Full Circle Associates

I have been following another spate of blog posts that appear on the surface to set up the oppositional tension of individual or the group. In most cases, I don't think that's what the authors intend, but it is so easy to slide into that trough. "Me" and "Us" are loaded words. Stowe writes:

"So, in the classical enterprise collaboration model people are, first and foremost, members of groups, and these groups define people: what their rights are, what their purpose and goals are, and so on.

But the social take on this is that people are individuals, first and foremost, with their own desires, interests, skills, and goals. People interact with other people for a variety of reasons, which include collaboration around business goals. But in the social, me-first model (contrasting it with group-first models) people's relationships are potentially asymmetric: for example, I may be on your buddy list, but you aren't on mine. And in the me-first model, I possess what I make and I opt to share it with specific individuals (or not)."

Yes, some older collaboration tools were designed for a group. There is still utility for that in some cases. The problem is individuals have to work in and across multiple groups and outside of them. They need hooks between the tools of their groups and communities.

What I take away from these posts is that finding technological and process ways to manage our multimembership across various groups and networks is critical in this wired world.

I've learned this idea of multimembership from Etienne Wenger and see the management of multimembership as one of the key technological and social issues of the online world today. There is quite a bit of interesting technological work happening in this area, from identity standards, pushes for interoperability and tools that help us collect all our digital interactions so we can make sense of them across all the groups, networks and even casual online interactions we engage in.

Stowe Boyd calls this "federation design"

In a separate but related blog post Mark Berthelemy looks at this multimembership issue in the education domain. It is interesting to note how he is paying attention to his multimembership across a network.
The importance of creating a network:

"To me, to be network aware means understanding that I am a node in a network of learners, responsible for developing, maintaining and pruning my own connections to that network. It's through those connections that I am able to rapidly pick up on new developments in my particular field(s), to explore those new developments further and perhaps to change my thinking and my behaviour in the light of those developments.

My connections into this network take many forms. I'm now much less reliant on face-to-face conferences & events. ... Most of my network activity now takes place online (the connections there are much easier to make, and to maintain). Some of it takes place through my Skype contacts list, some through email, most inbound connections are through my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader and most outbound connections through my blog."

Oh, and one other huge element. Overload is a part of this. How much multimembership can one person usefully maintain?