Suggested high-level, content taxonomy terms for Evolutionary Nexu

There's a conversation about our emergent taxonomy and how to go about cultivating it, here.

About Evolutionary Nexus

Art of Hosting

Collective Intelligence

Community Building

Conscious Evolution

Good Practices

Harvesting

Knowledge Gardening

Learning Centers

Presencing

Technology

World Café

.

George's comment on the rationale for the suggested selection of initial taxonomy terms

By “initial” I mean that any set of high-level taxonomy terms of a co-creative and learning community will continually change and evolve. I don’t claim any “objective” basis for my choice of the top 12 terms. In fact, it was not even a choice, more like listening to this question:

What high-level terms can serve as containers of frequently used expressions in the conversation of our communities?

Sticking to a relatively small number of top terms makes them more memorable, and easier to pick from than dozens of items in a list of terms, which pops up when we create/edit a node.

That intentional constraint on the number of top terms makes them also more precious, in terms of sitting in a spot of our ecosystem that will always be coveted by a number of newly emergent terms, which are gaining importance and momentum in the discourse of the Nexus communities. We need to develop and agree on an "emergent taxonomy" process for the collaborative arbitration of what to keep in the top 12.

Collaborative Tagging

This page is for jointly establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources we want to share among ourselves.

We recognize "collaborative tagging" by members of a team, community, or social holon of any size, as a pivotal process of facilitating the emergence of shared meaning.

Below is a minimalist set of guidelines that we recommend to Evolutionary Nexus users who also use del.icio.us as their social bookmarking tool, based on the work of Web Consultant Alexandra Samuel.

1. Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember.  Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. First, drag the link on top of the "Delicious Linkbacks" page onto the toolbar of your browser, which will install the bookmarklet called "Delicious Linkbacks". Once it is in your  toolbar, clicking on it will show a list of who has bookmarked (with tags) the page you are on. Beforehand you had to see the page bookmarked on the del.icio.us interface and click on a link to see who else has bookmarked the item, now you no longer have to do this manually via del.icio.us. You could be on any web page and think…hmmm…I wonder if anyone has bookmarked this page on del.icio.us…, wow they have…, cool!

   Augments the folksonomy value as you can see what tags were used before you apply your own tags…primo!

2. Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links -- this is the leading tag of the options you're considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don't have to check "open-source," "opensource," and "open_source" to keep on top of the big world of open source).
   
   Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you're looking at, with the syntax "http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource25." For example, "http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75" pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas "http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75" gives you no links at all -- demonstrating that "opensource" is the more popular tag of the two.
3. Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn't work -- it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don't work either. So if you tag something "camel case" it will show up on the tag page for "camel" and the tag page for "case."
5. Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work OK. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don't think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source, and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled Web services that comma-separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
6. Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags "open" and "source" -- so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source -- is a lot less useful than giving it the tag "opensource." Rather than using the tag "canadianpolitics," try using two tags: "Canada" and "politics." That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
7. Hang out at crossroads. If you've followed the guideline above to use two separate tags (rather than smooshing two words into one tag), find the resources you're interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tag "politics," you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL "http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics" into your browser's address bar.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts. If you're part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
9. Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you've used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can always re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags -- so if you tagged a bunch of stuff "food" that you later wish you'd tagged as "cooking," you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags.
10. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier -- you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you'd edit a file name in the finder.
11. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you're a dog. Or at least, they will know -- if you tag a photo of yourself with the word "dog." That's right, you're tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag "enemies" for your business competitors, or "prospects" for all the folks you're pitching.
12. Shh! This one's for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you're tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the "for:" tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague's del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it "for:username." So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you'd tag it "for:awsamuel."
13. Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends, and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today -- by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind and get del.icio.us.

Harvesting tools

This wiki will live and grow through your comments. If you don't feel like adding tools directly here, please post your additions in the conversation forum on harvesting tools http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/712. Suggestions for how this tools collection can be improved are warmly welcome!

The comments in the forum will be harvested and integrated into the table below on a regular basis.

_________________________

Picture a field in which someone has planted wheat. 

We imagine the harvest from that field to look like a farmer using equipment to cut down the wheat, thresh it, and seperate the seeds from the stalks.

Now imagine a geologist a biologist and a painter harvesting from the same field. The geologist picks through the rocks and soil gathering data about the land itself. The biologist might collect insects and worms, bits of plants and organic matter. The painter sees the patterns in the landscape and chooses a pallete and a perspective for work of art.

They all harvest differently from the field, and the results of their work go to different places and are put to different uses. But they all have a few things in common; they have a purpose for being in the field and a set of questions about that purpose, they have a pre-determined place to use the results of the harvest, and they have specific tools to use in doing their work.

What’s useful to note is that, despite the field being the same, the tools and results are specific to the purpose and the inquiry.

It is like this when we meet. There is much we can do, but a well thought through inquiry helps us to sift all that we might learn in the meeting to that which serves our purpose. When we can design questions that open up our curiosity, think through how we might use the results of our work and use the tools appropriate to the task, we can go deeper into our tasks and acheive emergent, innovative and better quality results.

So just try this for the next meeting you are a part of. Give some time before hand to create a little inquiry: “What am I curious about in this meeting?” Think in advance how the results of that inquiry will help you work better, and decide on at least one way in which you will use what you have learned. See if that doesn’t create just a little more engagement and createa little more momentum for the results.

(from Chris Corrigan's blog) 

Harvesting tools help us make the harvest happen! Recording, seeing patterns and feeding back the wisdom into the knowledge ecosystem so also others can benefit from it.

But also to make the harvest more exciting, more fun, to help people with different learn types (visual, auditive, kinesthetic etc.) and in different developmental stages to easily grasp the essence, for weeding harvest into other events and ecosystems etc.

Modern technology and the internet are offering us an incredibly rich variety of tools to record, visualise patterns and easily share our harvest, but there are lots of useful tools for recording without computer or other electronic devices.

The following is a matrix of tools and their purpose, which will hopefully be enriched and build on by many practitioners on an ongoing basis. Inspired by practitioners of the art of harvesting of the AoH community and beyond, but especially by Chris, George, Helen, Monica and Ria.

Please add all the harvesting tools and methods that you regard worth sharing.