mtl3p

The concept of “third spaces” by sociologies Ray Oldenburg.

The following content is written by Dom Nozzi.

“What is a “Third Place” and Why Are They Important?

“Social condensers” — the place where citizens of a community or neighborhood meet to develop friendships, discuss issues, and interact with others — have always been an important way in which the community developed and retained cohesion and a sense of identity.

Ray Oldenburg (1989), in The Great Good Place, calls these locations “third places.” (The first being the home and the second being work.) These third places are crucial to a community for a number of reasons, according to Oldenburg. They are distinctive informal gathering places, they make the citizen feel at home, they nourish relationships and a diversity of human contact, they help create a sense of place and community, they invoke a sense of civic pride, they provide numerous opportunities for serendipity, they promote companionship, they allow people to relax and unwind after a long day at work, they are socially binding, they encourage sociability instead of isolation, they make life more colorful, and they enrich public life and democracy. Their disappearance in our culture is unhealthy for our cities because, as Oldenburg points out, they are the bedrock of community life and all the benefits that come from such interaction.

There are essential ingredients to a well-functioning third place. They must be free or quite inexpensive to enter and purchase food and drink within. They must be highly accessible to neighborhoods so that people find it easy to make the place a regular part of their routine — in other words, a lot of people should be able to comfortably walk to the place from their home. They should be a place where a number of people regularly go on a daily basis. It should be a place where the person feels welcome and comfortable, and where it is easy to enter into conversation. And a person who goes there should be able to expect to find both old and new friends each time she or he goes there.

According to Oldenburg, World War II marks the historical juncture after which informal public life began to decline in the U.S. Old neighborhoods and their cafes, taverns, and corner stores have fallen to urban renewal, freeway expansion, and planning that discounts the importance of congenial, unified and vital neighborhoods. The newer neighborhoods have developed under the single-use zoning imperative — which makes these critical, informal social gathering places illegal.

Oldenburg points out that segregation, isolation, compartmentalization and sterilization seem to be the guiding principles of urban growth and urban renewal. In the final analysis, desirable experiences occur in places conducive to them, or they do not occur at all. When certain kinds of places disappear, certain experiences also disappear.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about, watching, and talking to ISF users. It keeps making me think of the need for clubs with memberships - not a private club, but something more semi-public with a large grey boundary between the two. I see people sitting in ISF cafe’s for 8 hours because they are self-employed and want / need to get out of the house. They buy their 3 lattes and a lunch, but it’s far from perfect for a bunch of reasons. The resources we need aren’t there (printer, shower, couch, locker) and it still not “our” space.

I *hate* working at home. Whenever I want to do some work I start with the question “Where?”. Partially this could be explained by the fact that I don’t have internet access at home and so am dependent on ISF hotspots, but even for off-line work I much prefer to be in a public space.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while - but this section from Robert Paterson’s Weblog: Going Home - Our Reformation about communal spaces “of the future” made me want to write smthg.

“It‚Äôs like a home and not a hotel. It is clean and comfortable and, more important; it is full of your friends who spend a lot of their day working there. Your network is here. It is like going home but in another place. The one he’s writing about when he’s visiting another city.

Every evening feels like a party as members drop by for a drink, a chat, a movie and maybe to take on the world in a number of games.

Local membership costs only $45 a month. Members get wireless, copying, space, coffee and the meeting room in the basic membership price. This unique pricing was designed to drive a forgotten type of group behaviour. The social norms of the Commons are the same as those that are used in many Kindergartens. Treat others and the place as if it were you and yours. Like eBay, your reputation, your character and your behaviour are central to your success in the Commons. Like eBay your reputation precedes you. Your reputation is everything. Members share a space that probably feels a lot like Lloyds Coffee House felt to the pioneers of business 250 years ago. Then too, your word was your most important asset.”

I don’t buy most of his post (especially the time-frames), but I admire the sentiment.

But I do want a club. Not an exclusively private club, but the whole public cafe + (member priviliges like: some private work areas + access to booking conference rooms + shower for when I bike there + kitchen +etc would definitely make me part with $30+/month. And I got a bunch of friends that are contract workers I think would be interested as well.

I know people have tried stuff like this (workspace + thirdspace) before (there was one on St. Laurent a few years ago). Does anyone know about any examples in Montreal right now?

Hugh keeps on pushing it. He tells us about a presentation he’s organized between Atwater and FACIL.

Free Your Computer! Liberez votre ordinateur!
An Open Seminar on Free and Open Source Software

Where: Atwater Library Auditorium (2nd Level), 1200 Atwater Ave.
When: Monday, Feb. 21st, 2005 from 7:00-8:30 P.M.

Atwater has a hotspot, but I’ve already probably said that before. I also just notice that they put their new website online. No more static html. All drupal-y goodness. Thanks to Dan, their new OSS IT guy. (Hugh - does Dan have a (better) url that I could use? He looks a little strung out in this picture ;-)

UPDATE 2005.02.07

Now the Atwater hotspot page shows their RSS. Sweet!

