Stewarding Technology for Communities

Funny how you don’t update mental statistics like, “how long have you been working on the book?”  I’ve been answering the question with “three years” for a long time.  But actually we started working on the project in January 2003, so that makes it four and a half years.

During our meeting yesterday afternoon I was struck by how different the three of us are in our preferences and tastes when it comes to things like fonts, graphic images, and book design.  When you consider how we came to agreement on so many things when it comes to the content of our book, all those differences make me really appreciate the agreements that we forged during those four and a half years of collaboration

We’re working on a book title.  So the end of the project is nigh!

Don’t you love technical problems? Our WordPress installation had some sort of major foo and we lost everything. Even the back up was full of garbage.

Thankfully not all is lost. There is the Internet Wayback Machine where we have been able to find most of the posts. We’ll have to reconstruct some of the latter ones where we only have snippets via technorati. We’ll be adding these posts back in as time allows. If there is something in particular you need, let us know and we’ll hunt it up.

But there is one HUGE loss.

We lost all your comments. We love you. We love your comments. So we deeply apologize for their loss! We have some back up plans to avoid this in the future.

Live and learn, eh?

Ruby on Rails is a new and increasingly popular web application framework. Like many technologies today, it has an active community of developers and they have the customary suite of wikis, file repositories, email lists, blogs and RSS feeds. One thing that catches my eye about the Ruby on Rails community is its very active, open-ended, ongoing conversation on an IRC channel. Its shop-talk goes 24 hours a day. Last April, I captured about 12 hours of conversation overnight (Pacific time).

Last week I posted a bit about technology stewardship, particularly community tech stewardship. Beth asked for a definition - a great question. So John Smith, Etienne Wenger and I batted one about for a bit. Here is what we came up with. “Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the working s of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

Although the whole technology for communities project comes out of our practice with specific communities, during gestation and birthing it’s easy to start worrying about how our thinking may have gotten far removed from actual practice. It’s easy to wonder, “maybe we’re just talking to each other… Maybe it’s a bunch of words that don’t have traction or actually refer to anything that’s real.” Fortunately, to keep ourselves going we’ve gotten some feedback from a friend or two along the lines of “this is great stuff” and “makes sense, but you’ve