February 6, 2008

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The Collaboration Show

Contents


A word of explanation

As an experiment, we're going to try and make an entire episode of Spark via this wiki. That means we need your help.

Below you'll see the script for the program, our timeline and your story suggestions. Right now the script is a shell, but we will be adding more everyday. If you have a suggestion or something to add click Edit or Comment to contribute.

Show Script

The taped segments of the program appear in bold. Everything else is narration by Nora.

Theme music

Bills: (where Nora promos what will be on the program. This is nested inside the theme music.)

Wikis, Web 2.0 and social media. Collaboration and the tools that make it possible are big trends in the culture. On Spark this time, we look at when collaboration works, how it works, and when it all comes crashing down.

Theme music ends

Show starts with Craig's suggestion:

"Hi, I'm Nora Young, and I'm evil and stupid. Hey, wait a minute. Who wrote that? (tape of people saying "I did" layered over and over?) Who let trolls into our wiki? ("you did") you did nora.wav its your fault.wav trolls in wiki.wav Oh right we did. That was the point of this episode of Spark, to see if we could write an entire episode by collaborating with you. A couple of weeks ago we opened up the radio making process by starting a wiki. It's a website that anyone can edit, and you jumped in and tweaked our ideas, our research, and you even changed this script.

Sudden remixing of Nora's voice: "changed this script" "made changes to this script" "vetted the dialogue" "re-wrote the narration"

Nora: That's enough of that. Being able to reverse changes is one of the great things about a wiki....

sfx

Nora: We didn't set up the wiki so you could do our work for us while we drank Pink Ladies. We did it to explore some of the brave new ways of collaborating. ....Because collaboration is the name of the game these days. It's everywhere--you can remix videos on youtube, you can play cards online with someone halfway around the world, or you can have a say in choosing the latest Canadian Idol. And here's a thing that gets lost in all the talk about "user generated content". It's that collaboration is changing who we think is an author. What a creator or an organizer. Collaboration will change the way we learn, the way we work, and maybe even the way we take the bus.

bus sfx...

Last month a group of Vancouverites got together with the city's public transit company to talk about how to make the transit system better.

I'm Karen Fung and I helped organize the transit camp.

NY: Yes, a transit camp. "camps" are the latest trend in conferences. And no,you don't need to bring your sleeping bags or bug repellent or mashmallows.

A camp is a user generated conference. There is no set agenda, there is no keynote speaker. Everyone who attends a camp has a say in how it works.

Karen: The barcamp rules are that leadership can come from anywhere, just because the people who organized it are at the front of the room at the beginning of the day, that doesn't mean that they have all the best ideas all the time. If someone else has a great idea, they are encouraged to speak up. The second rule is the rule of 2 feet, which is that if you're not getting value out of the session that you're sitting in, then go to another session. We can't be a self organizing session if we're not self organizing.

Nora: I love that. The rule of 2 feet! Camps used to be just for computer geeks, but lately, doctors, artists, and librarians are holding camps. In Karen's case, she wanted to talk about Vancouver's transit system, but without all of the tension and bureaucracy you usually see at an organized public forum.

NY: (on tape) so why did you think a camp instead of a conventional meeting would be a good idea? I had attended the first on in Toronto, it was a very different conversation than one I had ever envisioned having with the transit company. And to be able to have that conversation in front of people from transit, who also had their own comments and responses, saying we've actually thought of that, but you've never had to think about this as the public. It was really nice to enter into these collabortive types of conversations, instead of trying to say well what can we do in spite of the transit authority. Or to have the transit authority make their decisions without seemly to consult with the public. Interview rolls on from here...

First Interview of the show: Meetings 2.0 item here with Karen Fung from Vancouver."unconferences"

Spark ID voiced by Robert Nunnally: "From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, you're listening to Spark. And I'm Robert Nunnally (aka Gurdonark). I like Spark, and I also like making collaborative music, so I used the wiki to suggest a story about the Calendar Songs project..."
*
Calendar Songs: Dan recorded this with Tamara on Tuesday (MP3 here)*

NY: And what happens if one of those songs becomes a big hit? Who owns the intellectual property of all those creative sparks? Calendar Girl's project will treat the remixers as co-writers of the songs.

