Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I feel like I'm hacking my way through this Well system, trying to
figure out what works and how.  Trying to reference a previous post has
been a bit of a mystery so far.  Copying from Jon's post (and
attemtping to refer to it) re Jon's question:
http://www.well.com/testing/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/386/Nancy-White-John-D-Smi
th-and-Eti-page01.html#post47


I actually was thinking about the polarities as I woke up from my
first good night's sleep in a while.  I don't know about "drive
communities" necessarily.  I think the polarities are useful tools to
think about community experience.

What I woke up thinking about was a session with did for Jerry
Michalski's Yi-tan series (See:
http://coburnventures.com/wordpress/?p=122 and
http://yitantechcall.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/yi-tan-tech-call-274-digital-hab
itats/
).  I noticed how the group was so drawn to talk about specific tools.
 That's what we geeks love to do.  And I noticed that by talking about
tools we tend to drop a historical perspective.  After all, part of
our religion is that tools improve and the latest is probably the best
and most certainly the coolest.

And there are many other reasons that make it easy to ignore how
things play out in time. And I think we all have a strong tendency to
plan for some imagined "steady state".  But as I observe myself and
others doing tech stewardship work, it's all about improv and about
taking incremental steps forward.  A sense of timing is HUGELY
important.

So one of the most important things that the polarities do is focus
our attention on timing and alternation and the historical evolution of
a community's habitat (or configuration).  I don't know that we had
that as an INTENTION (I know I certainly didn't) but that's one
important bit of work that they do.  (I know that's a little "meta"
before diving in to what they are, but I want to just start by
reporting on my thoughts from waking up this morning before I forget
them.)
  

    
Just to clarify, I think that my comment was not that the polarities
drive community, but that they're a factor in driving communities to
adopt technology. I think what you're saying is that they're more of a
consideration than a factor?
  

    
re: 51, we usually just refer to previous posts in the same topic by
number, but it could also be referred to as <inkwell.vue.386.51>
  

    
Jon, yeah. They are a way to look at our communities, give us language
for that, and, at the core, remind us that communities are living,
breathing things. It is not about resolving the polarities, but living
into them in a way that fits for where we are now and where we are
heading. 

For a bit about polarities from my perspective, there are some slides
which can't totally stand alone, but give a skim of Polarities.
http://www.slideshare.net/choconancy/digital-habitats-nov09-frameworks

Brian, thanks for bringing in more details about PLATO.   I wish we
had fact checked from **you** rather than from various writings we
delved into for that chapter. We also interviewed David early on in the
project (as he has been an influence on me over the years. ) 

We can post some corrections/errata on the blog. Thank goodness for
book blogs. 
  

    
Clarifying what we're talking about, the relevant polarities are:

Togetherness <-------------> Separateness
Interacting/participation <---------------> Publishing/reification
Individual <-----------------> Group

My understanding was that understanding where a community sits on each
o the polarities drives or informs technology selection. 

Nancy, I really do like your observation about technologies that are
"designed for groups, experienced as individuals." 

Getting a set of individuals in sync with a more or less common
understanding, coordinating and orchestrating action in that context,
is just a huge challenge. It's a communication challenge: we can work
hard at making communication clear within a group, but the challenge is
in having clear interpretation. I can say something to some group of a
dozen people, and get twelve different interpretations, possibly
contradictory.  Regardless which technologies you choose for group
communication, there's the social aspect of facilitating enough common
understanding that interpretations will be generally in sync. To what
extent do technology stewards work beyond technology, focusing on
engagement, facilitation, synchronization? 
  

    
Jon, first I'd have to say that we don't always have to get people in
sync. The polarities help us understand, for example, where we are in
togetherness and separateness. If we feel we want to move more together
or less, then we think about activities, processes and technology to
help us modulate in the chosen direction. But as you note, this is not
a PURELY tech decision. Thus this fun space between tech
leadership/stewardship and more general tech/community leadership and
facilitation. 

Let's say we want more togetherness. For example, our community of
practice on chocolate has been in existence for 3 years, we've had the
conversation about milk, dark and white, we have critiqued every brand,
talked about the politics of labor in the chocolate market. 

When newbies come in, we are annoyed with the same old conversations.
So the community decides it wants a place for newbies to ease in, get a
sense of the history, etc. (Like the Well space for newcomers where
they can belong for their first year.) This community decides it wants
a monthly web meeting for this "space" and organizes a DimDim site,
identifies some hosts, sets a calendar up for the dates, and another
group creates a "hit list of top topics from the community" as a
potential discussion starter. You can see there were tech tasks,but
they were just a part of the picture. Now, did the tech steward LEAD
this process? Maybe, maybe not. So we need to think of the role in the
larger context of the community, what other people are doing, what
roles are explicit or implied. Habitat. Ecosystem...
  

