Category: Four pillars

How else would I have come across the delightful adventures of Mog and Tilly, as created by Jenny Bartle? fabulous stuff.

Just how did I get there? Well, no blog is an island. So when WordPress and Technorati tell me that someone’s linked to me, I go and check. And wander around aimlessly. And read. It’s one of the ways I discover new blogs.

Today I found a link coming in from Bill MacKenty, rooted around his blog, and (given my passion for that weird space where information technology meets education) linked to him straightaway. While reading his stuff, something stuck in my head, way in the back of my head. Richard Bartle. Didn’t he write some book on virtual worlds? Something stirred deep in my memory, so I had to check. See whether the Richard Bartle that Bill MacKenty recommended was the same Richard Bartle I’d read.

And bingo. Richard Bartle. The very same guy. Another fascinating read.

So much to do, so little time. If that’s the way you feel go visit Jenny Bartle’s site and read her Mog and Tilly cartoons.

…. Is now on facebook. Way to go, Hugh. And thanks Michael. Details at www.gapingvoid.com

There are many things I’ve been accused of over the years: being Confused is something I aspire to, so I’m pretty relaxed about it. Nevertheless, I take all comments seriously, seeking to learn from them. All of them. So, as you should expect, I’ve been taking a look at the Tonnies 1887 definition of “community”, and have been meandering through the attempted distinctions between “community” and “society”. But that’s for another day.

Right now what confuses me is something that interests me far more in the current context. Let’s take Howard Rheingold’s 1993 definition of “virtual community”, which reads something like this:

Virtual communities are: “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”

Let us then take the Tonnies definition of “community”, and here I quote from Wikipedia (it’s the most convenient place to quote from while travelling):

Tönnies distinguished between two types of social groupings. Gemeinschaft — often translated as community (or even gemeinschaft)— refers to groupings based on family and neighbourhood bonds and ensuing feelings of togetherness. Gesellschaft — often translated as society — on the other hand, refers to groups that are sustained by an instrumental goal. Gemeinschaft may by exemplified by a family or a neighbourhood in a pre-modern society; Gesellschaft by a joint-stock company or a state in a modern society, i.e. the society when Tönnies lived.

His distinction between social groupings is based on the assumption that there are only two basic forms of an actor’s will, to approve of other men. (For Tönnies, such an approval is by no means self-evident, he is quite influenced by Thomas Hobbes‘ homo homini lupus.) Following his “essential will” (“Wesenwille“), an actor will see himself as a means to serve the goals of social grouping; very often it is an underlying, subconscious force. Groupings formed around an essential will are called a Gemeinschaft. The other will is the “arbitrary will” (“Kürwille“): An actor sees a social grouping as a means to further his individual goals; so it is purposive and future-oriented. Groupings around the latter are called Gesellschaft. Whereas the membership in a Gemeinschaft is self-fulfilling, a Gesellschaft is instrumental for its members. In pure sociology — theoretically —, these two normal types of will are to be strictly separated; in applied sociology — empirically — they are always mixed.

Without even going into Tonnies’ core assumption (about the two basic forms of an actor’s will), what confuses me at present is the following:

Let us assume I belong to a Tonnies-defined real human physical community. Let us assume that the members of that community all join Facebook. What then happens? Here’s what I think:

Sometimes communities don’t just “emerge” in virtual environments. They pre-exist in physical environments, and, in relatively short order, migrate to coexist in virtual environments as well. Why do they do this? Because their virtual interactions can give them freedoms they never had, freedoms denied them because of disenfranchisement in one form or the other.  Disenfranchisements that could be physical or social or financial handicaps.

That’s what I find different about Facebook, the sheer speed at which an existing physical community, built up by its members over time and with love and care, can migrate and coexist in a virtual environment.

I am fascinated by this theme of how a virtual community overcomes physical disenfranchisements, and by the way the physical community uses virtual tools and techniques to do this. It will therefore become the topic of my next post on Facebook and the Enterprise.

It’s rare for me to buy more than three copies of a book, and Amy Jo Kim’s seminal Community Building On The Web is one such book. It’s so good that, over the last seven years or so, I have repeatedly bought it and given it away. Which was fine when the book was actually in print, but started getting a tad expensive when I had to go into the secondary market for it.

While the book continues to be “out of print” in a traditional sense, I’m glad to see that Peachpit now make a PDF download available, albeit at a price.

If you haven’t done so already, read the book. It’s an absolute must. Don’t listen to me. Listen to people who have a real story to tell about online communities…..

