Category: networks

Back when there was “social” in the software…

Picture of the head of a dog (Australian shepherd?) looking at you.
Alan Levine’s blog avatar

Alan Levine noted that he is just past his blogaversary and linked to a post of his from 2006 that I just love. It is a story of how he created an artifact from a presentation I gave at NorthernVoice (a BLOGGING conference, can you IMAGINE that?? We were crazy kids back in the day!). What was magical about this story is how Alan’s recording of my talk rippled across our respective networks and how people added to it and amplified it. (Bev, I loved your notes. Still do! Nick, all these years you mashed it up and now retirement is on the horizon! Who would have guessed!) I think this is when I really became a fan of CogDog, aka, Alan.

A picture of a woman in 2006 with shoulder length curly born hair glasses, holding two bags of Dove Dark chocolates. Photo by Alan Levine.
Photo by Alan Levine of a much younger, shaggier me, sharing chocolate

Alan’s post also has me looking back at years and years of Flickr event albums. Mama mia, there are stories. I often think I have few stories to tell. My problem is simply that I just don’t practice telling them! A little nostalgia… And boy, I was a lot younger back then! And with a lot longer hair. Still sharing the same Dove Dark chocolates though!

Edit a few minutes later: I’m listening to the audio. Still relevant.

From the Blog Archives: Dave Pollard’s Model of Identity and Community

Dave’s thinking and writing is pretty damned evergreen. I’ll leave this here for your consideration!

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A Model of Identity and Community « how to save the world.

So as Aaron explains, where there are strong ‘overlaps’ between these aspects of self among members of a group, that group will emerge to be a community (note the names applied to these four types of community below are mine, not Aaron’s):

  • If the overlap is mainly common interests, it will emerge as a Community of Interest. Learning and recreational communities are often of this type.

  • If the overlap is mainly common capacities, it will emerge as a Community of Practice. Co-workers, collaborators and alumni are often of this type.

  • If the overlap is mainly common intent, it will emerge as a Movement. Project teams, ecovillages and activist groups are often of this type.

  • If the overlap is mainly common identity, it will emerge as a Tribe. Partnerships, love/family relationships, gangs and cohabitants are often of this type.

From the Archives: The modules in our networks

From the archives – I can’t figure out why I never posted this one. Here it is, as it was drafted in 2013. (Yes, I’m up to 2013!)

Jessica Lipnack blogged about a National Geographic article on networks that really caught my eye. The Parts of Life – Phenomena: The Loom.

Jessica wrote:

Carl Zimmer’s National Geographic article, “The Parts of Life,” merits reading — and rereading. The structure of networks, meaning their level of complexity, is difficult to understand but Zimmer moves carefully to lay out an experiment conducted by Jeff Clune (University of Wyoming), Jean-Baptiste Mouret (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris), and Hod Lipson (Cornell University). If I’ve got this right, their experiments indicated that “minimally-linked networks spontaneously produce[s] modules.”

From there I hopped to the National Geographic article.  I was hoping it was referencing social networks, but it was natural, biological networks. But the ideas provoked some reflection.

Jessica also reminded me about a paper she was part of, Organizing on the Edge of Chaos. That old magnetic radar turned on again thinking “this will be helpful later this month!” Thanks, Jessica!

Community vs. Network – P2P Foundation

From the Drafts: something I wrote about community vs network a zillion dog years ago that showed up on the Peer to Peer Foundation wiki. Still works, but there needs to be an update. How would you describe the differences?

Screen shot of the entry on community vs network on the P2PFWiki

“A community is a bounded group of people who care about something together and interact around that issue over time.

A group of people getting together once may have a fantastic interaction and may learn a lot from each other. But unless they reconvene and join together again as an online group online or whatever, they’re not a community. They’re a group of people who had a fantastic experience together.

One of the things about the behavior of community is we give up a little bit of me, on the service of the “we“.

Identity it’s not just “me“, it’s “we“.

And in some communities that’s a lot… in a cult it’s all “we“. But in many of the communities in my life, I am willing to give up some of the things I need for the greater good of the community, because of the value that the community has to me.

A network are bunches of people with overlapping and intersecting interests.

You may be interested in milk chocolate, I’m interested in dark chocolate. I hate white chocolate but you may have a friend who’s interested in white chocolate and more of the network of chocolate. That’s OK, but we don’t have to give up our love of dark chocolate or white chocolate to be in that network. There is a tolerance for much more variability.

If the white chocolate people start blocking, we just go some place else. We don’t need to hang out with the white chocolate people. You can route around it.

Therefore the boundaries are always shifting. You can work around blockages, and it really drives from the idea of the individual. Whether you call self-interest or enlightened self-interest, the reciprocity is not necessarily one-to-one. You give something, you get something back, but it’s not necessarily equal.

You don’t owe me a favor. We owe the network a favor. If you think from an altruistic standpoint.

There’s very different things you can do in that community context versus the network context.

These new technologies, I feel are really strong around network context. And then the fun thing is communities fall out of networks. people discover each other and grow closer and then they form that bond, that continuity over time and become communities.

