CommunityWiki: CommunityTiedToOneTechnology
I feel like I slipped into the chocolate store this morning when I followed a link to CommunityWiki: CommunityTiedToOneTechnology. I have been in an ongoing conversation with Etienne Wenger, John Smith, and Kim Rowe about technologies that support distributed communities of practice. (This comes out of Etienne's CoP Tech Survey of 2001 - we are in the process of creating the next gen!)
John says all communities "straddle" technologies - and he considers telephone/IM/VOIP/F2F/paper technologies. On some days I totally agree. But when I look at the "platform" (an integrated set of features or tool) with the groups I work with, I see the CommunityTiedToOneTechnology pattern more often.
That said, I also notice that people experience that one platform in many diverse ways. Some embrace it and fly. Others struggle so hard and are often turned off or simply can't hack it. The same tool -- and these aren't stupid people. The point is the tools are designed for a group but experienced as an individual. My question is, does the integration of features and technology help us bridge that gap, or does it fractionate the group. How do we balance the cost of inclusion with the cost of cohesion when it comes to tools?
posted by Nancy White at 7:45 AM
6 Comments:
My experience of online communities has been that they've tended to move between technologies as time has progressed. The most obvious example is the group of us who met on usenet, some of whom gather in person at a music festival each summer, and many of whom have moved to an email list.
But beyond that, I've also found my experiences of community changing as some groups people I first met online have become friends offline, and then have moved back to exclusively online as I've moved to a new country. In the meantime, technologies have moved on and while initially we communicated via email it's now instant messaging, utilising audio and video where appropriate.
And then there are the people I rarely phone any more because I can read their blogs, and others I email more often because their newsfeeds remind me that I must. Or my fiancee who I met in person, communicated with by telephone and email for months, now live with, and plan things with using conversation, email, IM, text messaging, and a wiki.
In other words, my experience has been that while a community will usually form around a single technology, and will often retain that technology at the core of their group identity, other technologies inevitably come into play. If the community develops beyond its initial foci and longer term relationships form, it seems to me inevitable that it, or sub-groups of it, will spread across a variety of media.
James.
http://james.anthropiccollective.org
James, your experience resonates for me. Do you consider yourself an early adopter? If so, do the experiences change in any significant way for the second wave of adopters? I think so, but as an early adopter, sometimes I fail to be able to see that perspective.
Nancy
Nancy,
There is something strong about having a 'space', a 'Ba' where the community gathers. Perhaps I'm biased by Wiki culture but a loosely coupled blogging group just does not have the same pull, context or cohesion for me.
Denham
http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KnowledgeSpaces
I was wondering if the link to the communitywiki you say you followed came from our discussions on the mailing list?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/message/7032I think people would be surprised at the cross-pollination happening across different communities. For example, after the discussions at [of] mailing list, and in response to the one-technology page, I wrote up: LimitationsOfMailingLists which refers to the [of] mailing list discussion. I wonder what you might have to add?
Please pop over sometime into #wiki or #onebigsoup on freenode IRC for more of the same :)
- Heather James http://nearlythere.com/ps= i just noticed you mention "slipping into a chocolate store" and your yahooid is choconancy, LOL.
This is very consistent with the research that we did on technologies and interviews of groups using various technologies. I've forgotten how big the study was Nancy - can you remind me? 30 groups or am I totally senile?
Kim
Hi, Kim, great to hear from you. I don't think we covered 30 communities. In the end it was more like 12~!
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