I’ve been teaching a class on the subject for 3 years, I’ve been giving talks on the subject for almost a year. Finally I set down and wrote the essay for the second edition of the Collaborative Futures book. On Sunday (Aug 1st 2010) I gave a talk based on this essay at DebConf the Debian community conference. The title of the talk is “Beyond Sharing: Open Source Design”. The (high-pitch audio) presentation is available on the Debian site (requires Firefox or another OGV playing browser).

Is a book “content” or “conversation”? With the notion of challenging the power of monolithic institutions, are we creating one in the form of a book? Should we focus on the motivation, or the invitation? Do “in-dividuals” even exist?

ambiguous thoughts on sticky notes

A lot of work has been done, a lot of challenges in weaving our diverging views into the book in a way that would create that multiplicity that we want but still maintain the reading flow and would make for a good read.

A new team of authors/editors with a fresh set of eyes, critically dissected our initial conventions about collaboration. The main surgical intervention will happen now, by Friday night we should stitch it all together.

Second Collaborative Futures team starting the book sprint with a Skype session with more of the original authors

It’s scary to see your labor of love on the surgeon’s table. That’s a bit of how it feels now after the first day of the June 2010 Collaborative Futures book sprint.

Starting tomorrow morning and for the next 3 days we will work on a new edition of the Collaborative Futures book.

As I’ve done before I will keep updating with posts here every evening. In the meanwhile I will leave you with the spiel:

In January 2010 six authors and one programmer were locked in a room in Berlin and were assigned by the Transmediale festival to collaboratively write a book titled “Collaborative Futures”.

5 days and 33,000 words later the first incarnation of Collaborative Futures was finished online, and sent off to be printed. 5 months later the original authors together with three new people and will be locked in Berlin and New York to produce the second edition of the same book.

The Frankfurt Book Fair covers Collaborative Futures.

My online collaborators Mushon-Zer Aviv and Jonah Bossewitch and I are leading off a day of workshops on online collaboration. I love that Jonah and I will be meeting in person for the first time, and that Mushon will be joining us via Skype. How online-collaborative is that!

ElectroSmog SkillShare: Tools and Models for Online Collaboration

Saturday, March 20, 2010 | 10AM – 5PM

Free with RSVP

Limit of 30 participants (in New York).