"In that spirit, in this post I want to explain how to go about forking a document, such as a syllabus, on GitHub. I also want to suggest some best practices that will make it easier to fork shared documents."

"While networked computational tools can assist us in expanding the scope and breadth of the sharing we do with groups and individuals, it’s our ability to navigate the new social customs and ceremonies of the Network that will determine how far all this spreads. It’s a counter-cultural idea, instead of placing the highest value on independence and individuality, it takes us down the path of interdependence and coexistence. And this brings us back to this idea of a growth medium. As the old year ends, and the new one begins, I’m imagining an as yet unpublished Whole Earth Catalog filled with tools and perspectives on how we might grow this new crop in the fields of the Network. It’s a thing that “is” what it describes."

Facebook's impending problem is that even if the company enables future pacemakers to share our every heartbeat, the company cannot automate caring—the most important part of the feedback loop that has driven the social Web's ascent. Nothing can support exponential growth for long. No matter how cleverly our friends' social output is summarized and highlighted for us, there are only so many hours in the day for us to express that we care. Today, the law of social sharing is a useful way to think about the rise of social computing, but eventually, reality will make it obsolete.

"David Gauntlett’s new book, Making is Connecting, a few times recently: on my work blog, my knitting one, and on the Guardian’s Notes and Theories. It’s an interesting book worth talking about. It’s about the social meanings of creativity and 21st century maker cultures, be these makers of blogs, woolly cardigans, cupcakes, podcasts or physics-themed lolcats, and in particular the changing structures of making which surround what is sometimes called ‘social media’. "

"As with other marketing strategies, personality type can play a big part in your content curation style, from the types of content you share to where you share it and how you go about the process."

"So take a look at the Open Metadata Registry (formerly the NSDL Registry) if you’re developing semantic schema for data or other open research. Many of the standards listed in the element sets have decriptive frameworks or other structures you can apply to research data collection, images, spectra, or lab notebook data. Don’t say no one told you." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.science3point0.com/socialdisruption/2011/08/26/parallel-lines

"The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its concept of “social” seems to be based on what single twentysomethings do. “Social” in the sense of “families” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “sharing.” It’s happy to make recommendations for individual purchases social, but shared purchases are verboten.

It’s shortsighted. If the demise of the music industry has taught us anything, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blistering success of itunes showed that there’s a substantial market for aboveboard, legal ways to allow people to get what they want

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/we-share-too-much-and-its-stifling-innovation/2011/07/28/gIQAoVrgfI_story.html

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2020378/Facebook-Twitter-creating-vain-generation-self-obsessed-people.html

" It provides evidence that people are more prone to sharing interesting content if they are experiencing either physical or emotional arousal.

This stimulation needn’t be caused by the absorbing article, sad song or snarky sketch you choose to share. It’s enough that they occur in rapid succession."

"CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones).

CKAN makes it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data, especially in ways that are machine automatable."

"Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures."

"The present research investigated whether the attribution process through which people explain self-disclosures differs in text-based computer-mediated interactions versus face to face, and whether differences in causal attributions account for the increased intimacy frequently observed in mediated communication. In the experiment participants were randomly assigned to a face-to-face or computer-mediated interaction with a confederate who made either high- or low-intimacy self-disclosures. Results indicated that computer-mediated interactions intensified the association between disclosure and intimacy relative to face-to-face interactions, and this intensification effect was fully mediated by increased interpersonal (relationship) attributions observed in the computer-mediated condition."

Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository.

"Other research has shown that small science generates a substantial amount of data, and, over time, perhaps even more than big science," Cragin said. "Unfortunately, we don't yet have systems in place to facilitate best practice for data management or to address the range of needs related to sharing practices, but this is becoming increasingly important, particularly as funding agencies add requirements for data sharing and data-management plans."

By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.

Formally, we recommend adopting and acting on the following principles:

News story on data release practices for Kepler satellite.

In developing this prototype, we've collaborated with Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Carlos Souza of Imazon. Greg and Carlos are both at the cutting edge of forest science and have developed software that creates forest cover and deforestation maps from satellite imagery. Organizations across Latin America use Greg's program, Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), and Carlos' program, Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), to analyze forest cover change. However, widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.

What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform?

Interesting list of online text sharing communities and musings on publishing and piracy.

So depending on how much databases are expressions of craftwork and problem-solving and bricolage, and how much they reflect a timeless, placeless crystallization of nature's order, they're going to be less or more easily poured into big projects to reuse data.

notes on the topic of incentives for/against sharing in science

essay by Janet Hively
To create a commons-based society, people need more than exposure to new ideas. They need tangible ways of practicing and living out these bright possibilities. Old habits about how we organize and pay for work maintain the sharp divisions between rich and poor and tie us to the consumer values of the market-based society. At this time when unemployment due to layoffs is growing, we should try out some new ways to share the work and spread the wealth.

The press release sketches three cases that have a conservative political bias. I'm more anxious to support access than to worry overmuch about policy.

Welcome to DataDepot, a site that lets you track, analyze, and share trend lines.

We explore two possible explanations: private provision of public goods and generalized reciprocity. We investigate a particular form of private incentives to share content: redistributing traffic in the network to the advantage of the sharing peer.

This edition of eLearning Papers focuses on four distinct CoPs that have been fuelled by the use of electronic community building tools. In the last fifteen years, these tools have moved from online bulletin boards to wikis, audio and video podcasts, virt

Bibster is a Java-based system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata (e.g. from BibTeX files) in a peer-to-peer network.

the world's largest index & library of free video/audio lessons, tutorials, lectures & how-to's