Hmmm...

IASC is an association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively. Many will refer to such resources and their systems of usage as "commons".
from "International Journal of Commons" posted in Open

who got it from Peter Suber's Open Access News posting.

Ah, but there seems to be some confusion, for if you go to the organization's web site, you'll see it's IASCP not IASC.

The International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit Association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities in developing or developed countries.

IASCP's goals are:

• to encourage exchange of knowledge among diverse disciplines, areas, and resource types
• to foster mutual exchange of scholarship and practical experience
• to promote appropriate institutional design

from IASCP web site

Until you go further into their site, and find the first quote.

I wonder if this possible name confusion will lead to us getting a spate of requests for information about Common Property and the new International Journal of the Commons, as we keep getting requests for information on Aloe Vera farming after an newspaper in India listed the international Aloe Science Council's web site as iasc.COM rather than its true iasc.ORG?

Putting all that aside, the fortchcoming International Journal of the Commons looks to be an important contribution for governments and institutions concerned with the governance of natural resources that are [or should be] held as common property. I'm sure that those involved with open source, copyright, DRM, digital lifestyle aggregators, social networks and similar intellectual property and data-types natural resources will be able to learn from the lessons of other types of common property that will be taught in this journal.

Some time ago, we tried Volantis Mobilizer, a service that purports to take any web site and present for better viewing on small mobile devices. It didn't work with our dynamically generated, PHP on the one hand, CSS on the other, sites. So, we forgot about it.

For a few weeks now, every day, we get an email with the subject "[Volantis Mobilizer] Sites to be removed (first warning)" and the body claims that our site "will be removed after 2006 Sep 12".

Since there isn't a support link on your site, if you should see this, please STOP sending the endless "first notices".

Thanks in advance.

At tonight's PMI meeting, the main presentation involved customizing and deploying project management methodologies within an organization. One of Leon Herszon's key points for the Model of the Unified Project Management Methodology was that a modern PM methodology needed to be web-enabled. Discussing this point with the speaker made it clear that this was a read-only web portal/intranet and that the benefits of the read-write web such as blogs, wikis and forums, or of Web2.0 technologies weren't recognized.

A post-meeting discussion with a PM who was having problems with communication among distributed workgroups and stakeholders through muliple time zones was very interesting in light of the previous observation. Some points from that discussion:

• synchronous communication, whether voice [teleconference], video or text either inconvenienced or left out one group or another
• attempts at asynchronous voice/video communication using recordings of teleconferences didn't work well, and even where the capability was given to record feedback, the results were inconsistent and could led to further isolation of some groups
• recordings of teleconferences are difficult to track, the thread of the conversation is easily lost, and current search tools aren't effective
• in our experience asynchronous text communications such as building support through blogs, developing documentation through wikis, and providing support and conversations through forums overcame all of the above difficulties
• collaboration and online PM tools such as ServiceCycle and dotProject enhanced access and communication for all users
• building information communities [as discussed with Rick Mortensen, CEO of MARVELit in an upcoming Mer^ienda podcast] using portlets and dashboards might streamline communication and effectiveness among distributed workgroups even more
• MMORPGs can replace interpersonal team building boon dogles to make everyone feel included, so what if you're a high elf instead of a Malibu racer - maybe Second Life could help even more
• Open Source Solutions, such as those linked herein and others can allow an organization to quickly and cost effectively prototype business processes and supporting tools, i.e. methodologies, to solve remote, asynchronous communication challenges

As I've been up since 5 this morning, so if the above isn't that coherent, well... We can discuss it later. And for anything not linked, like phpBB, there's always Google.