One of the gurus of collaboration is Howard Rheingold. His days of collaborating go back to the Whole Earth Catalogue, and he's most famous as the author of Smart Mobs, about how our mobile "always wired" culture fuels collaboration. But just because the tools of collaboration are there, doesn't mean it's all beer and skittles.

Clip of Howard for the promo: "We will find out whether new access to media will be a wonderful way for kids to create new industries in their dorm rooms as they already have, whether it will revitalize democracy, or whether we will be washed away in a tide of spam and porn and urban legends." (MP3 RUNS ~0:22)

Howard's coming up in about 15 minutes.

Another Spark ID with Glenn, who suggested the Ficlets story: "Hi, I'm Glenn Jackman in Silicon Valley North, where we're riding, not so much a tech bubble but more of a tech foam. You're listening to Spark."

ITEM: Ficlets
This item will start with Kevin (the creator of ficlets.com) reading his post, and then will move into Nora's interview with Kevin. From there, we'll hear the voices of the ficlets writers who created sequels and prequels to Kevin's original work.

TAG: Here's a question. How much collaborating can you do over distances. I mean, these web 2.0 tools like wikis make it possible, but does that mean you can do without the face to face. Liz, Dan and I have used a wiki to make spark since the beginning, but when we're trying to figure out how to make a show hang together, we always get together in the same room with a white board and a pen and stare at each other.

Spark ID, starts with piano music, Tom and Nora appear.

ITEM: Tom Howell talks about what would have happened if Mozart used a Wiki to write music. (rough MP3 mix)

OK, I know Tom has a point. Sometimes Collaboration is more trouble than it's worth. Just ask anyone with a lazy lab partner. We were lucky with our wiki. Nobody hacked it, nobody hijacked it for their own purposes, but that's not always the case...

When Wikis Go Wrong
Michael Kinsley and LA Times Wiki story: Are we ready to collaborate on everything?

Nora introduces Howard.

Interview: Howard Rheingold (full MP3 at the blog)=

NY: That's about it for the collaboration show. Just because our collaboration show is in the can doesn't mean the project is over. The wiki and the blog are still open for business.) This episode has been a really cool experiment. I'll add reflection on what we learned/what it was like

But what it mostly made me think is that maybe we're actually getting back to an older idea. If I lived in a rural community 100 years ago, most of what I made would be collaborative... people working together on the farm, going to a quilting bee...The machine age, the 20th century is what gave us all those fragmented systems. Maybe we're returning to our natural way of working.

Credits:

Spark was made by Dan Misener, Elizabeth Bowie and Me, Nora Young. And by Karen Fung, Calender Girl, Kevin Lawver, Tom Howell, Michael Kinsley, and Howard Rheingold. Now this is the part of the show where we usually list all of the listeners who helped us make the show. This week, loads of people helped by sending us audio, leaving suggestions at the wiki, and editing the script. If we read the entire list of everyone who helped, the show would need to be another 10 minutes long, so for a full list of all our contributers, check out our blog, at cbc.ca/spark.

That's where you can also find links to all the music we used to make Spark. The show is made with Creative Commons music.

Timeline

The stories that will appear on the show have now been chosen. Dan, Nora and Liz are working on chasing them down. Over the next week we'll be recording the interviews and writing the script. The show will be totally finished by Monday February 4th.

