Tag Archives: online

Enhance Your Online World Cup Experience

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Ladies and gentleman, we are on the eve of what I might argue is the world’s finest sporting event — The World Cup. I’m happy to report that you have the musings of Gumboot editors John Horn and Kurt Heinrich to look forward to over the next few weeks as they attempt to explore the community-related possibilities that an event such as this is apt to inspire.

To add to the excitement,  I have a few fun tools to enhance your online World Cup experience. The first is a schedule that an online developer has put together for our delight. As Darren Barefoot puts it, “it gracefully enables you to explore a complex schedule–32 teams, 30 days, 10 venues, 64 games–along a number of axes.”

The second tool is designed to help you support your team in the Facebook and Twitter arenas: Twibbons. Click here and you can select the team of your choice and bear their flag on your Facebook and Twitter profile. It will be as if you’re carrying the country flag yourself. You could, as I’ve done, split your allegiance and decide to support two different teams. I’ve chosen to support an underdog on my Twitter profile and a favoured team on my Facebook profile, as you can see above. Germany is favoured, right?

Have fun with it! Go Cameroon, go!

Steve Tannock

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Steve Tannok - Programmer, Community Activist, Business man, Dad

Steve Tannok - Programmer, Community Activist, Business Man, Ultimate Player, Gamer, Dad

Who are you?

I’m Steve Tannock. I’m an entrepreneur, programmer, parent, technojunkie & ThinkCity board member. I also help out the Vision Vancouver Park Board caucus when I can, although I spend far, far too little time on that compared to what I wish I could spend.

What do you do for fun?

Well…..hmm… Any time I’m coding, I’m having fun, so in many ways my work is fun, and when I used to have lots of spare time, I’d spend it programming. But I do less of that these days. Much more time is spent exploring the universe with my son Liam. I also spend lots of time thinking about civic politics, and spend a fair amount of time doing things related to that. Pure bliss is found on the ultimate field and on the ice playing hockey, or time lost listening to music on my head phones.
What is your favorite community, and why?

The Vancouver tech community. It’s not a physical community or a neighbourhood, but it’s as vibrant, creative & as important as any locale. No group of people challenges me more than my fellow techies here in Vancouver. Our community politics range from extreme left to extreme right, but there’s a common thread: We all tend to believe in empowering the “common man” to do what they want; we all tend to be self-starters, creative, thoughtful people; we all tend to believe that being socially/politically engaged is a duty. The interesting thing about our community is that, while insular, our lives are lived in public – on blogs, on twitter (less so on facebook), and so people can watch how we interact and react. It’s why arguments blow up huge so quickly, but also, also why no one remains isolated. If you’re having a shitty time and tell us? Someone’ll make the time to talk to you – there’s an incredible (virtual) support system in the Vancouver tech community, even if we’ve never met in real life.

What is your superpower?

I’m an endless fountain of ideas – both original, and counterpoint to your ideas.

How would you use this superpower to build community?

I work really well with small groups of people to help them shape their BIG IDEA into something workable. I’ll question your intentions, I’ll counter with other ideas, but with the goal of finding ways to make your beautiful idea a reality. I love taking a topic and riffing on it for ages, slowly moulding it. And while on my own I come with endless ideas, it is the debate, the back and forth with others that ideas take shape, become realistic, and often, in the end, get implemented.

My three favourite things about Steve Tannock are…

1. He has no fear bringing different worlds together to form community. Recently I had the opportunity to attend a BBQ at Steve’s new home in South East Vancouver. At that BBQ there was an eclectic group of people ranging from nurses who worked with his partner, kids (and their parents) who like to play with his son, his board gaming crew, ultimate friends, and work colleagues. In effect it was a smorgasboard of different people with different interests. Many would shy away from bringing together such diverse worlds and would seek to keep them seperate – not Steve, cause that’s not how he roles. The result was a great confluence of different people bringing ideas – literally – from everywhere.

2. He’s a really nice guy who exudes kindness wherever he goes. With some people, wherever they go, they exude a kindness and soft spoken thoughtfulness. That’s Steve and it makes me want to be part of his communities.