So I’ve been thinking about podcasting a bunch recently (why do I get into these things so late?). If you need a primer - here. I was having a quick beer with Boris and I was asking him about vloggers. So we know that a big reason that podcasting has taken off is because of the playback mechanism (the ipod). So I was trying to find out if Tivo’s or the OpenSource build-your-own PVR’s (Freevo MythTV) supported RSS and if they could grab video through it. Couldn’t really find anything. Does anybody else have any info?

Then I was wondering if vloggers could use bittorrent so that they could broadcast without killing their int. connection. I was going to blog about it, and then I got an email 2 days later on the nycwireless mailing list with info about BlogTorrent.

“Blogtorrent is a package that makes Bittorrent easy to use. Bittorrent is the most popular way to distribute large audio and video files online. Right now Bittorrent constitutes about 35% of all internet traffic (for real). Using Bittorrent, anybody with broadband can distribute a large file (for example, television programming) to a mass audience, without needing a big expensive server. This works because with Bittorrent, everyone who wants the file helps distribute it. ”

and it doesn’t stop . .

“Another feature we’re really excited about is RSS. Every tracker makes an RSS feed of all publicly available torrents. The RSS feed supports enclosures, so it will work with programs like Torrentocracy or iPodderX that can automatically download RSS feeds of torrents. The RSS feed also includes “stats” data on your most popular torrents. If people want they can ping Blogtorrent.com with the URL to their RSS feed. At some point, we hope we can put together an awesome, blogdex-style “Blogtorrent Top 40″.”

Torrentocracy?!?!

“Torrentocracy (pronounced like the word democracy) is the combination of RSS, bit torrent, your television and your remote control. In effect, it is what gives any properly motivated person or entity the ability to have their own TV station. By running torrentocracy on a computer connected to your television, you not only become a viewer of any available content from the internet, but you also become a part of a vast grass roots media distribution network. This is not about the illegal distribution of media, but rather it’s about enabling an entirely new way to receive the video which you watch on your TV.”

and

“It is written to be integrated with MythTV, the Linux-based home media server project.”

WTF? Where have I been hiding myself not to know about this? Why didn’t you guys let me in on this stuff? ;-)

But seriously, have you guys heard about this?

The only thing that I can think of that would be missing is a trustable -read:won’t go down tomorrow with all my data - del.icio.us to tag everything properly - audio, video, photos, everything - not for it to only work as a silly little tool to share my bookmarks.

Then instead of only viewing the vloggers that I can subscibe to, I would also automatically get every video that someone else tag’s as “wifi” or “burkina”.

I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight.

I am really glad I skipped a bit of my a class to go to this.

There was a very cool presentation on at LabCMO this monday.
“LabCMO est un lieu d’exp&eacuterimentation socio-technique &agrave l’intersection des domaines de l’informatique libre et de la communication m&eacutediatis&eacutee par ordinateur (CMO).” It’s a communications research group at UQAM studying OSS and community informatics. Headed by Serge Proulx who is also an investigator with CRACIN.

It was on “Le logiciel libre en Am&eacuterique Latin” and it was given by Lena Zuniga. Omar recorded it, and I think it will make it’s way onto the web at some point - either via his blog, or via the LabCMO people.

Although there weren’t many people, it was a subset of local community/OSS scene. S. Proulx, Alain Ambrosi (from GlobalCN), Omar from Koumbit, Stephane Couture (masters -UQAM + Koumbit) and Anne Goldbenberg (Phd UQAM), and Hugo Gervais (Communautique + FACIL).

I really felt like I fit in, because it was an academic research group (im involved with gameCODE), it was on international dev sp. ICT (I spent 6 months doing ICT in west africa), and the subject matter was open-source groups (ISF). Oddly, I was actually at all the meetings in Burkina Faso when the first LUG was created. There’s a great picture of me being the only white dude with 30 burkinabes at the inaugural meeting.

I found an article about Lena’s research if any of you want to know more. And here’s her blog if you can read spanish.

Social Software in the University

I was debating between copypasting the whole article here or just linking to it. The discussion is what wiki’s/blogging/cms’s mean to universities and how they are reacting to them. Not well it seems from this post and from what I’ve seen so far. It’s definitly working its way in from the outside - via adventurous professors or on-the-ball graduate students. I’ve been privy to the discussions about social software at the IT department here and the attitude certainly isn’t one of excitement. It’s more like a “you first” scenario. Too bad when you consider the enthusiasm that has gone towards setting up wifi at conU and the success that has been.

Trying to find that article that Seb wrote why academics should blog. Can’t. Here’s some good notes from Liz on an academic/blogging breakout session she participated in.

Another link here.