Confirmed stories

Stories that aren't in production:

  • the Wikipedia anti-rules - a long list of collaboration "worst practices" assembled over the past few years, many of which are hilarious
  • spammers and flamers and trolls, oh my - various kinds of "griefers" and how they disrupt collaboration and "community" - and why literally any one of us could find ourselves wearing this label from time to time no matter how reasonable we think we are
  • Wikipedia vandalism in progress - a selection of the funniest attacks on Wikipedia, some of which are so hilarious (like the SOLLOG assaults by devotees of the so-called god SOLLOG asserting his obvious divinity) it is impossible to read them and simultaneously breathe - there was also a page of "funniest Wikipedia vandals and trolls" once which summarized some of the truly hilarious activities these folks get up to
  • the world's worst meeting - all the things that happen every day but you hope not to you all on one day
  • there are also some songs written about Wikipedia on Meta-Wikipedia which are under GFDL - Hotel Wikipedia to the tune of Hotel California and Coconut Monkey to the tune of Paperback Writer - might have to pay for the music but not the words - then again you could do a whole show on Wikipedia and not run out of material

Production/scripting thoughts

  • Could begin with script about wiki that has been manipulated to make Nora say silly things. ( I really like Craig's suggestion below. I'm adding it to the script)
  • Promo the wiki within the context of the interviews
  • Encourage people near a computer to join a vawkr.com chat room to live video/chat while the show airs. Timeshifters miss out!

Discussion

I think what may be missing up front (and this addresses the 'shorter story needs') is an 'explanation' on the metaphorical level of what a wiki is. Say, a sandbox. Where kids come together to build and play and cooperate. Revise and heighten. And then walk away. "The learnings and takeaways'are taken on in their being. So much of the chat and stuff (not necessarily here) focusses on end results - the product, the artifact - and misses the mark on the 'social value' - ie people make friends, enjoy the experience, build trust, have fun. So much talk on collaboration ignores this and seems hell bent on proving 'something' to the masters of the universe. Would make a nice short piece. about a minute long. "A wiki is like..."

This is probably a tag and not a story, but according to this
http://technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22005/
the library of congress in the US is putting tons of photos on flickr. They were taken in the 1st part of the 20th c, and have little or no info about them, so they're asking ppl to visit their flickr acc't and add any info they may have.

_contributed by nora young on Jan 24 9:21am _

I am just thinking that you may want to reference at the top of the show the term "wikiality" in the way the script was developed. It was coined by Stephen Colbert on the July 31, 2006 broadcast of The Colbert Report. It is defined as "a concept that together we can create a reality that we all agree on". His usage of the word is that since wikipedia is editable by everyone if enough people change an entry to something, even if it is untrue, popular demand will make it true because people will reference Wikipedia as the source. Hense, what is written in wikipedia becomes wikiality (their version of reality).

contributed by Greg Demetrick on Jan 24 12:29pm

Ficlets story: I compare it to that kid's game (don't remember what it's called), you know the one, kids sit in a circle, one whispers something in the next one's year, and around the circle. When complete, we hear the first comment and what it morphed in to. I know it's not the same but it's an analogy: someone starts and then let's the next person take over.

contributed by Glenn Jackman on Jan 24 12:29pm

Here's a short, fun story idea: How to shamelessly self promote your art or work. It isn't easy. Recall the golden days of shock and self promotion. You know- Blondini tightrope walking over Lundy's Lane, N. Falls.......evil kneivel rocketing over Snake Canyon (sort of....he didn't get very far.) And now with spark wiki, anyone can force their way into the limelight (sort of......how many of you are actually listening to this episode anyway?) Jarrod Barker of Port Dover Ontario and his experimental band Pleather have coined the term: Buccaneering - to steal someone else's thunder by creating your own in a web based manipulative way. In fact they are shamelessly Buccanneering their music right now, here on spark, have we lost all control? <nora should sound sarcastic> sound effect of "cueing up" Pleather sound bite---uploaded mp3 of song:iroha&nbsp; at top of this page upload section, no copyright, public domain/use <a rel="license href=">
<img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/2.5/ca/88x31.png" /> span xmlns:dc= href=" property="dc:title" rel="dc:type">iroha</span> is licensed under a
<a rel="license href=">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License</a>. )

contributed by pleather on Jan 25 7:40pm

The name of the game Glenn Jackman is referring to is "Broken Telephone"

contributed by N Herman on Jan 26 1:58pm

Unfortunately Toy Soldiers Unite has failed in their attempt in to bring their message of peace, love, and explosive dolls with buzz saws to mainstream Canadian culture. Dr Steel For World Emperor!

