Etherpad is open source. You can make your own version, redesigned however you like:
http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/etherpad-open-source-release Requirements Java 1.6 (tested with 1.6.0_10) Scala 2.7 (tested with 2.7.4) MySQL Server 5.1 (tested with 5.1.41) mysql-connector-java (tested with 5.1.0) --- If live music "counts" as a deep local phenomenon, there are a variety of other local activities which also lead to community connectedness. My brother is head of the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago http://www.oldtownschool.org/ and he has written a fantastic book (no bias here, really!) called Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Democracy-Community-Public-Purpose/dp/0252029658 Trying to follow his lead, I'm active in: - Church activities. This primarily means the Unitarian church on Ponsonby Road http://www.unitarian.org.nz/auckland/ which has a Men's Group that meets every other Wednesday night. We go on hikes and ski trips and have even organized a weekend stay at a ARC house in Anawhata (great place!) http://www.arc.govt.nz/parks/our-parks/parks-in-the-region/anawhata/bookable-facilities.cfm - Dancing. When I left the States last July, one thing I was sad to leave behind was contradancing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_dance This wonderfully social form of dance is so simple it has been called "walking around to folk music" but it is great for meeting and connecting with people of all ages -- because you TOUCH one another. Obviously Auckland has a variety of alternatives and I have tried a number of them: Irish Set Dancing at Rocky Nook: http://www.setdancingnews.net/news/eclasses.lp#NewZealand Ceroc downtown: http://www.ceroc.co.nz/ English Country Dance: This is from Beth Harris (bethharris51 at hotmail dot com) - Hello Everyone, It is time to get dancing again with English starting this Friday, 12th February at St Johns, 7.30 pm, and Early Dance starting Friday 26th February @ 8 pm, same venue. The Historic Places Trust is keen to hold some Quadrille Dance/Victorian Dance lessons, with the idea of eventually holding a small Colonial Ball sometime in the future as part of Heritage Week (not this year though). The lessons, led by me, will be held in the grand (but small) ballroom at Highwic starting on Wednesday 29 April, and will run for 6 weeks, the last evening possibly costumed. This is a fantastic opportunity to dance in this beautiful colonial house. There will be a charge, but more information will follow. Please let me know if you are interested. Can you also consider whether you would like to perform some English Country dances at Highwic one Sunday afternoon as part of their entertainment programme. If there are enough people interested, it would mean an extra practice one Friday night beforehand. Hope to see you on Friday. With regards, Beth RSA Ballroom Dancing: http://www.ptchevrsa.co.nz/entertainment.html Dance to Big Band music just down the road from Motat http://www.motat.org.nz/ - Sports. A key to local social connections for me is getting out to play tennis at the tennis club. http://www.aucklandtennis.co.nz/ Auckland also has a very active and social badminton community: http://www.auckbad.co.nz/index.htm And I know there are also running, cycling, sailing, and even juggling clubs: http://nzja.org.nz/ - Professional/Special Interest Groups. I'm a member of the New Zealand Computer Society and regularly attend their events: http://www.nzcs.org.nz/ And go monthly to the Python User Group meetings in Auckland: http://nzpug.org/ And you'd be amazed at the dedication of the local genealogy software group (note the 4 hour long meetings): Legacy Users Group http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/UsersGroups.asp Venue is the room at the NZSG, 159 Queens Road, Panmure, Auckland. Meeting (as usual) 6:00 pm through to 10:00 pm. Meeting to start by 6:30 pm. Tea/coffee/biscuits available, $4 door charge. http://www.genealogy.org.nz/ Finally, there is the whole idea of randomly connecting with like-minded people. I've tried this once, joining a group that liked to cook for a BBQ out in Mission Bay: http://www.meetup.com/ (Auckland has 80 Meetup Groups) (Wellington has 19 Meetup Groups) (Christchurch as 8 Meetup Groups, including The Christchurch Web Design and Development Meetup Group) - Travel. I have a friend who always tries this resource before booking at a hotel: http://www.hospitalityclub.org/ While I made my first friend in Auckland through this group: http://www.couchsurfing.org/ One point I'm making here is that without the world wide web I would not have FOUND many of these social groups (or at least not as quickly). Another point relates to the ideas of Carl Shirkey http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ http://www.shirky.com/ who talks about our "cognitive surplus" and rising "culture of participation." Someone had to go to the trouble to BUILD and maintain all these on-line resources to create links to the local social networks. The final observation I would make is this: I don't own a TV. I have no desire to have a ONE-WAY social interaction driven by commercials. Books are fine, because they don't have ads. What the internet brings is the potential to easily give feedback -- I'm currently doing some proofreading of a technical book, in pre-press, just because it was made freely available on-line before going to the publisher: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/book.html And as Shirkey observes, it is those websites and projects which engage and encourage free form feedback that are most successful (he specifically cites Google's free form search beating out Yahoo's structured category search). It is with these ideas in mind that I'm trying to encourage the creation of this open source voice-and-vision enabled dialog system, Open Allure: http://openallureds.org where anyone could write educational "scripts" just as they have helped author the 3,216,339 articles in Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons The last thing I want is to have people so totally absorbed by their on-line interactions that they miss out on in-person social connections. What I hope is that the focus, feedback and transfer of knowledge made possible by an effective on-line educational system will give people ACCESS and SKILLS and perhaps even TIME to enjoy and participate in their local community. John Graves PhD Student Auckland University of Technology _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
