Western Mass Drupal Camp will be held in Amherst MA on 1/21/12

I was very happy to find out this weekend that I will be speaking next weekend (1/21/12) at Western Mass Drupal Camp in Amherst.

I’ll be walking through a case study of the site ISITE Design recently designed and built for the JFK Jr Forum at the Harvard Institute of Politics (The Forum site is new, the Institute of Politics site is existing).

As I wrote in the session description:

An interesting project – in some ways a very simple Drupal site with a single content type, but lots of interesting features.

Key features we’ll review include:

• Kaltura – open source (and SaaS) video platform for livestreaming, transcoding, and delivery, including HTML 5 video
• Programmatic content migration from EZ Publish, using Feeds
• Homepage feature carousel and “featured” forums: Views, Blocks, Nodequeue
• Complex Views (Headers, Contextual Arguments, rewriting)
• Taxonomy: Speakers, Moderators, Cosponsors, Subjects
• Calendar of Forums

Looks like it will be a very full day of sessions, including presentations on responsive design, Drush basics, Views, and usability testing.

• Perry Hewitt, Chief Digital Officer, Harvard (@perryhewitt)
• Gene Begin, Digital Marketing Director, Babson College (@gbegin)
• Tom Baird, Vice Chancellor, University of Michigan Dearborn
• Mike Petroff, Web and Technology Enrollment Manager, Emerson College (also a writer for .eduGuru) (@mikepetroff)

I’ll update this post with the video from the session as soon as it’s available.

Videos from the session have been posted, and below is a quick Storify list of tweets from the event:

(See also Erik Devaney‘s coverage in New England Post: Inside FutureM: Digital Marketing and Higher Education)

In the meanwhile, here’s Chris presenting at a Berkman Luncheon Series event on June 17th, 2008:

The Berkman description:

A discussion of the recently published book, Two Bits, which will focus on the meaning and cultural significance of Free Software, its history and the manner in which it has been “modulated” into domains both close to and far from software and networks. Topics for discussion include anthropological approaches to studying distributed phenomena, the historical analysis of Free Software and the use of Free Software practices in education, science, music and culture generally.

Unfortunately I was out of town – in Chicago for Web Content 2008 – and unable to attend in person. Nice to see Benjamin Mako Hill, danah boyd, and Ethan Zuckerman (and, I’m sure, others who I don’t recognize by sight but would know by name and reputation) in the question and answer segment. That’s the kind of crowd you’ll really only get at a Berkman event.

Here are my rough notes from the talk, which are really more an outline of the topics discussed than what Chris has to say about them – for that you’ll have to watch.

Overview of the book:
I. Ethnographic and Theoretical Introduction: Hackers, Geeks, and Recursive Publics
II. Analytic History of Free Software – Five Practices which make Free Software
III. Modulations of those practices into other domains

Part One:
The important thing is the subtitle – the cultural significance of free software.
What would it mean to do an anthropology of free software?

Ability to participate in building the internet – recursive publics: the thing that draws them together is the thing they are building in common.

Part Two:
Breaking Free software into 5 practices / domains.

1. fermenting a movement
2. sharing source code
3. defining an open infrastructure
4. writing copyleft licenses
5. coordinating collaboration

Part Three: Modulations, carrying “free software” into non-software domains

College Textbooks – Connexions (collaborative textbook creation using creative commons licenses). (At Rice University)

Biology: BiOS, Registry of Standard Biological Parts, patent Lens, open source nanotechnology

Bio Nano: ATCC (Global Bioresource Center)

Difficulty of patents, not just copyright, in some of these other domains.

—

It’s interesting to me how much Chris focuses on the moment in 1998 when “Free Software” and “Open Source” underwent a decisive split, and how the distinction between the two plays out in the “Modulations” section. What difference does it make if the modulations are actually versions of “open source” in other domains rather than “free software” in other domains?

Of course, the book isn’t subtitled “The Cultural Significance of Open Source,” so one assumes the focus is more on the free software version – which focuses more specifically on copyleft, and ensuring (some might say requiring) freedom for downstream users – but when my copy finally arrives I’ll post some further discussion about what impact those differences might have. Would the more traditionally business friendly “open source” approach have made modulation into other domains easier, but perhaps less impactful?

Pecha Kuch is coming up on April 10th, 8pm, at Harvard Graduate School for Design.

I’m hoping to make it over there after Our World Digitized at MIT

This is a benefit not only for the steady stream of students (undergrad and graduate) and recent graduates all those colleges and universities pump into the workforce regularly, but also because of the broader institutions they support.

My two favorite examples this year are the MIT Comparative Media Studies program and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. (As an alumnus of neither Harvard nor MIT, I can recommend both impartially).

Somewhat less well-known in tech circles than the Media Lab, the Comparative Media Studies program practices “applied humanism”:

The . . . program is committed to the art of thinking across media forms, theoretical domains, cultural contexts, and historical periods. Both our graduate and undergraduate programs encourage the bridging of theory and practice, as much through course work as through participation in faculty and independent research projects.

Among the projects that the MIT CMS program currently sponsors / hosts:

• The Convergence Culture Consortium
• Learning Games to Go
• Metamedia
• Project New Media Literacies
• Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
• MIT Center for Future Civic Media

In addition, check out their Faculty, Theses, Publications, and subscribe to their Events Calendar and News Feed, which often includes podcasts of various events.

This week (Nov. 16th and 17th, 2007), the Convergence Culture Consortium will be hosting the Futures of Entertainment II conference, which (true to their mission):

brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Check out the full conference schedule for more detail on speakers and subjects. I will be attending and hopefully blogging about much of the conference – though those posts may not appear until the following week due to some vacation time which will take me offline.

Just up the Charles in Harvard Square, the Berkman center focuses on “Internet & Society” in the broad context of the Harvard Law School.

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of the center, just look at:

• The projects linked from their home page, including the Center for Citizen Media, the Citizen Media Law project, the Digital Natives project, and the Internet and Democracy Project, among others)
• Their faculty and fellows, including Yochai Benkler, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, danah boyd, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, and David Weinberger, and that’s just grabbing the names that immediately jump out to me, not to suggest all the others aren’t equally prominent or doing equally fascinating and worthwhile work.

Also be sure to check out (and subscribe to) MediaBerkman, which podcasts / vodcasts many Berkman sponsored events for those not able to make it to Cambridge in person.