January 1st, 2009 has been the target publication date for the book for a while, but that now seems to be slipping.  We’re working as hard as we can on type faces and layout details and all of that.  At the same time we’re using chapters of the book in a CPsquare workshop called “Connected […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 workings of a community […]

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 […]