Developing a Next Generation Collaborative Cloud-Based FlowScape

The Legal Physics Research Team is embarking on a new REST-based integration drive to take LegalHackathon.org and related personal media and idea flow to the next level.  The general concept is described on this blog post about Cloud Flow Integration.  If you are interested in controbuting to this project, please let us know soon.  

Come Jam With Us at the MIT Media Lab

If you are (or will be) proximal to the MIT Media Lab, you can join our research team during project jams hosted at the MIT Human Dynamics Lab when work on this project will be conducted through the remainder of July and early August.  In addition, you can participate in development and project jams remotely via our Hangout and collaborarive online services provisioned for this project.  

Project Scope and Description

The scope of this project is 1) to enable users to propose and rate topics for discussion, and 2) using the data and metadata from top rated topics to auto-populate and publish a Wordpress blog post and corresponding sched.org event session.  Specifically: 

1. Self-Organizing Topics of Discussion

• The intention is to use model aspects of "open space" unconference style self-organizing conference session. The idea is to use data from a web form or other simple user contribution method to gather a range of proposed topics such that users may easily review and rate each proposal. The process initially will likely be a simple sort by rating of topics in order to provide a measure of general interest or a mechanism for prioritization of which topics will be provided online conference sessions.

• An example of this unconference/unpanel functionality has been prototyped in a rough proof of concept for the "unpanel" session of Bleak House to Geek House conference.  Embedded in this blog post is a webform used by panelists and attendees to express desired topics.  A simple web page was used for all participants (panelists, attendees and the moderator) to see the then current listing of contributed ideas.  The panel session ran somewhat differently, with the rating of ideas conducted manually by the moderator from the podium.  

2. Reduced Manual Steps and More Automation for Publishing Schedule and Blog Post

• The initial round is intended to produce all required data required to publish a Sched.org event and Wordpress blog post corresponding for any session selected by users, including the title, description and person(s) proposing the topics. Use of the Sched.org REST API is intended as the means to automate creation and publishing of each new session in the relevant event on Sched.org. As needed, default values can be used such as a single default speaker, vanue, session type and session length/time.

• Each corresponding pair of Sched.org sessions and Wordpress blog posts should be cross-linked to each other. This may require two steps for one or both services, the first being the creation of a URL for the event on each service by publishing of the post on Sched.org and Wordpress and the second step being the addition of the link in the event description on each service to the event post URL of the other service.

3, Optional Desired Functions and Flows

• Optionally and if possible, the code should automatically provision and embed codes for the following d services for each individual session: a Google Hangout, either Hackpad or EtherPad, and an IRC chat.

• It is anticipated that later versions of this platform will simply match interested users and session proposers such that all topics with at least one or more registered participants and one or more active session proposer will be automatically provisioned a sched.org published event session and a published event blog post usable as a session collaboration space by the participating users.

More Information on Participation

If you are interested to work on this project, please let us know soon.   In additon, very limited funds may exist for direct financial support for individual or teams who require it and that propose a compelling plan for developing, documenting and deploying code to achieve the project goals.  In all cases, we'll provide public credit on our MIT research blog to people and teams who want it and that have made significant contributions to the project.    

Shortly, we will contact everybody who expresses interest through our contact form and communicate more information on next steps.