Howard “Smart Mobs” Rheingold: If you’re thinking of building an online community, read this book

Kevin “Wired” Kelly: This is the book I hand out to anyone serious about building online communities

Jon “Slashdot” Katz: In addition to being useful, this book is a mirror into the culture and future — even the anthropology — of online communities

What does all this have to do with Facebook? Well, I wanted to get you hooked into the way I was thinking when I first came across Facebook. I didn’t think of it as a “social networking” site. I saw it as an online community, one that had been built by people who understood the precepts and guidelines of people like Amy Jo Kim. [I had the chance to meet Amy Jo at Supernova a few years ago, and it was a real delight. She really knows her stuff. I believe she’s gone “mobile” now, so I expect to hear great things about what she has to share about mobile communities next.]

The book itself consists of an introduction and 9 sections:

• Introduction: Calling All Community Builders
• Purpose: The Heart of Your Community
• Places: Bringing People Together
• Profiles: Getting to Know Your Members
• Roles: From Newcomer to Oldtimer
• Leadership: The Buck Stops Here
• Etiquette: Rules to Live By
• Events: Meetings, Performances and Competitions
• Rituals: Handshakes, Holidays and Rites of Passage
• Subgroups: Committees, Clubs and Clans

Now you can see how I felt when I first came across Facebook. In fact, if you look at what Jon Katz said all those years ago, it is eerily prescient: …. a mirror into the culture and future — even the anthropology —  of online communities

Enough preamble. Facebook is not a “social networking” site. It is a community of communities. Now this is potentially of immense value in an enterprise, if we use it sensibly. Let me outline a few potential uses:

Collaborative filtering to allow the sharing of patterns: people who read A  also read B; people who met A also met B; even people whose career moves were A also had B. As partially discussed earlier, we can gain a lot from the collaborative filtering process and its pattern outputs. They can be used for staff induction and role-based training. For succession planning. For career development. For informing and briefing deputies and interim backfills; for dealing with unplanned absences. A whole plethora of instances where learning is made possible, learning about context and domain and objective and modus operandi.

Rating processes that actually mean something: rating the usefulness of an e-mail reply; of advice given; of a person’s skillset or competence; of suitability for membership of a specific professional community; of the fit-for-purpose-ness of a particular product or service. Rating processes that are continuous rather than discrete and irregular snapshots; rating processes that are open and transparent rather than cloak-and-dagger stab-in-the-back; rating processes that are across the enterprise and beyond it, to include partners and customers. True 360 degrees.

Recommendation processes that are both push as well as pull. Unsolicited advice. A response to a query. The creation of active and kept-up-to-date and valuable FAQ sites. [It has always been my belief that an FAQ site is only as good as its update frequency and usage population].

From tacit knowledge to tacit problem-solving:  If I take the recommendation process one step further, I can visualise an environment where Person A responds to a question by Person B, where that advice (and its context) is flashed across my News Feed, where I read it. And in the process of reading it, I solve a problem I didn’t even know I had.

Wisdom-of-crowds and Prediction Markets: Checking the health of strategic enterprise programmes, projects, even transformation initiatives. Being able to get short-sharp votes on key subjects, just to take the pulse of the institution. Testing morale. Validating quality of communications and their usefulness. Even assessing the likelihood of project success or failure, whether measured in time, cost or quality.

Hiring: The availability of decent profile information, active references, and modus operandi means that we can bring community processes to bear even on candidate selection and hiring.

I’ll leave it there for now, and hope that I’ve done enough to elicit constructive comments.

Thanks to Sean (and yes, I did read what he said via Facebook. Of course.) I was made aware of The Open Library. There’s a lot I like about their vision:

The “Collections” approach to book selection is appealing, so much so that I can foresee a time when I try and provide a collection myself, something I had not considered before. The opportunity to non-rivalrous shareable goods and abundance out of a physical, proprietary and scarce collection is in itself something tremendous.

The quality of the archival systems in use makes the books “searchable, retrievable, downloadable and printable”. If I’ve interpreted it correctly, the costs of setting up a decent archival station are currently around $10k and dropping. The Collections approach, when combined with democratised archival processes, should yield significant benefits. In this context, it’s instructive to note that archivist recruitment is being carried out via Craigslist.

There is a clear focus on the use of public domain materials, of open source scanning software,  of Creative Commons licensing processes, and a reliance on open and standardised metadata. All this bodes well.

In addition, the provision of support for people who are normally disenfranchised is heartening. Images can be magnified. Text can be listened to. Books are available free online.

I am particularly intrigued by the possibility that this particular initiative will itself become an open multisided platform. There are already people offering different components and services for scanning, cataloguing and even reading. The Internet Bookmobile seems a fabulous idea.

All in all, I’m delighted to see what Brewster Kahle et al have achieved, and will do what I can to support what is happening here. More later.