ProCurate

I wrote a post about voluntary and professional associations yesterday.

In the post I quoted Steve Rosenbaum:

Associations are a veritable content creation machine. These groups of thought leaders are blogging, tweeting, meeting, and plugging in to social media with innovation and enthusiasm that in many ways surpasses many of the media organizations.

While media is suffering from audience erosion, as the web gives readers and viewers and ever widening array of choices — association membership remains strong and solid. Why? Because professionals need access to high quality information, professional networking, and professional development resources that a consortium of their fellow members can provide.

I have been writing about curation and aggregation in this blog and am always delighted to find discussions about activities that I see as central to communities of practice.

I am a great fan of Produsage.

This has prompted me to think about an activity that might be called ProCurate. I see this as the collection of digital information with the aim of making it available openly for others to find and develop. I think it is a conscious and deliberate activity infused with reciprocal altruism.

A post by Deanna Dahlsad focused my thinking today (I had missed this earlier post). She proposes that:

Content curation is the process of sorting, arranging, and publishing information that already exists. Like any collector or museum curator, content curators identify and define their topics, select which items to include (and often how they are displayed), while providing the context, annotations, and proper credits which not only assist their readers but identify themselves as more than interested but invested; a leader or an authority.

It seems to me that curation is an act of commitment too.

I liked her comparison of blogging and curation:

Many bloggers spend their time selecting what they consider the best of what other people have created on the web and post it at their own sites, just like a magazine or newspaper. Or they provide a mix of this along with writing or otherwise creating their own content.  Not to split hairs, but curation involves less creation and more searching and sifting; curation’s more a matter of focused filtering than it is writing.

Shortly after reading Deanna’s post a tweet led me to Paul Wallbank’s post about Managing your digital estate. He observes that:

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is always difficult but today we have an added complexity of dealing with the online problems of social media sites suggesting people still “like” the deceased or valuable documents locked into cloud computing services.

With more of us storing information into cloud computing services, having important data locked away becomes a real risk and how online storage or software companies deal with deceased estates becomes important.

Paul’s post summarises policies for dealing with a deceased’s profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon and PayPal. He points to Mashable’s post 7 Resources for Handling Digital Life After Death. In that post Erica Swallow observes:

After someone passes away, their digital assets live on in the form of computer files and data online. For some, that’s not a big deal. But for others, the thought of leaving digital assets unattended for eternity after death is unthinkable.

I had not seen the seven resources Erica mentions. As a result of Paul and Erica’s posts I see the activity of ProCuration as a custos role too.

This custos role is being exemplified for me at the moment with the Paralympic Wikipedia project.

Photo Credits

Library

Scrapbook

Cirrus 111203

A brief Cirrus post to end the week.

I read with interest news of a Little Printer via a Scholarly Kitchen post. Berg has produced the printer and reports that:

Little Printer wirelessly connects (with no configuration) to a small box that plugs into your broadband router. . . . your phone is your remote control. We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products.

There is more information about the Little Printer on Matt Webb’s post.

By coincidence the Scholarly Kitchen page had a link to an interview with Clay Johnson.

Marc Slocum notes that:

Clay Johnson (@cjoh), author of the forthcoming book “The Information Diet,” believes the information overload problem is actually an information consumption problem. In the following interview, Johnson explains how reframing the issue around consumption and taking ownership of our info intake are the keys to finding information balance.

One of my consumption issues is how to curate the information I gather. My cirrus posts are one way of doing this for me. My blog has become a repository. This week I was interested to find Lyn Hay‘s post (via a Diigo Teacher-Librarian Group link) Content curation and the power of collective intelligence. I thought Lyn’s post was an excellent resource for a community of practice keen to connect about curation.

The Teacher-Librarian Group in Diigo brought me news of David Kapuler’s Top 100 websites for 2011. David observes of his list:

I tried to cover a wide range of sites, from flash card creators to digital storytelling and of course, social networks, which really shined in 2011.

Photo Credit

Little Printer

Aggregate and Curate: Scoop and Paper

I like to sign up for Cloud sharing opportunities.

This week I have revisited Scoop.it and Paper.li. Both are very powerful resources for linking communities of practice and curating practice.

I chose Scoop.it to explore how I might share information about sport with the community of practice around the International Association of Sport Information (IASI).

This is a YouTube explainer about Scoop.it:

 

I looked at paper.li last year as a way to aggregate feeds from the 385 people I follow (@520507) on Twitter. I am starting to realise how powerful this aggregation is.

Paper.li:

Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers to fresh news, daily.

We believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in. We’re here to help!

Every day, around the world, millions of articles are featured on Paper.lis, benefiting millions of readers. We are just at the beginning of an exciting new adventure and we think we’re on to something good.

We love the semantic web, we respect our content creators, we strive for simplicity, and we thrive on feedback.

I am hoping to be much more pro-active with these two aggregation and curation tools given my interest in both activities in an age of produsage.

Secondary Data Analysis and Curation: A Presentation at #IACSS2011

Last week I had an opportunity to make an oral presentation at the Eighth International Symposium of Computer Science in Sport in Shanghai.

I was keen to explore the potential of secondary data analysis that draws upon the increasingly rich data provided by websites supporting sporting events.

I used data drawn from the 2011 Asia Football Cup to discuss issues around the creation and curation of content. I noted some of the responsibilities associated with produsing web based resources.

This is a brief SlideCast of my presentation.

Curation

I have been revising a paper I am writing on Cloud computing.

Part of the revision has involved looking at Curation.

This week I received an alert to a post by Kent Anderson, The Power of Curation … shortly after I found Brian Solis’s post The Three C’s of Social Networking.

Both posts were put into focus by Harold Jarche’s  Managing in a Networked World and a brief look at OpenCalais via a Diigo recommendation.

Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat’s (2011) paper Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework added more detail for me about ‘knowledge capital’:

Not all the value produced by a community or a network is immediately realized. Activities and interactions can produce “knowledge capital” whose value lies in its potential to be realized later. Note that this potential can be useful even if it is never realized.

I caught a glimpse of Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation too.

Postscript

Five days after I posted this I came across Morten Myrstad’s extensive post Content Curation – Growing Up and Coming of Age. It is a treasure trove of links and ideas that explores some of the business issues surrounding curation.

Photo Credit

You left the ark where?