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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our seventh episode was recorded the evening after Bear and Blog and features Steven Walling, Wikipedia Extraordinaire and chicken tender who works with Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham at Portland’s AboutUs.org, wherein we talked about using Wiki as an academic source (and getting an A for it), Recent Changes Camp 2009, The Wikipedia Manual of Style, breakfast, lunch and dinner, sleeping under the stars and by the river, guinea pigs, User Bots, and trees, snakes, owls and grapevines

What’s creative and groundbreaking, and capable of topping iPhone buzz on Twitter?

It’s Cre8Camp, the inaugural unconference that brought 50 creatives to SOUK, a coworking space (322 NW 6th Avenue), this Saturday. Within the first hour of introduction and networking, about 24 topics were developed for discussion, and groups of creatives went off to various conferences rooms and hallways to delve into some of the most intense dilemmas, new media techniques, and social prerogatives that currently exist.

The event was covered masterfully on Twitter, allowing the rankings for the hashtag identifier #Cre8Camp. There was so much buzz involved that #Cre8Camp trumped mention of the newly released iPhone 3G on Twitter. By the end of the day, #Cre8Camp was second only to Dark Knight.

The conference was organized and sponsored by @stevegehlen, @CarriBugbee (Big Deal PR), @feedia, @brampitoyo, @7thscreen, @sadiemedley, @julsd (Owner of SOUK) Great Lunch from @turoczy (of @siliconflorist), @ahockley (amazing photos of the event to come soon), and the Art Institute of Portland and ISITE Design.

It was live-Tweeted online by @StevenWalling (Wikipedia/Wiki God), @CarrieBugbee (amazing job) Me @caseorganic, @sadiemedley, @staceyanderson, @notbenh @feedia, @brampitoyo, @Theinfovore, @lilbutterfly, @JeanAnnVK, @unclenate.

The event was mind blowing and incredible. It will probably take me a week to fully digest and analyze the information gathered.

If you have information you’d like me to include in future updates on the information gathered during Cre8Camp, please E-mail me at caseorganic@gmail.com.

One of the things that really excites me about the evolving state of the Internet is the ability for books to be coauthored across time and space. The Wiki is one of the most powerful tools in allowing this to happen.

From Wikipedia to the newest form of this method, the “Art of Community”, a book for O’Reilly by Portland’s Dawn Foster and San Fransisco’s Open Source Advocate Danese Cooper (who is currently packing for OSCON).

Another great thing about the project is that the book resembles itself in its construction and content. It is a book that was built by the same methods that it writes about. Needless to say, I am looking forward to watching it develop online.

If you are interested in contributing to the book, you can do so at the O’Reilly Commons Wiki

If you’d like to meet Dawn Foster, look for her at the next Beer and Blog. They’re generally on Friday, 6Pm at the Green Dragon. You can also check out her blog, Fast Wonder, or follow her on Twitter.

She’s extremely active in the Portland Tech Community as well as well versed in RSS aggregator applications such as Yahoo! Pipes. You can see more of her Yahoo! Pipes on her blog.

If you’d like to meet Danese Cooper, you can find more about her from this Wikipedia article, or you might run into her at OSCON this week. If nothing else, you can also follow her on Twitter.

Below you can find the most recent iteration of the book (as of July 19, 2008). Hopefully it will give you some ideas, and some impetus if you’d like to contribute!

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Chapters for AOC

From WikiContent

Back to WikiContent:Community_Portal

Important Note: We are in the process of contacting these people - some of them have NOT agreed to participate yet!

[edit] Chapters

• Dawn Foster, Danese Cooper, and Andy Oram: AOC Introduction with Benefits and Types of Communities
• Dawn Foster: AOC Managing Communities
• Danese Cooper: Corporate Communities
• Tara Hunt: Measuring the Health of your community? - Maybe (checking with her publisher on cross-posting a chapter)
• Kaliya Hamlin: Role of Face-to-Face Interaction in Building and Complementing Online Community - Interested.
• Karl Fogel: Dealing with difficult community members - Interested.
• Liz Henry: Wiki Communities - Interested.
• Eric von Hippel: Community Driven Innovation - Doesn’t have time to write something new, but might be able to republish something??
• June Holley: Network Weaving - Interested.
• Jean Russell: Nurturing or Flow in Do-Good (socially-responsible) Communities - Interested
• Sulamita Garcia: Communities Across Continents: How They are Different - Interested
• William Hurley aka whurley: Community status - Interested
• Zaheda Bhorat: Non-Developer Contributions to Developer Communities - Contacted, but not confirmed.
• Zak Greant: Managing Community Issues with Issue Trackers - Interested
• TBD?: How communities of disabled people can organize themselves using online media (recommended as a chapter by Beth Noveck)
• Beth Noveck with David Johnson: Visualization Technologies — (other suggestions Sunny Fugate[1] or Lion Kimbro[2][3])

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A lot of user frustration is caused by unreliable information experiences. Contact and location information is often ill-placed or absent on business websites. Because of this, the user spends an unnecessary amount of time wayfinding instead of contacting the business. This leads to user frustration and business losses, not to mention time lost on the side of the user.

Enter AboutUs.org. It’s like Wikipedia/Phone Book/Search Engine/Social Networking - all in one. It provides a consistent and cheery user experience, while data mining the needed contact and location information that a user needs…quickly and quietly.

Plus, users can augment every page of the site to expand information about a business or topic, because AboutUs is a Wiki. Users can have profiles, interests and groups. They can find others based on their interests/edits. They can upload photos and stories about themselves in Wiki format.

AboutUs.org is based in Portland, too! In fact, I recently visited their location and was terribly impressed by their corporate environment. Being there gave me renewed ambitions for what Japanense futurist Mr. Masuda wrote about in his book about the future: The Information Society as Post Industrial Society.

AboutUs looks like it could be another step towards a bright future of coworking and cocreation of knowledge and ideas.

Tonight, my friends Heather and Max and I went to the WikiWednesday Open House event at Portland’s AboutUs.org. We met Wiki Inventor Ward Cunningham.

The event consisted of a networking session followed by a conference in critical thinking led by Ward. We discussed the current manifestation of Wikipedia, the future of the Wiki, and it’s limitations. The notes I took there will form the basis of a new series of posts and a few papers.

After the conference, Ward talked about AOL, the endless September of the Internet. Before the net was open to the masses, college students used to have to deal with the new waves of college students that were just learning to use the Internet every September. After a month or so, the Freshmen would learn how to use the Internet correctly and everyone would continue to improve the system as a whole.

Then AOL arrived on the scene. The September never ended. Not everyone ever figured out how to use the web like the generations of college students before them. Thus, AOL became termed as the “endless September”.