Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Well, Bruce was asking about people in different rings "...what have they
got in common with one another? And does it make them like the folks in 
that same category in other online social networks?"

Looking at individuals, the story of one person in one or more gatherings 
is pretty much the "common sense" of it all, right?  My small anecdotal 
contribution is there to suggest that being a wallflower in one place 
does not mean you won't be in the thick of the hive mind in a other 
social/community grouping.  It could be that you're an outsider everywhere
if you participate lightly somewhere, but my theory is that that is not 
a safe assumption. I'm glad people are doing this research.    
  

    

(end of illustration. Blue dot is moving away from the yolk, back to his
white mascon)
  

    
I think there's a limit to the granularity of detail in a social
network visualization; like any statistical evaluation, looking at the
high level can miss much meaningful detail. It's also unclear how
"real" is the data without more about the data gathering process. How
do you define who's a lurker? Do they always lurk, or is that just a
stage in their participation? Could it be that they're not lurking, but
ignoring? I.e. they joined the community, took a look around, and
wandered off? If it's an open community, there may be no way to tell
who's lurking and who's gone.  In summary, I think we have to be very
critical in our assessment of statistical claims and high-level
assumptions about online behavior.
  

    
Sure!  It's like being interested in learnign about a city. Various 
kinds of maps are good tools for getting information, and so is 
a sit-down conversation with a hand full of diverse residents. The 
approaches offer different useful clues.
  

    
And different "noise" and misleading clues, too.
  

    
Jon: Yes! We need comparative data across communities, individual
demographic information, and longitudinal data. Then, we'll be much better
positioned.

It's frustrating to think that there *are* entities who have some such info,
but that it's proprietary.

And I'm with you, Gail, on the "noise" and misleading clues. Anthropologists
have told me they needed to learn to be wary of relying on the information
provided by their very first informant in a community. Why? Not because of
small sample, but because that person is probably an outlier and not
representative of the group.
  

    
I'd really like to see studies of communities of practice that are
especially successful, and analyses of the customs and behaviors that
make for that success. When organizations are effective, what makes
them so? How organized must they be to get work done?

Here on the WELL, all we generally require is good conversation. We
consider this a community, or community of communities, but we don't
have to work toward goals or deliver projects. If you were building a
platform that was more goal-oriented, what would you include?
  

    
How organized they need to be changes over time, I think.  It has been
a while since I've read organizational theory, but I remember that
there was no one-size-fits-all model (except for what works for all
relationships, good communication).  It depends on goals, dynamics
within the system, etc.
  

    

I agree with Maria on that.  I think we see that here within The WELL too.
We get goal-directed topics (planning a picnic such as in <party.> for
example) and some goal-oriented private conferences too, for private
projects, support or business conversations.

For me, working here, my big agenda is "let it continue." However, for goals,
the agenda is ooften to complete something and tick it off a list.  Study
for a class and then take the test and scatter.  Plan a wedding and marry. 
Put together a business plan and get investors.  The next steps may not
happen with the same cast of characters in the room, so the goal is a 
waypoint, and a transition point.

So my first question is always about the imagined duration of a project.
Sometimes we find amazing people and we stick way longer than we expected...
but when there's a goal, there's usually some kind of time increment.
Making that easy to grasp and agree upon may really help.  So that could 
become part of a design pattern for goal-oriented endeavors, in my opinion:
"You have  X  Days or  Y  Percent of the project allotment remaining"

Visibility of who's active might also be useful in that scenario. 
Jon, saying "analyses of the customs and behaviors" is very astute. It 
doesn't have to be built in to be what is taking effect, and that takes it
out of dseign and back into how we are all trying to collude to 
make community interactions, often despite designs we encounter.
  

    
(Sorry for being away so long -- serial family colds plus bad
travel...)

Gail, I think the other characteristic in your observation, besides
duration, is focus of outcome. Sometimes you want to have divergent
work, starting with a few ideas and ending with lots of them, or
starting with a few vague intuitions and ending up with serious ans
sharp alternatives. Tools like Caucus and mailing lists are great for
that sort of divergence, as they always allow for the introduction of
new ideas, and because disagreement propels conversation better than
agreement. 

Sometimes you cant convergence -- for people to agree on something,
and then do something about it. Tools to arrange face-to-face meetings,
and systems that capture a sense of the group, whether in loose ways
like Wikipedia, or tight ways, like a source code repository in an Open
Source project, can produce that outcome.

The critical mistake, in my view, is deploying convergent tools for
divergent problems and v-v. If you want to have an open-ended
discussion, using a wiki will tend to leave the conversation inert,
while if you want to get people to do something, a mailing list will
tend to dissipate the "do" energy in the usual back-and-forth of
conversation.
  

    
That is very interesting.