_contributed by Toy Soldier Fedak on Jan 26 10:21pm _

-SFX:[sound of clicking] ,

Nora: Hi, I'm Nora Young, and I'm pleased to welcome you to this
wikisode of Spark, put together by "the people formerly known as our
audience." Yes, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Well, maybe
lunatics is a bit strong. But what do we call these people? And what do
we call this thing that we're up to here. Well, one Aussie egghead
calls it 'Produsage'.." (folowing lifted from Bruns' websitefor a start) Dr Axel Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second
Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. He is a Senior Lecturer
in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of
Technology in Brisbane, Australia and coined the term produsage to
better describe the current shift towards user-led forms of content
production which are proving to have an increasing impact on the
economy, law, social practices, democracy and Class A radio prgramming
itself.

Suggestion: I (Dan Misener) just came a lovely little quote from David Sifry on the Open Sourcesite, calling the show's listeners and readers - “the people formerly
known as your audience.” This is a lovely phrase, and it'd be great to
include somewhere here. - dan misener]hey dan (brian here) i've tried to incorporate this idea into noras's intro. i donlt think it needs attribution to sifry as it has become commonly used in the sphere. my 2 cents *Interview:* [Axel Bruns on Produsage (to be taped in early Feb)

Nora: You can hear my full interview with Axel at the blog, cbc.ca/spark

  • Here's the big question we're looking at now: How do we keep reminding people that the show was made with the wiki without beating them over the head with the Wiki-stick?

Answer: short playful production bits "a wiki is like a sandbox..." "the word wiki comes for the hawaiian" and maybe

 How do we acknowledge the contributions made by everyone?

Answer:
have them contribute more directly i.e. have them read some of 'the
bits', maybe their idea contribution lies elsewhere but their tangible
contribution lies here. of course then there are the logistics...

What can we do that is more creative then having a ton of names in the credits?

Answer: direct contribution

Should we have people introduce the items they pitched?

Answer: could do, but why not ask people to do more, the contributions may end up be lo-fi, but use what you find.

  • tape: I'm XX and I edited this show. Have many of the contributers list themselves here?

" It's everywhere--you can remix videos on youtube, you can play cards online with someone halfway around the world, or you can have a say in choosing the latest Canadian Idol. And here's a thing that gets lost in all the talk about "user generated content". It's that collaboration is changing who we think is an author. What a creative work is"

Sorry, but remixing videos and playing cards is not collaboration. Nor is choosing the next Canadian Idol.

contributed by brian moffatt on Jan 30 6:18am

"How much collaborating can you do over distances?"

Nothing wrong with getting together in a room with a board to collaborate. And just because you set up a wiki doesn't mean you have collaboration. Collaboration existed before all the nifty web 2.0 tools. As for the issue of distance, it depends on the project, really doesn't it? Think of an architectural project. A building. Eventually, the team needs to get together and take the model and put it together on site with glass and steel. And the ability to collaborate depends on the willingness of the participants and the strength of the tools. This wiki is a fairly poor tool for working on this project, for example. There are other and better tools available for project management. And for all the romance surrounding distance learning and telecommuting, old business and education models and modes of behaviour are hard to abandon and break. It's usually a control/power/trust thing. If the end use is a digital product - say a piece of music, or a blueprint for a housing complex - then there is no reason why the entire project could not be delivered 'over distances'.

contributed by brian moffatt on Jan 30 6:42am

The question that arises in many people’s minds when the wiki approach is first described to them is “How can that possibly work? If everyone is editing the same text, doesn’t that lead to incoherence? I must not be understanding something about how the built-in control mechanisms work. There must be some controlling authority.”

