New Idea in Forums
Stumbled onto 'H20', Harvard's open source community software for classrooms and schools. Looking into it, I spotted a very interesting idea for forums:
H2O currently provides the Rotisserie. The Rotisserie implements an innovative approach to online discussion that encourages measured, thoughtful discourse in a way that that traditional threaded messaging systems do not. The basic concept of the threaded messaging board is to enable broadcast-to-broadcast communication among a group of people, meaning that every participant in the conversation receives every post from every other participant. This mode of discussion inevitably leads to the domination of the discussion by a few very verbal participants and silence by the lurking majority. The Rotisserie breaks this mode by assigning every post within the conversation to another, specific participant for response. The resulting conversation guarantees that every post will be responded to by at least one other participant and that every participant must respond directly to the post of another participant.
Rotisseries are organized into projects, which are loosely analogous to courses, but usually less formal. Some projects are open to all users, some are open to applications from all users, and some are invitation-only. Every rotisserie belongs to a specific project, and the typical rotisserie uses the participants of its parent project as its participants, though it will be possible to include individual users and even entire other projects in the participant list of a rotisserie.
I think it is a pretty neat idea, although cannot see it working in a non-classroom environment -- it is impossible to compel people to do anything, especially suffering to respond to inane postings.
As far as I can tell, Arsdigita has nothing to do with this project; that is a good sign.
Posted by Nils Blutig at March 27, 2003 12:46 AM
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