    
I realize reading your response that the idea of "syncing" can be
complex. I was thinking about getting people in sync with a common
understanding, what a colleague of mine calls "same page results." If
everybody's on the same page, there may still be differences of
perspective and differences of opinion, so they might not be in sync -
in agreement - on particular decisions or course of action. 

And then, more relevant to the tech steward, there's the question of
getting the group in sync about using a specific technology. 

Did you do much research into the nature and definition of stewardship
as you prepared the book? I've had some interesting conversations with
Charles Herrman, who has this definition: "Stewardship is the exercise
of a trust wherein a custodial function not only fulfills an
obligation but whose perfection to the requisites of fitness speaks to
the steward’s dedication to the principle upon which the trust has been
founded."
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1307172_code510356.pdf?abstrac
tid=1307172&mirid=1)
Charles talks a lot about the office and rseponsibility of
stewardship. The article I linked, which contains that definition, is
on corporate stewardship, a little different from the context we're
talking about, but interesting nonetheless.
  

    
Two paths, starting with synching

I think some groups (such as teams) need more syncing. Open, wider
ranging networks may need very little beyond the point of connection. I
think that was more what I was talking about. So for the current
econsultation I'm working on, the "same page" we need is a)
understanding of the task asked of participants to review something and
b) ability of participants to use the chosen technologies ENOUGH that
they can do #1. To fullfill that we, as tech stewards and facilitators
should have prepared the tools well, prepared simple briefing materials
(expecting few to read them) and then provide rapid, personal support
as the event itself is short. 

Happily, they don't have to come to consensus! (She says, sighing a
huge sigh of relief!) 

For KM4Dev, the international dev/knowledge sharing community, the
challenge is to give enough "line of sight" to the technology AND
participation options. As a network, affiliation is VERY light to
heavy, participation is from none, to core volunteer, but in fact with
very little structure. The biggest complaint we hear is "I didn't know
about X option!!" Too many channels? Not so much "togetherness?"
Unclear domain? Or simply rich with possibility? I'd have to let the
members judge that. ;-)

As to definition of the word stewardship - oh boy, we had lots of
conversations, searching, etc. It is amazing how many people have a
negative view of the word "steward" (go back to it's meaning in Feudal
societies!). Others associate it wit fluffy bunny new age. Others see
it as a quite straightforward, sensible word. 

I took a quick peek at the article you linked to. I"m going to read
the rest of it now!
  

    
When you think about it, getting on the same page is something of a
miracle.  A lot of time has been spent and ink spilt figuring out how
to do that in face-to-face meetings and teams.  And to learn how to do
it in distributed settings, you have to look over the shoulder of
people who know how to do it (or who've managed to do it "without
knowing how").  And looking over someone's shoulder in distributed
settings is itself a bit of an achievement. 

It seems to me that your econsultation is aiming to meet people where
they're at, which is a very labor-intensive process.  

It strikes me that we don't see difference or distance as a resource
until we're sufficiently close (on the same page or synced up) to put
difference to work.  That's a great example of what I was saying about
how these polarities force us to take a step back from the tools and
think about how processes play out in time.
  

    
Yes.  Many groups have minor or major splits ongoing within them and
have sub-groups who have no motivation to be completely in sync with
the larger group. Helping with tools probably means helping navigate
hidden group power structures now and then!

Here's a side question -- I may not formulate this elegantly, so
everybody have at it if it needs to be refined --  I'm involved in a
few online groups that have a Community of Practice reason for being --
but I also am involved with The WELL and Table Talk, which are
communities that perhaps include some interlinked communities of
practice, but seem to go beyond their practices such as apple users or
parenting to a broader identity goal, a practice of being a community
member.  Is that something that you find as an emerging phenomenon
around various CoP groups, or do you see it as unrelated and perhaps
unusual?  What's your take on communities that do not have one core
practice and purpose, except for being community members at large?
  

    
John, I found this statement intriguing: "It strikes me that we don't
see difference or distance as a resource until we're sufficiently close
(on the same page or synced up) to put difference to work." Can you
give an example or two of "putting difference to work"? 
  

    
Gail, I think the focus in CoPs is learning. There are tons of types
of communities -- but with the use of online tools that allow fuzzy
boundaries or as John put it recently elsewhere, a broad periphery, it
seems to be a natural progression that the interlink, some overlap or
even blend into a larger whole. It has been interesting to see how, for
example, many non profits are giving up hosting their online
communities on their own websites and are using Facebook or NING, and
thus getting access to the "friends" of their members or fans, and to
the adjacent "communities." 

This asks us to rethink and probably redefine what we mean by
community. And be careful if you get me going on this. ;-)
  

    
Although, that trend towards Ning and Facebook is what I was talking about 
last week. It also reflects, at least in my own mind, that it is a LOT to 
demand of the members of a CoP (which often is not a "community" in most 
general senses of the word) to learn a unique system and track unique 
login/password info - and for some purposes, that is no longer necessary. 
It is certainly common for people to have Facebook accounts, and I am 
probably typical is belonging to several Ning communities, as well. 

