Dadamac's Posterous

It is an alterative space for quickly publishing content on the web. Orignally used for open letters and things that didn't have an obvious "place" within Dadamac.net.

The initiators:

This is something that is "me on my own" (Pamela McLean)

The backstory:

Dadamac's Posterous is partly an experiment with public-space and private-space. It's also an early attempt to bring more of my interests together in one place. Posterous is a wonderful middle way between a blog and an email (and is evoivng further over time).

I was very influenced by Andrius Kulikauskas and his extreme approach to using the public domian as the default behaviour. I can see the benefit of agreeing early on if something that you are saying/writing is private or for sharing. This is true for trivia about our personal lives and our hopes that we share in emails. It is also true for ideas and project work - where I am influenced by the work of Michel Bauwens, the P2P (Peer to Peer group) and ideas of the Commons..

My posterous experiment also related to use of time. I often need to explain similar things to different people, and so it's useful to refer people to previous emails, or parts of emails, rather than rewriting content. I thought I'd experiment with writing some emails to the named recipent (not sharing that email addrss) and to "readers of my open letters on posterous" so the emals were in a public space for easy reference.

I had another reason to try posterous. My interests are wide ranging and the inter-connections are not immediately obvious. I find it difficult to explain what I do (which is why I somethimes simply describe myself as a life-long-learner). I thought that posterous might work as an "over the shoulder" look at what I was doing - and maybe it would prove helpful in enabling the inter-relatedness to emerge.

The catalyst:

March 22nd 2010 I saw a posterous post via Tuttle club and decided to try it - Dadamac exploring postersous

Timeline (to July 2012):

• March 2010 - Start of Dadamac's Posterous - Dadamac exploring postersous
• March 2010 - First use for an introduction - Introducing Loy Okenzie and David Smith
• April 2010 - started to use it to bring in things I was doing elsewhere (this one was discussion on Mike Gurstein's communiy infromatics blog( - Some thoughts on Research as an Element in Telecentre/Community Informatics Practice
• August 2010- started to collect up series of posts into more or less regular "digests" to get an overview of what I was doing - Dadamac Digest - July 24th - August 10th
• August 2010- I was including "thinking aloud" posts where I was reflecting on things to clarify them in my own mind- eg - Evoluion of First Thursday
• September 2010 - I was getting requests from projects wanting my help in becoming moe visible, even if I could not help them financially. That fed into my thoughts about how Dadamac - with no resources - could help other projects to become visible (as we were helping Fantsuam Foundation) Calls from Uganda continued  
• 2010 and 2011 and 2012 spreadsheets made of dadamac posterous archivies  for easier reference later (for my own use  - so "idiosyncratic" - but published in the interests of openness)

The ongoing story:

In July 2012 Andy Broomfiedl and I did some re-arrangements of the informations flows in dadamac.net. This should mean that "on the fringe" items that used to go to Dadamac's posteraous will start to sit more comfortably in the "mainstream" of www.dadamac.net (Intiallly dadamac net was only being used to illustrate the links between UK and Fantsuam and raise the visibility of John Dada's work there).

Collaborators:

in a way everyobody who has influenced the content of dadamac's posterous has collaborated - but as they don't realise it I can't claim them as collaborators, I can only acknowledge my appreciation,  

Future vision:

Dadamac's posterous s an ongoign experiment, and its shape keeps changing. I expect it to be used less as Dadamac.net becomes more inclusive, but I think it will continue to have a useful role.

Learning issues

This is a useful learning experinece. On one level posterous has been interesting simply because I was an early adpoter and so I have seen it develop and add new features. (In addition to dadamac's posterous I have experimented with setting up other groups and things within posterous for my own use and for colllaborative use).

I have also learned a lot from discovering what kind of informaion I tended to put on posterous, and how my contacts used the opportunites I gave them.

Experimenting with open letters has also been valuable. I have tried many different apporaches. At one extreme are leters tha only the named recipeint would really undersatnd. At the other extreme are letters where anyone could undertand it all, evey reference is explained or a link is provided. Mcuh of the refernece material that is on dadamac.net was developed in order to support the open letters.

I experimented with ways to structure my Dadamac posterous archives (for my own use) and ways of feeding the archives appropriaely into Dadamac.net. Using daamac's posterous has helped me get new insigths into different kinds of information, how accessible I need different things to be, and how I need different kinds of information to flow.