When the communities explode, they can go back out into the network, and still be connected but without maybe all that “we“. “I’m done with “we”, I need to go back out into the me!“. But there’s still a connection.”

via Community vs. Network – P2P Foundation.

Community is not a one shot deal

Trees, standing togetherI found another almost intact unpublished post from 2008. It still resonates for me. For you?

Will Richardson sent out a tweet today noting the admissions page of the College of the Atlantic. This line caught my eye. (Alas, dead link… this is what happens when you resurrect a 13 year old blog draft. I can’t find the text on their site  now..)

Community isn’t a one-shot deal; it’s at the heart of daily life here.

Amen! Community is fabric, not container. It is, to use a word I love, quotidian. Peter Block (see this blog post) talks about successful communities being “slow, small and underfunded.” So then what does this mean in terms of networks? Are they a one shot deal? Fast? Certainly large is a property of many of the successful networks I’m a part of. (I’ll leave the funding issue alone today!)

I keep thinking every day about what makes community different from network.  Just when I think I have it figured out, my logic falls apart, even when I try to squirrel out of it and say “this is all a continuum and of course, context matters.” Argggg.

This weekend I was introduced to Blip.fm – a network of people sharing links to music they love, Twitter style. (Update – it is now more of a way to be an internet based DJ, so it evolved a bit.) I have also been playing Amy Jo Kim and Shufflebrain’s “Photograb” puzzles in Facebook. (I don’t think these exist anymore either!)  There is something about both of these networks that strike a “community chord” in me. Part of it is that both are well designed with game dynamics in mind, something Amy Jo has written about. Awards, “props” and various forms that reify participation and support reciprocity. I liken it to addiction to chocolate. 🙂 There is something you want more of.  That is the gaming property that draws us back.  But that addiction is not the “community-like” property of either of these sites that I’m sensing.

Is there a community property to Blip.fm and Photograb? I think so. But let me step back a bit. And, true to form, ramble. Yes, I’m thinking out loud, so don’t sink the following in concrete. Make it better by commenting!

My personal experience and definition of community is a group of people who care about something in common, and who interact with and have some sort of relationship with each other over time. Community has some boundary, however fuzzy and ineffable. It has interactions that are in some degree or other shared amongst all or most of the members. Things overlap. The boundary is a core part of the identity of a community and members are willing to have some degree of collective, not just individual, identity.

Networks are, by contrasts, collections of relationships (represented by nodes) that are not equal nor reciprocal over the network and where interests are overlapping, not necessarily congruent. Individual identity has primacy over network identity (if, in fact, any network identity is explicitly expressed.) Network relationships are defined by the nodes, not the boundaries of the network –if there are even boundaries. For example, membership in Blip.fm is a boundary, but not one that an individual can really fathom in terms of relationships because, come on, we don’t have “relationships” with thousands of people. Which begs the definition of relationship, eh?

In my experience, we form relationships in communities based on the person first, then their role and participation in the community. In networks we often form connections based on the content another person adds to the network. A puzzle on Photograb. A great tune on Blip.fm. We then nurture that connection and, if we like what we see, we may choose to activate that connection into a relationship. So trust, if I may use that word, is based on artifacts not personal relationships, at least at the start.

Given enough overlapping relationship, a community may form within that network. That’s why I think networks are so powerful as community incubators. This is a far more sustainable and scalable community formation path than someone saying “we need a community on X topic and I’m going to build it.”

Building implies a space. Community, remember, is fabric. Or ecosystem. It needs place, but it is not place itself. It needs time. It needs more than a container. But I’m getting off track, yet again. Sigh.

So are networks one shot deals? Often, yes. If we don’t get sufficient value out of a connection, we move on. If the content provided by the network doesn’t add value, we move on. The cost of sampling is not too high and the risk of disappointing or souring a relationship with another network member is low.

But networks are not by default one shot deals. If so, then what causes us to persevere in our networks? To stay connected? To create the possibility of community emergence?

Back to my thought about the possibility of “community-likeness” of Blip.fm and Photograb. Two things were in mind before I started playing with Photograb and Blip. That was value and relationship. Value is what we get out of something we participate in. You learn something. Have fun. Get work done. Relationship is the ongoing interaction we have with other individuals. Networks give us connections so we can create/find/nurture sets of connections that have short or long term value.

But it dawned on me today that, for me, a third reason cropped up today. Beauty. Or maybe pleasure is the word. In the case of Blip.FM and Photograb, both bring me non-text experiences that give me visual and aural pleasure. I’m smiling and grooving now to the music on Blip.fm and am truly appreciative of the individuals who took the time to share what they love and fill my little office with music. I’m madly giving them “electronic props” on the system to express my appreciation. (Nice design, Blip.fm!)

I’m taken back to the same feeling when I share a communal meal or a walk in a beautiful place with members of my communities.

The shared experience of beauty. In both communities and networks.

I’m gobsmacked I had not noticed this before.

But then again, community is not a one shot deal. Networks don’t have to be either. Through perseverance, I keep learning something. Ah, now there is another property or value provided by both networks and communities — learning.