planetwater

Some of the readers of this blog are alumni of the environmental engineering curriculum at the University of Stuttgart. There is a club, called “Kontakt Umweltschutztechnik Stuttgart e.V.”, whose goal is to bring students, teachers, and alumni together in order to exchange ideas and thoughts. Check out the club’s homepage as well as the new XING group!

Planetwater.org appears on Andreas Roth’s map that shows the locations of where a given blog is based at.

Map of Blogs in the area of Germany.

Great idea for a goole.maps mashup!

The magazine Science published an editorial titled “Science 2.0“. One key point of the author, Ben Shneiderman, is that online collaboration is going to shift focus of science, towards the social sciences. “Online collaboration” inspired the title, since online collaboration was a key new possibility offered by web-based communities since the technology (CSS, Ajax, XHTML, weblogs) has been available, and titled “web 2.0” after a conference hosted by O’Reilly Media. Along the same lines, O’Reilley offers a “where 2.0” (in 2004 and one coming up in May 2008) conference, geared towards location based digital / online services.

There is a commentary on “Science 2.0” at wired.com, with interesting comments. The key point for me though seems to be that funding is going to be granted to collaborators:

Science 1.0 remains vital, but this ambitious vision of Science 2.0 will affect research funding, educational practices, and evaluation of research outcomes. Science funding agencies will face resistance as they promote a transformation that seeks to make a safe space for Science 2.0. Scientific journal editorial boards and conference program committees are already shifting their attention to new topics and opening their doors to new scientific research methods. Pioneering educators have begun changing their curricula, focusing on collaboration strategies and teaching new research methods. The innovators are courageously taking on new challenges, but they should be ready for the resistance to novel ideas that has always been part of science. In that way, Science 2.0 is part of a great tradition.

I’m not sure how the effectiveness and quality of your collaborations are going to be measured. Also I think of critical importance will be to stay on top of Science 1.0 while collaborating!

What do you think about all this? Are you using “Web 2.0” “technologies”? And if so, mostly privately or also for your business?