Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

I didn’t get notified that this blog is one of the ones not getting ported to Harvard’s new blog system, yet I can’t imagine it is. It is quite possible it won’t exist past Friday, August 10. Sayonara!

Yeah, hi, remember us?

Dave Winer, who started this group roughly ten years ago during the spring semester of 2003 while a Berkman Fellow, returns tonight to tell stories and inform us of his latest project. He pointed to a BloggerCon document about rules for that conference as a way of explaining how tonight’s meeting will function.

(It occurred to me that I actually have a meeting to announce in this space. It’s been so long, I almost forgot about it.)

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Dave asked for notes, so here goes. There’s something squirrely with my Internet connection and ability to browse the Web (DNS fails), so who knows what I’ll actually be able to do.

A lot of familiar faces are here, as are some new folks.

We’re enjoying reminiscing. We sit around telling stories of our favorite meetings, what drew us to the group, and so forth. We took a break from Memory Lane to complain about the lack of a unified Boston area tech event calendar.

Lisa joked that our group was back in the days when people did on blogs what they do on Facebook now.

We talked about social media and the Boston Marathon bombings and what was happening during the lockdown, if it was actually what it was here what the media was reporting. One fellow who specializes in helping groups work in conflict zones and has worked with journalists in such zones to help them be more neutral said he saw a lot of media inadvertently spreading the conflict and using war zone tactics.

Howdy! Long time no meeting …

Let’s gather on Thursday, December 10, at 7 pm at Aiyara, 16 Eliot Street, in Harvard Square to catch up. It’s where Smile Thai used to be. Mark your calendars!

* What’s new?
* How has the economy impacted your work?
* What new tool or gadget has influenced you in the last year?
* How have you used social media in your job search or your hiring process?

Erica and I are changing the blog group meeting schedule. Instead of meeting weekly, we’re going to meet monthly or as appropriate. We’ll try to publicize meetings in advance in this space and through our discussion group.

This week, Steven Clift of E-Democracy.org is in town. So we’re hosting a Roundtable Discussion: Social Media and Local Public Life at blog group.

Steven Clift is with E-Democracy.Org, which hosts a 15 community/neighborhood, 3 country online Issues Forums network started in 1994. 

Join us on Thursday, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m., followed by optional dinner/drinks out in the area
Berkman Conference Room – 23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge

For more info, background, etc., see Steven’s post.

Upcoming meetings & events:

• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about the “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• 4/25-26: BarCamp Boston
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Neither Erica nor j can run the blog group meeting this week.

As always, we’re open to suggestions about topics and speakers and activities. Please let us know if you have something in mind.

Upcoming meetings & events:

• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about the “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• 4/25-26: BarCamp Boston
• At some point, we should take advantage of Berkman’s RockBand set and have a music party in lieu of a normal meeting.
• It’s getting to be time to have another dim sum gathering, too.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

There’s an offsite Berkman staff retreat today and I’m not sure when I’d be able to head back to the office, so let’s not meet this week.

If you’re itching for a weekly hit of blog/tweet/socmed goodness try the Tweetup Forrester is hosting at Redline in Harvard Square tonight: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1496553

Upcoming meetings & events:

• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about the “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• 4/25-26: BarCamp Boston
• At some point, we should take advantage of Berkman’s RockBand set and have a music party in lieu of a normal meeting.
• It’s getting to be time to have another dim sum gathering, too.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Tonight, Berkman needs the conference room to host the Harvard/Yale/MIT Cyberscholars group – and so blog groupers are invited to join in! Topics for tonight are:

• Cybernetics and Revolution – Eden Medina
• Platform Studies and the Atari VCS (Atari 2600) – Nick Montfort
• Video Games and Pro-Social Development – Gene Koo

For more detailed info, see the main Cyberscholars event post.

Upcoming meetings & events:

• Wedesday 2/25: Pecha Kucha Boston 8! (Our own Brett Stilwell is an organizer).
• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about a possible “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• 4/25-26: BarCamp Boston
• At some point, we should take advantage of Berkman’s RockBand set and have a music party in lieu of a normal meeting.
• It’s getting to be time to have another dim sum gathering, too.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Take advantage of Ignite Boston 5 coinciding with this week’s meeting.

“The fifth Ignite Boston will be Thursday, February 12, from 5pm to 9pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston.”

O’Reilly requires an RSVP.

Upcoming meetings & events:

• 2/19 – Probably blog group will host the February Cyberscholars event.
• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about a possible “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• 4/25-26: BarCamp Boston
• At some point, we should take advantage of Berkman’s RockBand set and have a music party in lieu of a normal meeting.
• It’s getting to be time to have another dim sum gathering, too.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

This week, we’ll welcome Yvette Wohn to discuss the Korean news & social site Ewhaian.com: “Integrating hyperlocal news with social networking”

From Yvette:

In 2001, three seniors at Ewha Women’s University launched a social networking site for students of their school. (Ewha is one of Korea’s top universities and the largest women’s univ. in the world) With campus media subsidized and screened, this online portal took off not only as a networking site but also as an independent news and information portal. With 50,000 active user accounts (mostly current students) and an average of 8,000 concurrent users, the site is a forum for synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Although there are “staff” members for a news section, most of the interesting content is user-created– ranging from lecture evaluations to peer counseling and serial fiction. The content is not only self-created, but also self-moderated. Despite the high web traffic and massive hard drive management, the site is profitable–not relying on advertisements, but rather on offline events, which works in not only generating revenue, but also keeping the community together.

I believe Ewhaian is a great model for regional news sites, social networking sites that have a tight geographical focus, and could be the next step for Facebook in expanding its business/services. I wish to talk about how this site got here, what worked and what didn’t, and why after several years, it’s still thriving when so many similar sites failed.

As always, blog group meetings are at 7pm in the conference room of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at 23 Everett St.

Upcoming meetings & events:

• 2/12 – Go to Ignite! Boston 5: sign up in advance to be sure you get in.
• 2/19 – Probably blog group will host the February Cyberscholars event.
• TBD: Renee Lloyd on women in technology & brainstorming about a possible “She’s Geeky” conference in Boston.
• At some point, we should take advantage of Berkman’s RockBand set and have a music party in lieu of a normal meeting.
• It’s getting to be time to have another dim sum gathering, too.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.