content should be imported into which new knotes weblogs, and wondering about how to set up the initial categories for these blogs... and more interestingly how to support a process in which the members of the site develop their own categorising conventions.
I hope the text of that email to Alan might give a flavour of what we're about to try to do with knotes and categories:
2 comments.
- Latest comment:
- 02-Nov-2005 12:35 by mmalloch; We're re-thinking social tagsonomy management
