I did my first graphic recording gig in Second Life tonight for a Rockridge Institute gathering. It started with a telephone presentation by George Lakoff, then an hour of Q&A on the phone. After that about 20 of us did a virtual World Cafe in Second Life. This image is the recording of the harvest.
Time to disconnect now!
I was searching online today about a book I remembered from University, James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” when I stumbled upon a link in a wikipedia article that took me to a follow up book that traced the families that Agee and Evans wrote about. When I clicked the link, it took me to [WorldCat.org] Search for books, music, videos, articles and more in libraries near you. Poof, not only did WorldCat tell me about the book, but it showed me all the libraries and book stores NEAR ME that had the book. I was reawakened to the ease of accessing my library (a 1 mile walk). Fantastic service!
Via a twit from Jeremiah Owyang I was led to a post from Nick O’Neill, Do Social Networks Follow the Traditional Business Cycle – Covering All That’s Social All the Web critiquing a recent report by Jeremiah. Jeremiah asked what we thought of Nick’s critique, particularly of the image from Jeremiah’s Forrester report.
My response:
Since I can’t read the report, my response may be out of context. But I don’t think what the chart references is a community by my definition, which is a bounded set of people. (addition – actually, that’s only PART of my definition.) Communities don’t scale out and out.
Most commercial “communities” (which I assume Jeremiah is talking about) are actually networks and the people in them change over time. There may very likely be communities that form and persist over time as well, but their growth is never continually up. Then tend to find a stasis point which doesn’t change much.
The commercial networks right now may play out like this chart, but I think there is something specific and important that is not reflected in this chart and that is the challenge of multi-membership and the proliferation of network alternatives.
Right now, for example, social network sites are hot and have a huge growth. But we are starting to see the fatigue (too many widgets, to many alerts and messages with no granularity to their usefulness or aggregation in ways that makes sense to the individual, my friend just invited me to another network, my “friend” who I don’t really know started spamming me.)
No amount of ongoing management and continual improvements is going to be able to control the impact and draw/drain of the larger market of networks. It can fight against it, but the fact is people are fickle and will move on.
The differentiation will be those sub communities that form and persist. One strategy to explore is how to create the welcoming space for those communities, and expect the number of communities to grow, rather than the size of any one community.
Then you have not one single upward curve, but many that weave into a successful vortex that persists even though MANY people will come and go.
An example of this is the Share Your Story community at http://www.shareyourstory.org
I get a bit concerned about the hyping of community as well. This is more an intuitive than logical data-driven response, but the image above is more hype than reality as it stands on its own. I’d love to see it reframed from a network perspective which I think is both more scalable and sustainable.
Then I tweeted that I thought, out of context, the image was a bit of a hype. Jeremiah then direct-tweeted me to offer more context. I love context. So now I have a copy of the Forrester report to read, thank you, Jeremiah. It is printed out for weekend reading on the sofa. Jeremiah said I could blog about it, although the report itself is proprietary (a paid product of Forrester.) So stay tuned. I think it is important to share what we understand about communities and networks.
D’Arcy Norman, this morning on Twitter. A sure community indicator.
One of the practices that is part of my daily routine in communities and teams which use phone calls for meetings, is to take notes in a chat environment. I am really good at capturing notes so I’m often one of the note takers. I find typing increases my attentiveness and listening. Otherwise I’m prone to multitasking (email, checking twitter, writing blog posts. Should I admit I started writing this post while on a telecon?)
What I’ve noticed is that I’ve started to use the chat as back channel for voicing my own input and thoughts. This is more like the “backchannel” used by techie communities, particularly during face to face events. It is another layer of conversation that enables more than one person to “talk” at the same time. It is also useful in web meetings. Back channel, of course, has it’s risks too — fractured attention and a channel for mocking etc — but it is different from the note taking practice. One is a record, the other is part of the conversation. One represents the voices of others, the other IS the voices.
When I mix the two, I start wondering, am I compromising the note taking with my comments and input? Or am I adding richness and voice to the proceedings? Am I strengthening the conversation by adding text input and not interrupting, or am I undermining the speaker? All these are possible. So how does this inform my choices in my practice?
This duality reminds me of this “two hatted” feeling I get when I am in a facilitator role. I often feel I am not fully devoting myself to facilitation if I put my participant hat on. When I do, I do it explicitly. I am wondering, should I do that when I shift in chat, or does that just add more noise to a fast flowing chat?
What do you think?
Photo by Salvor
