#community

> So please, do go switch to something that doesn't require interacting with people. OK.

So what good is there in being a part of a community? It seems almost too obvious to say. I could talk about how there are practical advantages in terms of mutual support. I could point to how communities are engines of trust, which we need for society to function. Or I could recognise how community bestows a sense of belonging or identity as we float through an empty, meaningless, godless, universe. But this would hardly be revelatory.

It's for all these reasons that I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be. I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities, that encourages discussions and expressing meaningful ideas. Not one that systemically encourages harassment, abuse, and shouting as loud as you can, and which on its best day, is a glorified link aggregator. And not a very good one.

It's for all these reasons that I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be. I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities, that encourages discussions and expressing meaningful ideas. Not one that systemically encourages harassment, abuse, and shouting as loud as you can, and which on its best day, is a glorified link aggregator. And not a very good one.

How did the community form in the first place? A core of developers carried over their work from the former OpenOffice.org community, but the key move was to make it easy and fun to join in with development, so the project avoided barriers to participation. The mailing lists were tuned to welcome newcomers rather than to favor existing developers; a page of "easy hacks" created for newcomers had small, tasty morsels to chew over, and extensive README files were made easily findable.

But my Commodore 64 is mobile now, like yours, and the modems are invisible, and the internet is the air all around us. And the good friends, the real friends, are finding each other, and connecting with each other, and my Mom is turning out to be more right than ever.

The way we got to this point, this place where we’re all friends and don’t tolerate sexist and homophobic behavior, is in no small part thanks to booze. If we want to continue to expand this community and make the rest of the world a more tolerant place we’ll have to continue to value the personal over the professional.

Word out of the Gallifrey One Doctor Who convention is that there is going to be a web series of Community's Who-parody show Inspector Spacetime. It sounds like it won't be Donald Glover and Danny Pudi in the starring roles, however. Travis Richey, who plays the Inspector on the show within a show will be producing six episodes. [bessyboo via Charlie Jane]

(Note the ASF isn’t alone in this insanity. Others have told me that FSF projects are forced to use the Savannah collaborative platform, whether they want to or not. Crazy! Repeat after me, folks: your community is not your tools.)

A new Pew study finds news outlets using Twitter almost exclusively for one-way distribution — of their own content. And this is why I only follow live human beings on Twitter, for the most part. That, and funny bots.

"Community" is a mess ratings-wise, but it's one of NBC's few shows that still draws largely unabashed love from critics (and from its shrinking but passionate group of fans). Pulling it off the schedule temporarily given the ratings is understandable; pulling it off the schedule while leaving "Whitney" on is not. Either show is going to do the same pathetic numbers on Wednesdays at 8 - away from its "Office" cocoon, "Whitney" could easily do worse than "Community" would - and one move at least buys continued goodwill from the press and viewers, whereas there's no one outside the immediate families of Whitney Cummings and Chris D'Elia who will be happy that show continues to air, week after week.

NBC's Community is being put on hiatus. Twitter is pissed.

Misery is a module designed to make life difficult for certain users.

This module allows administrators to hide a users posts from all other users. This is an effective strategy for dealing with troublesome users as it discourages attempts to evade bans.

"Here’s a brief review of the last 6 months of grassroots tech / startup community organizing in Ann Arbor, MI, originally intended for the July 2009 Ann Arbor New Tech Meetup (but foiled by a blown projector bulb)…"

"Songs have always been shareable and shared. People, young and old, share songs with each other – by singing or playing them - in a variety of ways and settings, through a variety of technologies and media or other manner of accompaniment (as well as a capella). Songs as recordings are not fundamentally different in this respect. Since the advent of recorded media, people have shared songs in this form as well: played for each other in private and public settings, on personally distributed mixes (mixed tapes / CDs), and, in the age of mp3s, as files sent via email, IM (instant message), torrent, third-party hosting site, or any manner of online sites and services. "

"A study making the rounds suggests that Wikipedians may feel at home online, in part because they're grumpy introverts. But the results need to be interpreted very cautiously, as they were based on only 69 contributors from a single nation, a tiny drop in the Wikipedian ocean."

Among other things, here's why I'm not too stressed about Google Chrome. Also, why Mozilla is unlike any other company I've ever worked for. "Over 180 million users worldwide, Over 5000 community-contributed extensions Over 50 localizations. Over 200 knowledge base articles on support.mozilla.com, Over 1,600 total contributors to the code base. Over 20,000 volunteers who download the latest nightly build of FirefoxOver 2,000,000 beta testers, "

"You are invited to microcowork (e.g. work together, or alone but in the presence of others) at any of the times and locations on the calendar. You're likely to see logista, vaguery, edwardvielmetti, bkerr, mitten…"

"THANKS SO MUCH, BRITTA, FOR ALL YOUR EXCELLENT HELP!" No longer working with Britta was one of the big sad bits of my leaving Yahoo!

"The always-on, perpetual freelance culture of Web 2.0 has spawned its own "coworking" spaces, but are these new techno-optimists building sustainable communities?"

"A great deal of effort goes into technical means for finding information on the net, but hardly anybody has been helping newcomers figure out where the net fits in the larger picture of their careers."

"I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny. "

"I feel like all these emerging (emergent?) "ambient" communication technologies actually help to make me happier, and feel less alone in our highly abstract and disconnected world."