layout: post title: Civilities and ViewPoints created: 1113211142 categories:

• Personal Publishing
• Drupal
• Social Media

I must be slipping. I had never heard of Civilities until Arieanna pointed towards it. Jon Garfunkel is doing some amazing writing, and he's hitting all my buttons: it's all about Web 2.0, it's not a blog, and he's using Drupal to power it all:

Civilities is the work, so far, of one person. One might thus label it a blog, but it isn't one. It's better than a blog. I call it a Civ, which conveniently is an acronym for "Constructing Informative Viewpoints".

Civilities.net: About page

Next fantastic thing from Jon: ViewPoints. Alex Samuel and I had a discussion about online consultation -- which we really need to post some ideas around -- and I think Jon's ViewPoints are a step in that direction. Here's what he sees as the Usage Patterns:

• Any point of discussion can become a quick poll.
• A debate may develop between two parties; participants may score each point in the debate as it happened.
• Meta-moderation works simply by applying ViewPoints to an existing post.

Civilities.net: ViewPoints

Luckily, Alex is also heading back east soon, so hopefully she will get a chance to sit down and discuss these concepts with Jon directly.

Tags: alex samuel, jon garfunkel, online consultation

BTW -- these tag things at the bottom of some of my posts are supposed to lure Technorati here. My Blog Therapist posts still aren't showing up with their tags, but T. did finally accept my blog claim. I'm choosing specifically to not link to the Technorati tag page, but rather a URL I believe representative of the linked tag. It's still supposed to work, but hasn't for me so far.