Tag: online_community

How would you share your knowledge about online community?

You may have noticed that yet again I failed to post my Monday Funnies Video. Hey, sometimes you just have to wait until inspiration hits. My sister passed along the link to this amazing performance by Anita Renfroe. There are many versions on YouTube, but I picked this one because in the information box there are the lyrics. Take a listen: YouTube – The Mom Song Sung to William Tell Overture with Lyrics

Of course I enjoyed this both as a mom and as a daughter.
Anita nails it. What an act of knowledge sharing!

But the video inspired more.

I have been thinking about how to evoke the history online community as a thread of our current and future practices. My emerging idea is to look at the intertwining between personal stories about online community along with the technology development that has enabled this new form. I’m not so much interested in the precise history, but the intertwining between our desires to connect, our practices and how the technology community has responded to those pushes and pulls. From the early internet connections through BBS and email, to today’s microblogging and social networks. How might this more evocative retelling inspire our next practices and developments? I had initially thought about this in terms of a set of visuals. But after hearing Anita’s paean to a mother’s advice, I’m expanding my possibilities. Yes, I’m probably about to get in even deeper over my head and may capabilities. That’s why I need you.

Stories + Advice + evocative visuals + some sort of performance art. Can I pack that usefully into a 45 minute presentation at Community 2.0? Will it be USEFUL? I figure I’ll start by exploring each of these, then keep what rises to the surface.

I’ve asked you for your stories. (More still appreciated). Now I’d like you to give me any and all of your advice about designing, building, being in online communities. The shorter and pithier the better. I’ll try and do a version of Anita’s song. Can you help me? Post them in the comments or on your blog and put a link back to this post and I’ll find them. I’ll be, as always, in your debt.

Just as inspiration, here are Anita’s lyrics

“The Mom Song”

Get up now
Get up now
Get up out of bed
Wash your face
Brush your teeth
Comb your sleepyhead
Here’s your clothes and your shoes
Hear the words I said
Get up now! Get up and make your bed
Are you hot? Are you cold?
Are you wearing that?
Where’s your books and your lunch and your homework at?
Grab your coat and gloves and your scarf and hat
Don’t forget! You gotta feed the cat
Eat your breakfast, the experts tell us it’s the most important meal of all
Take your vitamins so you will grow up one day to be big and tall
Please remember the orthodontist will be seeing you at 3 today
Don’t forget your piano lesson is this afternoon so you must play
Don’t shovel
Chew slowly
But hurry
The bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside, don’t play rough, will you just play fair?
Be polite, make a friend, don’t forget to share
Work it out, wait your turn, never take a dare
Get along! Don’t make me come down there
Clean your room, fold your clothes, put your stuff away
Make your bed, do it now, do we have all day?
Were you born in a barn? Would you like some hay?
Can you even hear a word I say?
Answer the phone! Get off the phone!
Don’t sit so close, turn it down, no texting at the table
No more computer time tonight!
Your iPod’s my iPod if you don’t listen up
Where are you going and with whom and what time do you think you’re coming home?
Saying thank you, please, excuse me makes you welcome everywhere you roam
You’ll appreciate my wisdom someday when you’re older and you’re grown
Can’t wait till you have a couple little children of your own
You’ll thank me for the counsel I gave you so willingly
But right now I thank you not to roll your eyes at me
Close your mouth when you chew, would appreciate
Take a bite maybe two of the stuff you hate
Use your fork, do not burp or I’ll set you straight
Eat the food I put upon your plate
Get an A, get the door, don’t get smart with me
Get a grip, get in here, I’ll count to three
Get a job, get a life, get a PHD
Get a dose of,
“I don’t care who started it!
You’re grounded until you’re 36”
Get your story straight and tell the truth for once, for heaven’s sake
And if all your friends jumped off a cliff would you jump, too?
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said at least a thousand times before
That you’re too old to act this way
It must be your father’s DNA
Look at me when I am talking
Stand up straighter when you walk
A place for everything and everything must be in place
Stop crying or I’ll give you something real to cry about
Oh!
Brush your teeth, wash your face, put your PJs on
Get in bed, get a hug, say a prayer with mom
Don’t forget, I love you
And tomorrow we will do this all again because a mom’s work never ends
You don’t need the reason why
Because, because, because, because
I said so, I said so, I said so, I said so
I’m the mom, the mom, the mom, the mom, the mom!!
Ta da!!! (less)

Community 2.0 and Las Vegas, Baby

For what it is worth, I hope what happens at Community 2.0 does not STAY in Vegas. 🙂 In May I’ll be speaking about online community history and visuals (really catchy title, eh? I need a title consultant) at Community 2.0. I picked this topic because as Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I were working on our book (yes, it is AT THE EDITORS!!) we noticed this beautiful intertwining between technology development and community – how they have impacted each other. At the same time, you know I’ve become obsessed with the visual and I have been wondering how to express this intertwining in a multimedia way – maybe even almost performance-like. Talk about stepping off a cliff with no parachute. But that’s what makes it fun. Why else take a non-paying speaking gig than to learn with friends, right?

It also is rare that I speak at non-NPO/NGO/EDU events, so this will be fun to step into a different stream and see what happens. It will be a culture shockas well in that I will be coming from a week long gig in Ethiopia. So maybe a wee bit jet lagged as well. I’m coming in a day early (not worth flying home) so if anyone wants to do something low-key, let me know. I have marked Monday the 12th for play and prep.

But wait, there’s more…

I’d also like your help. But first the logistical details.

Conference Information
Now, about the conference (and of course, that discount code I can share with you as a speaker). The conference is May 12-15 at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas, NV. The website is www.iirusa.com/community Your discount option is a 20% discount off the standard price on my behalf. Your personal discount code to share is: SPKRM2005NW. Please pass this along to anyone you know who plans on registering. They can register by calling 888.670.8200, emailing register@iirusa.com or visiting the website www.iirusa.com/community

A Request to You
I’d like to capture a series of written, audio, drawn and/or videoed personal histories about online community. In other words, tell me a story about your participation in online communities. What was your first time? What was the experience that was transformative for you? If you’d like to play with this, email me or leave a comment. My goal is to weave together these stories along with some historical data and trends. I’ll also be capturing personal histories from people AT the conference. If you are going and would like to help with that, I’d LOVE to have you play in this sandbox with me. I’ll buy dinner for the team Monday night, May 12th as my thank you. You would need to know how to either record audio or video interviews, take a good text interview, or draw it. Seriously – even draw it.

Making Sense of Communities and Networks

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.
Forrester Community Image

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.