National Archives and UVA release Founders Online website

“This free online tool brings together the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in a single website that gives a first-hand account of the growth of democracy and the birth of the Republic.

Founders Online was created through a cooperative agreement between the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant-making arm of the National Archives, and The University of Virginia (UVA) Press.”

http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2013/nr13-103.html

Hypothes.is | Platform for the collaborative evaluation of information

The blurb on the Hypothes.is website says:

It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

They noted a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a workshop on February 22-24 in San Francisco and a Fellows program, so they must be on to something.

The Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory

This is a project from Howard Rheingold. Learned about it in this video.

Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” We invite you to build on what we’ve started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools.

Advice for Web Developers

The blog Six Revisions has an article, “How to Make Remote Team Collaboration Work.” Collaboration can be a challenge for web developers, particularly when the team is in a variety of time-zones. The author said:

Working with people in the same town is hard enough. My brother and I are working from opposite sides of the globe.

As we started talking about establishing a new website, we realized we needed to acknowledge the difference in time zones if we were to get any semblance of synchronization in our work. Setting proper times for brainstorming sessions and meetings online proved to be quite a challenge in the beginning.

Collaborative Library Website Project Awarded

“Plinkit Collaborative Receives a Digital Government Achievement Award”

“The Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government, has awarded the PLINKIT Collaborative a 2009 Digital Government Achievement Award in the Government-to-Government category. …  Cathilea Robinett, executive director of the Center for Digital Government, said, “We congratulate the winners of this year’s awards.  They are terrific examples of first-rate ideas and collaboration on digital solutions which ultimately benefit citizens.  Plinkit is software that lets libraries maintain rich web sites without any technical expertise.”  Read more.