itpedition

In response to the final chapter in Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, questions on OpenVisuals coming to my mind are:

Why a user should spend time on being a part of OpenVisuals?  This also brings more complicated questions: why she should spend time tweaking her visualizations with the API? Will she be interested enough to make her visualization working on the website?

I have this given as the mission in the front page :

OpenVisuals aims to provide an Open Source Visualization Framework, in which the datasets can find their own visualizations, and visualizations already out there can be shared to be used with other datasets. Dataset owners and Visualization artists - datasets and visualizations - in the same pot.

I wonder how it stands with respect to Linus Torvalds’s proposal for Linux - a new but small operating system, undertaken principally as a way to learn together -.

improving communications as group activity -  “suggest a visualization to this dataset” feature, “post this dataset to the ’singles’ wall”

In reference to the section of Caterina Fake, greeting first ten thousand users in flickr, I did have my first registered user, but there is nothing I can do to greet him. He didn’t post any visualizations/assets, hence nothing to comment on. So getting a user registered gives them just an empty portfolio page. So I guess something is missing here.

On small/large groups issue, the initial idea is having a large group interaction within OpenVisuals. But since last week, I have been trying to implement a way to get future Nature of Code applications to be posted and gathered to have a small group interaction. It wasn’t the way I was looking for, but this opportunity of Nature of Code class posting their stuff itself questioned some small group interaction in the website? Can Nature of Code class students have their own space in the website? My current solution for that is to having them to tag their stuff with Nature of Code, so that in the browse page they can focus on Nature of Code works. (actually, I even added rss function, so that they can subscribe to the feed of that tag)