George Roberts :: Feeds

What is needed for a community to function

ELESIG is a community of researchers that started with a small group of universities, which grew out of eLearning Pathfinding. Elesig has identified a number of functions that distributed (online) group/community members need to fulfill. I adapted these from Rhona Sharpe's presentation to Brookes eL@B on 20/11/2008. The slides may be forthcoming.Online Community functions:

• Welcome new members
• Share resources
• Discuss work in online environments
• Facilitate online discussions
• Present work at online events
• Provide feedback on work and presentations
• Host online events (webinars)
• Summarise discussions
• Collaborate on papers for publication
• Help with access to facilities
• Lead online group
• Join core team

Police fundamentalism and Earth First!

The Observer published a "warning" by the police on Sunday 9 November under the headline, "Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists". In the article, the writers Mark Townsend and Nick Denning, appear to serve as mouthpieces for a simian authoritarianism. They provide little balance to counter the assertion by a "senior source" in the The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) that, "... eco-activists are researching a list of target companies which they believe are major polluters or are exacerbating the threat of climate change." Something wrong with that?

The article goes on to suggest there is a "... network of UK climate camps and radical environmental movements under the umbrella of Earth First!, which has claimed responsibility for a series of criminal acts in recent months." As far as I understood it, the umbrella works as much the other way. Climate Camp provides the umbrella and Earth First! sympathisers - and environmentalists of all stripes, including such radical membership organisations as the WI and the National Trust - may from time to time come under it. This is not just dreadful journalism in the manner of the Daily Mail, this is an attempt to shape a national debate in ideological terms with, I suggest, the aim of demonising dissent, driving a wedge into the environmental movement. Why?

NETCU hardly covered themselves in glory during last summer's climate camp. They managed to drop a copy of their Pocket Legislation Guide to Policing Protest, which has been made available by UK IndyMedia. NETCU describes itself as "... not a public authority as defined by Schedule 1 [of the Freedom of Information Act] and therefore there are no obligations on NETCU to disclose information under the Act. Police Forces are advised NOT to release this guide following freedom of information requests." So, is NETCU cross with environmentalists who blew the wind up their skirts?

I have been thinking about the Earth First! (international site) ethos. On the one hand it could be seen as an expression of humility before the greater world and responsibility to it, no different than a religious person might, with humility, put god first. But, just as god-first can lead to fundamentalist intolerance, so, too, might earth-first. However, not all Christians are fundamentalists and neither are environmentalists or Earth First! And, not all fundamentalists, of any denomination, are violent. But, the "senior source" at NETCU, abetted by toady journos, weaves a web of violent environmental fundamentalism from a set of only loosely, thematically related activities: researching polluting companies, environmental activism, Climate Camp, and Earth First!.

Given one may see one's own reflection in the mirror of our enemies, I wonder whether we might understand NETCU as an expression of police fundamentalism, the extreme end of the order and authority-first movement? I research, from time to time, the behaviours of people and society that appear to me to be damaging to the the earth and other people in it. I read the research of others on the web and in print and I occasionally blog about it. Though I did not make it to Climate Camp last summer that was because our baby son was ill, not because I did not support many of the the aims of the Camp and its organisers. I occasionally assert that over population puts pressure on the carrying capacity of ecological niches, including that of humans. Having made those statements I am also able to assert that violence of all sorts only breeds violence; that power and domination are the problem; that the solution to power and domination lies in the rejection of power and domination, not their transfer from state fundamentalists to any other fundamentalism, religious or environmental. I occasionally welcome a police presence in my community and have met officers who serve out of a desire to make the world a better place. I am not, generally, of the authority-first persuasion, nor am I particularly religious. I try to live gently on the earth and to put the earth and all its inhabitants first.

Putting the earth first is a counter to the me-first ethos that finds expression in human behaviours, which, arguably, have led us into the current banking collapse and to the edge of anthropogenic ecological collapse. Continuous growth is not possible. Systems have carrying capacities. The goods of this earth are unevenly distributed. These are both facts and challenges. NETCU, no thanks to the Observer, appears to be actively attempting to suppress the discovery and publication of facts and to impede resposes to the challenges.

Eframework workshop 29 October

Workshop was organised to do three things:

• enable U&I Projects to produce outputs for the eFramework
  
• to help the eFramework team to validate its own elicitation processes
  
• to introduce participants to "Project X", the Innovation Base (IB)

So the proposition may be: can systems development language be applied to the description of a social learning research problem?

• organisation
  
• motivation
  
• what is the wow factor (impact)

The workshop opened with a defense of and justification for the use of modeling languages to reduce ambiguity, increase precision, allow interchange, re-use and forward engineering (CASE).

Drawing tools can be used, but do little to increase precision. Topic mapping tools are better. Language-based modeling (UML, etc) is best suited.

We were invited to begin Modeling the IB (Innovation Base). The Innovation Base is seen as a bridge to the eFramework. This led to an exposure of assumptions underlying the eFramework and an observation that points of view are crucial to understanding abstraction. The developer's perspective holds the system layer to be less abstract than the use case, but the end user will view the use case as precise and concrete and will see the system layers as abstract.

I drew some pictures and took some pictures. Chapter and verse is here.

Our Problem
How to support the U&I programme to form a sustainable community of practice around the UIDM requires:

• Community formation service(s)
  
• Community participation service(s)
  
• User needs elicitation services

Whisky notes

Three lovely malts this weekend in Rydal with Ali, Johnny, John, Aileen, Iain and Mhoraig:

• Glen Moray (no age, guessing 7 or 8 years) lovely, honey and black pepper
  
• Glen Morangie, Maderia wood finish, sweet, as you would expect, and slightly cloying
  
• Teaninich 10 yo black pepper, lemon and oak.
  

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