Is there just this one dimension of desired outcome, or are there
other types of goal and corresponding optimal tools?
  

    
There are lots of intersections between tool and goal -- for instance,
synchrony, participation, and scale form a "Pick 2" dilemma. 

If you want everyone to have a shared sense arising from interaction,
you can do it with synchronous form like a chat room, but only with a
small group, or with a synchronous and large group, but only if most
people are in listen-only mode, or with a large group of participants,
but only asynchronously.

What *hasn't* been done yet is a real decision tree for these kinds of
choices. I have a feeling that it hasn't happened b/c its impossible,
in that social complexity swamps simple binary forking, so we're left
with intuitions abut what will and won't work. A few observations are
simple and general (as with the one here) but most are complex and
context-dependant.
  

    
I've never gotten why some people prefer IM over email; perhaps
IM is better for some goal that I never care about and don't see.
  

    
I love IM.  Email is for an exchange of info.  IM is a conversation. 
There are things that I can write that are hard to express in a normal
converasation.  I think IM can often be deeper than a regular
conversation.
  

    

There are several components that make IM feel different than email.  One is
a temporal distinction, again. Rapid response changes the flow.  

I think another reason people prefer one or the other has to do with 
the volume of mail one gets.  Even if there's little spam per se, 
the mix of correspondants in a typical mailbox are likely to be less 
intimate than the list of instant message buddies.  Email evolving first 
and being more exploited for commerce is part of the context for 
these kinds of preferences.  So that makes it partly cultural, even 
absent other considerations like twitter integration, degree of adoption 
of a short punchy message writing style, etc.
  

    

Clay, your previous point is very useful.  We see people at The WELL
using forum software for a lot of things it was never intended to 
facilitate. Social roles, with nicknames such as "energy center" have 
been used to describe behaviors that compensate for the non-wikiesque 
nature of a simple flowing conversation.  Somebody steps in and 
summarizes, reads back, cultivates the goal.  (Typically this is 
a practice used for something like arranging an event, as i mentioned.)     
 
I think that the open mic conversation format does lead to a scattering 
and drifting of ideas, unless all or most participants are very clear 
on just what they want to use the tools to do.

I'm struck by your statement that:
>  What *hasn't* been done yet is a real decision tree for these kinds of
>  choices. I have a feeling that it hasn't happened b/c its impossible,
>  in that social complexity swamps simple binary forking, so we're left
>  with intuitions about what will and won't work.

So of course I want to know if you know of faux decision trees or 
half-assed attempts at this stuff that take it any further than the 
list vs wiki split.  
  

    
As part of our consulting methodology, my partner and I are working on
something similar to the "decision tree," focused on best strategic
uses of specific social technologies. But it wouldn't work to put that
in front of someone and expect them to understand it. It's more of a
guideline.

Of course, you shouldn't consider the tools in isolation. As Nancy
White and I discussed long ago, it's more powerful to take a
"multimodal" approach. An example that I used to reference in my talks
was the "happening" format (Ross Mayfield's term) that Joi Ito et al
used to create the "Emergent Democracy" paper in (I think) 2003. We
combined conference call with chat room and wiki. There were two levels
of converation - the conference call, which was relatively restricted
bandwidth (one person talking at a time), and the chat, which was many
people having multiple conversations at once, as a backchannel for the
call. Some were capturing notes in the wiki, then Joi wrote the summary
paper as a Word document that he uploaded to Quicktopic for sharing
(similar functionality to Google docs). A later iteration was wikified
on Joi's wiki, and there were several changes and comments there. I
took that version and edited it for the version that appeared in the
book _Extreme Democracy_. The paper itself is just one manifestation of
a knowledge process. I think this process would fall into the category
of "capturing the sense of the group," and I think we were closer to
the real process of producing knowledge, and though Joi was listed as
author of the paper, there was more transparency into the group process
behind the author (which is usually there, but seldom visible).

Clay talks about using social tools to converge on a decision, and I
think it's interesting to observe where tools fail. For instance I've
used Timebridge to schedule meetings - it's a tool that allows you to
offer several meeting times and see which works best for all
participants, as each identifies good and best times from among those
offered.  I've seen groups that absolutely could not converge on a
workable time for everyone, so we had to abandon the tool and mandatge
a meeting time. 
  

    <scribbled by vassilio>
  

    

In regard to #67, I kind of like the  "multimodal" approach you 
mention, though at times it is just too easy to miss something.  I think 
a group still needs an information wrangler or energy center person(s) 
to make a multimodal collage work smoothly.

That person doesn't need systems powers, just insight into the value of
summarizing and feeding back, and a sense of permission to behave that 
way.

Honoring, promoting and assisting people who can do centering and 
recapping is an undervalued communications strategy, seems to me.  Most 
likely I undervalue those who are champions at that myself.