Climate Commons

A new one for the commons collection:

Climate commons is a networked conversation space that creates a cross-disciplinary platform for planetary ecological concerns. Twelve people who research issues relevant to the arctic and climate change contribute the progress of their investigations and reflections from October 10, 2006 through January 10, [2]007. These networked conversations can be read by and contributed to by visitors to the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary art Boston or on the web at climate-commons.net.

It also offers some open source-y goodness:

Matt Shanley has created three main visual tools to help foster the dialog on this site.
The word count history graph uses sparklines to give you an idea of the ups and downs of site activity at a glance.
The hexagraph provides a spatial representation of the threads of a conversation. You can literally see when a conversation branch is bursting at the seams.
Category highlighting reveals common threads by illuminating the key words.

Each of these extensions will be released as an open source project in early 2007, around the time Climate commons is coming to completion.

I have to say, though, that there is something vaguely jarring about a project to do with climate change, sustainability and all that coming to "completion": shouldn't it just go on and on? (Via WorldChanging.)

Audacious, Adorable Auntie

I've been a big fan of the BBC ever since I first saw Doctor Who - and I mean since I first saw the very first episode of the first Doctor Who (yes, I know, I know). Today, life is inconceivable without the backdrop of Radio 3 from early morning until late at night. And so it's good to see such a fine institution being so, well, good and fine.

Its latest move as it dances on the brink of opening up the vast audio-visual thesaurus hidden in the vaults is to make its Programme Catalogue freely available for searches (and how appropriate that an institution that almost defines Britishness should use two of the words that almost define the British variant of English for this).

It's not complete (it only has one entry for me, but I'm sure I took part in a deeply obscure BBC TV programme about computers several geological time-periods ago); it's not completely free (the licence essentially limits you to personal, non-commercial use). But it's a completely wonderful start, and a magnificent contribution to open knowledge.

Update: Apparently, the dinky little graphics that pepper the results are called sparklines (via Nodalpoint.org).