The fact is that it does work. People are surprisingly cooperative and respectful in their wiki interactions. (Contrast that with traditional newsgroup flaming.) This is the essence of wiki interaction. Cooperative work by people who have never met, have no personal knowledge of each other, and no predefined protocols for behaviour is certainly something new, and worth commenting on.

contributed by Paul Zablosky on Jan 30 10:33am

Nice observations Paul. As easy as collaboration sounds, it involves for the most part a lot of unlearning. It's really hard to give up control, especially if you are someone who has been trained in hierarchical, top-down methodologies/work systems. Broadcast being one such area. I think the people at Spark are to be congratulated. This is not easy.

contributed by brian moffatt on Jan 30 5:00pm

(Picking up from the end of Brian Moffatt's comment: "How much collaborating can you do over distances?")

And indeed many digital products are produced through collaboration between participants distributed across many time zones. Early versions of uPortal were created by a team of contributors linked only through a mailing list, and a software (CVS) repository. To be sure, many of them did attend the same conferences, and there were twice-yearly developer code-fests -- face-to-face meetings of coders and designers -- but the bulk of the work was managed through a simple mailing list. The use of a wiki came later. But the contributors inhabited time zones from the UK to Japan.

contributed by Paul Zablosky on Jan 31 10:02pm

I've used Basecamp to collaborate on the project management level (great tool) and have just had Cozimo reco'd to me, with which I'm just now beginning to work with on a collaborative creative level. There's a huge difference between the two as i see it (between the levels of collaboration, not the tools). I think music is the easiest art form in which to collaborate over distances (nature of the artist and their familiarity with digital tools - i mean collaboration is in the nature of a fair number of musicians and 'digital' is the native language. In other areas, perhaps design (ie architetcure, software etc. i'm less familiar with these) there is also the disposition and the language. Certain businesses just don't offer the collaborative spirit or the desire to work in digital space. Some years back, in the early days of teleconferencing, a friend of mine, an executive in the insurance business, was ordered along with the others scattered about north america was ordered to appear at head office the next day, as the ceo just really hated the tech they were using. My suspicion is the ceo was a control freak (well known to be, in fact) and was witnessing the undermining of his 'presence' with the 'tele'. The same may apply in the arts as well, though. Novelists and painters tend to be singular in their visions and practises and dispotions, for example, and may not make the best collaborators up close or at distance.

contributed by brian moffatt on Feb 1 11:52am

*This is weird ... I can edit WikiPedia when I'm half asleep, but this is all different. Q: what inspires software developers to branch off and do things so differently, so that people experience on another platform find themselves tripping over basics? It happens to often ... it's almost as though when we're online we don't actually leave the world of zero-sum game. But there I go, being lucid and ironic again. "Don't be lucid and ironic. People will turn it against you saying, ''Aha, you see? He isn't a nice person!''" --Albert Camus.

I came here looking for the script from the show.
I appreciate what you're doing here. But wouldnt it be kinda nice to put in a link to the actual shot list? As though folk are actually /using/ the web? as though this is an actual living document?
See, thing is ("structuration") our behaviour is conditioned by the way the world really is. And the way the web actually is enhances those who just want to bla-yada-blah. (Is this really the page to discuss the material in the show at length? Isn't that kinda what a blog is for? How come those who manifest as web wizards use it so poorly?) While folk who actually try to get something done are constantly tripped up. (When I clicked the Login link the system displayed "You must be logged in to see that page." I'm the only person who noticed? I'm the only person who cares? Maybe it's because I've been working with actual documentation for things like actual airport landing systems ... while most other folk are happy enough to just yada-bla-yada. I mean, life is just a game, right? Isn't it? #borg #matrix)

Anyhow ... thanks ... because of this page I know there's such a thing as CBC (I did MCR in the 70s) and that there really is a show called Spark. (I listen to it most weeks.) And also that there are people talking about tech. (I've been blogging on ICT since 1996.) All in all ... you know ... cue Twilight Zone theme)

--~~~~

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