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Auf Wiedersehen, Bavaria.
I'm moving on now to the next stage of my journey and the completion of my PhD thesis. This blog and my other accounts (OAC, Twitter) will go dark over the next week or so as I relocate.
More soon.
The OAC now has an excellent homepage hosted at NING, a just-add-water social networking platform that I hadn't even heard of until now. I'll probably review it in full at a later date, but it's incredibly simple to use and has all the features needed to develop a fully functioning online social network.
The Cooperative has quickly grown to over 200 members from many different locations and backgrounds. Members can create their own profile pages with a variety of content widgets and layout tweaks. Groups are simple to form for focused discussion and can be in any language. Hopefully more regional languages will appear to reflect the diversity of anthropology around the world. You can watch the activity and contributions of members from the homepage in real-time and any member can add photos and videos to the public pool or comment on any user, group or discussion page. There's even a built-in simplified IRC client for chat.
Haven't convinced you to join yet? It's like Facebook, only better. For anthropologists.
The social features are excellent in their present state, but there is also plenty of room for the Cooperative to grow and take on new tasks. Have a look at Lorenz Khazaleh and Max Forte's posts for more information on suggested directions and features that the Cooperative may absorb in due course.
I've become a strong advocate of the OAC because I feel that such a network is long overdue, especially for a discipline like anthropology. Being able to connect to other researchers in a few clicks without the awkwardness of formal channels is more than a little refreshing.
Here is my page at the Open Anthropology Cooperative.
Several anthropologists have encouraged the formation of an Open Anthropology Cooperative to engage in anthropological discussion and collaboration away from the restrictions of formal academic management. It looks as if all of the tools which have (relatively) long been at our disposal - wikis, blogs, interactive social networking platforms - will be put to the excellent task of opening up the discipline to students, faculty and non-academics alike. I look forward to the next stage of development which will be the implementation and organization of a web platform upon which the Cooperative can grow.
I'd like to see the OAC become a comfortable channel for discussion which does not intimidate amateurs or first-year undergraduates, yet remains useful for doctoral students, fieldworkers, lecturers and specialists in all fields. Broad is good. I also hope that it will become truly international (and multilingual) and incorporate students and departments thus far not so evident in the anthropology blogosphere and consequently missing out on some outstanding knowledge dissemination. Above all, I'm interested in furthering digital anthropology, which I am pleased will have a strong base in this cooperative effort.
In my opinion, there is no reason for an invented divide that reduces web-based academic content to a second-rate substitute for formal (read: expensive, elaborate, bureaucratic) channels. Why not overlap "open" and "official" academia until they are one and the same? If the technology and demand can sustain it - which I believe they can - making anthropological and ethnographic knowledge freely available should be a priority. This can reflect back heavily upon the academic method itself, both in theory and in practice.
How about an online/offline seminar series, bridging the gap with web-based multimedia, in-person meet-ups, etc? Crossing over from the lecture hall to the web, sharing teaching and learning materials, creating new bodies for peer revision and publication are all possible and positive outcomes. Breaking down the publishing barrier and enabling actual feedback with established anthropologists can only help to aid in the development of better research and analysis.
The key to success, as always, will be participation. Visit the (temporary) forum on Keith Hart's The Memory Bank website to learn more, to follow the progress of the OAC and, of course, to contribute.
