Climate commons was intended always to be a short term experiment with two primary goals. First to bring together researchers/thinkers/producers from a wide range of fields to contribute information/ideas to a multidisciplinary pool. Henry Jenkin’s writes about this in his blog: “In a networked society, people are increasingly forming Knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.”

The second was to create on the internet in a blog form a space for conversation, questions, and contributions from anyone–a participatory network. As I contemplate what happened in the more than one hundred posts and three hundred comments with the site visited by an average of 3000 people a day, a number of new questions have formed:

what is the nature of participation on the internet?

On blogs or other forms of online conversation, people don’t seem to be talking to each other, but instead to the network as a whole. So do the conversational contributions remain as individual data bits linked to a larger community, without a direct relational experience of person to person?

how does conversation and pooled research create change?

does a conversation that is about climate, a phenomenon intimately linked to place, need to be located in a physical place, and take into account the context of that place in order to become more than generalized abstractions?

how can this experience of research and networking be defined as an aesthetics?

these are just a few questions I am left with? if you have any others, please contribute them in the comments.

Many thanks to all the core authors and guest authors who generously gave of their time and expertise to this experiment. And thanks to Matt Shanley, code guru and collaborator.

the image is from the april stepitup07 rally on boston commons, my 5 year old son bridge holding up a sign with a pic of the Earth and the word hope

-- JaneMarsching