This stuff is on my mind a bunch even more so than normal because things have slowed down at the experiment that is gameCODE. Not in terms of the activity of the group - they’re great and we’ve done a lot of cool stuff recently - but in terms of the online space. It was ramping up pretty well for the first 2 months, but things have definitely cooled down and there’s less activity right now. I’ve been neglectfull in my RA duties as I’ve been trying to get caught up in my classes but I don’t think it’s that. I think the binary-ness of public/private is a big problem, because you miss out on a lot of the reason’s to blog when your stuff is only available to a group of 20 other people. However, even that amount of public-ness seems to be a problem for people. I keep hearing again and again from academics (gamecoders and others) that they would be too worried to post stuff - because it could be stolen, or that their idea would be thought stupid because it wasn’t ready. It’s so far from the where I come from (which is the open-source idea of post early, post often) that I think I do a bad job of communicating with them.

I don’t think I’m being critical of them [academics] (I’m not trying to be) when I bring up this issue of miscommunication. It’s the same thing that I’m facing with my group and the same conversation that I’m having with MDCN. On the contrary, I applaud these academics for being courageous and being willing to have these conversations. These are the ones that are willing to put themselves out there. They sense that something is going on and that it has implications for their area and they are taking a closer look. A lot of the time this is expressed in feelings like “I couldn’t” or “I’m already overloaded” but I think that I’m going to try and view these statements as expressions of interest. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but even in the most negative reaction that I’ve heard about this I’ve never heard a tone of disinterest. That’s not such a bad place to be at the beginning of a discussion.

An entry in Smart Mobs (from Just inter active blog) on Backchannel (interestingly during a Julian Bleeker talk)

“The ZML, where Bleecker was giving his remarks, has 16 projectors that can be used for wrap-around surround-o-stimulation. We had 5 of those screens: three displaying a shared IRC chatroom, and two displaying EtherPEG output - a “sniffed” record of the JPEGs going by in people’s web surfing on the local wireless.”

There was a follow up experiment at Just Interactive where they wanted to try something other than IRC and EtherPeg:
“In place of those two technologies, I wanted to use Flickr, a Flash-based online chat service that allows people to post photographs into chat. In addition, I wanted to use to SubEthaEdit to create a single shared document where people could take notes. It’s a Macintosh-only application, unfortunately, but I wanted to experiment with it as a group nonetheless; we have enough Mac users to make it worthwhile and I want to see what shared-single document editing does for groupthink.”

I just skimmed the articles - have to go back and read them later.

I’ve blogged about this stuff before when talking about HarknessTable

Regarding that project - I’ve been thinking a bunch about doing that on tikiwiki. Hopfully I’ll have a chance to spend some time trying to make that happen. Scott controls OurConcordia.ca domain. I’m pretty sure that he set it up intentionally to oppose the thinking behind MyConcordia.ca where the university let’s us do such empowering things as paying our bills and reserving lockers. Gee, thanks. Scott doesn’t really have the time to pull something like this off himself, but how amazing would it be to have a tikiwiki hosted at that domain that was open to the students. Maybe the student union could help out doing the managment overhead (time).

I like it - it’s a very shit-disturbing kind of project. And frankly - we all know that the University isn’t in a rush to give us the kinds of tools we need in order to connect with each other. I would love to have forums for all of my classes by default, but mostly the teachers never get around to it. I’m not faulting them, but I am questioning the the priorities for IT at Concordia.

I was lucky enough to be invited to CRACIN’s conference this afternoon. I got to hear a bit about each of the grad students and their projects and heard a few speakers (some with prepared talks, some off-the-cuff). It made me think differently about Alison’s collaboration with ISF and especially, made me appreciate the good relationship we have so far. I think that the next ISF board meeting would be a good time to invite Alison to come discuss the possible directions of her research with us (as well as being an opportunity for her the board to officially welcome her).

Also, today was a interesting opportunity to see what I might be doing if I continue with a Masters.

On that note - I have told some people at ISF that I’ll be basically taking the next month and a half off (except for the board meeting and few other little things). Time to concentrate on academia.

————————–
Graduate Student Colloquium on Research Methods: October 29, 2004 for CRACIN

Videoconference: Friday, October 29, 2004, 12:00 - 4:00 pm
University of Toronto (KMDI)
Concordia University

The purpose of the CRACIN Graduate Student Colloquium on Research Methods is to introduce students to the common research methodologies being deployed by CRACIN researchers, and to discuss questions and issues of mutual interest and concern with respect to them. The Colloquium will also provide students with an opportunity to meet or become reacquainted with other CRACIN student researchers at participating universities.

This _did_ blow my mind.

—————————————————————
To: “Urban Technology & Telecommunications”
From: “Anthony Townsend”
Subject: [telecom-cities] global web cam map film
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:45:39 -0400

http://www.pleix.net/films.html

the first one “Netlag” will blow your mind. its a global map animated showing webcams

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If you know who Sebastien Paquet or if you know of the blog Many-to-Many, check out his request in which he asks for feedback in relation to his continued funding.

I sent in a letter - I put a copy of it in Boris’s post.