AnySourceTypeServiceIdeality - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Things I am working towards in the ScholarsBox:

frictionless movement of content and knowledge and data
ability to join content and services arbitrarily and easily
tied into this is the notion of maximizing reuse, enabling bricolage authoring
four domains of interaction: digital libraries, educational technology, the Web, authoring tools of all types

So what is this ideality? I want everything in the world of ideas, references, digital content, services, data at my fingertips. I want to be able to join content and services arbitrarily and easily (any source, any data-type, any service). To make this happen, I need the frictionless movement of content and knowledge and data. Having this technical power would let me maximize the reuse of my (and other people's) content, to engage in full-power bricolage authoring. No technical limitations please. Now, I might be overstating my case when I argue that I want to remove all technical limitations to moving and recombing data and services (like authorization, rights expression, social norms) -- so I want to build technology to support "approrpiate" ways of use. For example, the tools should have the proper respect for rights and but not too much. What I think is needed is cultural, social "infrastructure" to enable people to self-regulate to enable the notions of free use. (Larry Lessig's book on Code and Law is helpful here: code is implicitly or explicitly enforcing norms -- so I don't want to inadvertantly enforce other norms. I also don't want to just accept DRM etc. I'm not saying anything new here -- so it would be good to nail down good literature)

A nice description of AnySourceTypeServiceIdeality in the IU News:

The UC Berkeley Interactive University Project:

Greenbaum asked his audience to imagine an "ideal" environment – a Scholar’s Workspace in which a user had access to any data source, could handle any object type, and apply any service to these objects, and as a result of this was able to build collections. He offered that this kind of tool/service would be highly valuable for higher education, particularly since it enables the user to execute the “scholarly primitives” of collecting, organizing, annotating, interpreting and presenting. In addition, such a tool/service could enable the creation of digital collections, contextualized for different publics and designed for dis-aggregation and re-use.