Full Circle Associates

Jim has a thoughtful post, Convergence and Procreation where he muses on community indicators, ways to find communities and the emergence of something that may indicate a really important change: transient communities. He goes on to use the term "fluid" too, which I like. (Now, I'll leave aside if these groups are communities. That's another topic.)

This idea of transience dovetails with what Etienne Wenger has talked about with multimembership. (Etienne, I wish you blogged!)

First, a bit on the transience from Jim. I am bolding some things worth highlighting from my perspective.

"To tie this into my recent posts about rankings and tracking of expertise on the net, I want to note the transience of thought on the individual, the right to multiple associations, and the healthy aspects of not being an expert.

These groups and communities on the net are well formed. And, yes, the conversation is well formed and on-going, but we should be wary of rankings that build up expert or superblogger status on given individuals.

Inherently:

1. Ad Hoc Groups are created to solve problems
2. Blogs' subject matter is transient
3. Community is fluid

This leads me to wonder how we would establish relevance of blog posters by community indicators when the communities themselves are in flux by design. Communities defined by a given area of interest will tend to highlight those who are perhaps overly focused on those areas of interest. It may yield a search of those who are tunnel visioned and not those who are innovative."

OK, Jim, I hope you say more about what you mean by "well formed." I'm nodding in firm agreement about the transience (or always mutating) thoughts, multimembership and the non-expert value.

I want to tease out the intersection between transience and multimembership -- I think there is an image in here somewhere. The web environment makes the transience really easy. The multimembership, especially if you can't visualize that membership because of its ad hoc nature, becomes hard to track after a certain number of communities. How do I stay connected to these moving, fluid conversations and people? Where once I could "point" to my online communities through a password protected portal, now my community constellation is this ever shifting fractal. How many people can conceptualize and manage this in a busy life? Is there a technological solution? A change in the way we think and an emphasis on impermanent and short term interactions? At what cost? There is value on all ends of the spectrum. Will we tip one way?

Now on ad hoc groups created to solve problems; I'm not sure we are there yet. I think they form to discuss the problems, but we still are challenged to move forward to action within ad hoc structure. Well, at least some of us are.

Finally, the fluidity of community. I really want to ponder on this some more as I start thinking, or confusing, networks and community here. But then I think, hm, this is a new form. Unnamed?

Related post here.

community_indicators, community_fluidity