Steve 2.0

Steve 2.0

3. He has his own icon. That’s right, Steve has his own icon. And you only get to have your own icon when you’re part of a gazillion online communities. Want to join Steve in one of his online communities and see what he’s talking about? It’s only a click away:

http://tannock.net | http://www.flickr.com/people/stv | http://twitter.com/stv | http://www.facebook.com/steve.tannock

And that’s the story, as told by Kurt Heinrich…

.eco

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recently the adeptly-named ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) proposed the creation of a .eco domain name.  the concept would be to reward organizations that meet certain environmentally-aware criteria with a .eco site.   potential visitors to such sites would be guaranteed to be supporting climate-friendly organizations.   interestingly, the two front runners to administer this ‘certification’ are Big Room Inc. (out of Vancouver!) and Dot Eco LLC (associated with Al Gore).   we can guess that support from the ‘father of the internet and contemporary american environmentalism’ will have some serious weight in the decision-making process, but it would be nice to see hometown heroes get a slice of the pie.   as a former LEED-consultant, I understand some of the controversy associated with eco certification and I am sure the .eco will be subject to more of the same; let us leave the eco-labelling controversy for now and turn elsewhere.

the .eco discussion made me think about .com.   I thought: ‘how cool would it be if .com was short for .community’.   this seemed likely, given the networked nature of the internet and the clear sociological links between the communal aspects of online life and sitting in the olden days village pub/square, listening and observing your village’s social life.   not to be.   the capitalist machine wins again:  .com stands for .commercial.

Fireplace TV1 smallcommercial evokes images of flickering product advertisements on television, consumers buying their life-goods, and bland glass-enclosed steel and concrete business districts.   this site describes other domain names including: .org (formally restricted to non-profits, now open to any individual or business), .net (formally restricted to technical concerns, namely web-providers), .biz (business only, I think of used-car salesmen when I see it), and a number of others.   the most interesting is the .coop (reserved for coops, although I have never seen one in use).

these are the most popular of the .somethings and all have become available to business.   does this make the fundamental purpose of the internet economic?  to me this is concerning in light of the essentially anti-community, rapine nature of the capitalist corporate model we live in today (maximize returns to shareholders while minimizing and externalizing costs to the surrounding environment).   what if .com stood for .community?  would this affect our perception of our communities, both virtual and real?

tangentially, this means the most popular ‘community-building’ website — FACEBOOK.com — is a business concern.    somehow it produces income for the venture capitalists invested in it.   is this a problem?   consider this: how would you feel if your real-life, community-centres were run as for-profit institutions?   they could never offer the same range of money-losing services: poorly attended yoga classes, low-income mum’s groups, or 2$ drop-in soccer.   every decision made by facebook must be put through a profit filter; does this make them a good forum for community building?   think on it before signing in and posting information about you and your real community.

Perils of Online Community

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Online communities are lauded these days. Applications like facebook, twitter, myspace and friendster are seen as the new way to create and maintain one’s personal social community. With these new tools people can expand their community to hundreds of friends, sharing information like never before. Can’t be anything but good, say our online gurus.

Maybe online communities aren’t so perfect after all. As our Web 2.0 communities grow and the amount of time we spend online grows with them, many people are spending less time with their close friends and family. Instead of going to a park with your close ones, doing dinner with your family, or strengthening friendships via common interest and common activities, the new online community leads us to spend endless hours viewing flickr photos, writing facebook wall posts, and yes, writing and commenting on blog articles. At first it is no big deal. But slowly, one starts to notice sometimes we’re spending more time with our friends online than offline.

And instead of focusing our quality time with a small handful of close friends, we spread our net wide, communicating with hundreds of “friends”, many of whom we’ve never even met. In effect, we’re watering down our social community, trading personal flesh on flesh relationships in exchange for hundreds of pixel images, superfluous comments/posts, and short bios of people we once knew a long time in a galaxy far far away.

Is this the future of our communities?