Having said that, one feature that is true of all recent community tools 
that I have used is that much that we have learned about how to facilitate 
online conversation has disappeared. I think of how many neat features of 
WebCrossing or Caucus are utterly missing from Ning and Facebook and it is 
a shame. We =do= get, in return, lots of ways to socially network and 
share presence, but it's as though the new technologies were mostly 
disruptive--nobody looked back and said, "what makes a forum work 
well"--the concept was simply re-invented and is slowly returning to bare 
bones utility.
  

    
Exactly.  When people outside this community ask "could The WELL run
on a contemporary platform?" my first question is about the basic
features of keeping track of people and what one has already read.
Those are indeed less common on the really big platforms. It is
extraordinary that those things have not been brought along to the new
technologies.

(On the other hand, perhaps it is intentional:  in some drop-in,
drive-by comment contexts perhaps nobody wants people to gain long term
awareness of each other, with conversations that go forever, feuds,
alliances, and all kinds of collusion. Fun for the participants perhaps
but maybe not part of the distractable tidbit-paced ad-friendly
revenue model of the platform owner.)
  

    
I think it's an example of what happens when the focus of attention
slips away from 'the interaction between practice and tools' to just
'tools.'

> This asks us to rethink and probably redefine what we mean by
> community. And be careful if you get me going on this. ;-)

Yes, please.

I'm partial to the notion that, if the ancient nomadic peoples of the
earth hadn't settled down, we wouldn't be having all this confusion
over concepts of 'community' and 'place.'
  

    
Well, we can add "conversation" to that confusion as well. <Ari>'s
observation about the lack of facilitation reflects for me a shift of
the types of activities people are engaged in. And more indepth
conversation doesn't seem to be a prominent feature. It is more light
interchanges, intersections of content and commentary. 

I'm not sure that alone can sustain a community of practice. So for
me, my experience these days is of more networks interested in shared
domains, and less, indepth CoPs. 

The types of tools that have currency seem to have a causal role in
this. (Not the only cause!) 

Now <clm>, I'd love to hear more of what you think the world would
look like if we stayed nomadic. Because I think we are now often
digitally nomadic. I'm intrigued, but can't quite get my head around it
yet. Say more please?
  

    
Well, in early times, I imagine the survival of nomadic groups must
have depended on a high degree of clarity about the practices that
sustained them. Group learning would be key. And the language impulse
would give it a name.

But language would never trick the nomads into thinking that these
activities depended on a particular place -- because *nothing*
they did depended on a specific place. Rather, they would be more
attuned to patterns or configurations, it seems to me.
  

    
Patterns. YES. I'm going to chew on that for a bit (with some
chocolate, of course)

The key here is focus and persistence, no?

Are we focused and persistent now?
  

    
Hmm, are we focused and persistent now? I have a lot of distraction
from the interfaces that emphasize tiny unrelated events in a mingled
stream. Random collage is not a productive environment for me.  

I can see your point, Craig.  That way the community who passed
through the oasis would never be confused with those who happened to
live permanently in proximity to the oasis.  That ambiguity about the
idea of community would be removed.  The other difference might be that
the nomadic group would also be a CoP in learning and perfecting an
obvious group practice of travel. Plus the nomadic group would be, most
likely, a much smaller group, more unified by common adversity. One
set of differences out of many, I'd guess.

So yes, they would notice configurations and patterns in their group.

To Nancy's earlier musing, are we more like nomads and less settled
because of our technologies? I wonder whether we want to be, and what
being like nomads really means in modern life.
  

    
<40><choco>

I like your Nigeria story very much, Nancy. My primary interest is
international / trans-national Internet applications, and your story
makes many of the terms and concepts here "sound" trans-national --
i.e. you don't necessarily have to be in Dallas to do it -- you said,

> "Did you know that to associate a non gmail account with a Google
group in Nigeria requires a mobile phone verification process, while it
requires only an email response in the US. Did I know that? No. I
found out when I had to troubleshoot with a scientist from Tanzania who
was in Nigeria when he tried to log in. This is tech stewardship from
both the tech and community perspective because in the course of our
Skype call we got to know each other and I could encourage his
participation.  And of course, that introduces Skype as a non-central
part of our tool configuration, along with email. Plus I talk to the
core team on the phone. Getting complicated, eh? Oh, and we are using
video hosted on YouTube. Natch."

-- much food for thought, about international / trans-national, in
every line there... sounds like pre-internetworking device juggling...

Any other such trans-national war stories, from you or others here?
Any thoughts about human languages and cultural differences etc. as
tools, or as yet-unsolved barriers? 

R&D now occupies -- 24/7 & globally -- Digital Habitats, as I
understand your term, as does online gaming. Sometimes language and
cultural are barriers, in those, and sometimes they're not: global
science speaks English, currently, the way air pilots do -- the latter
bunch literally "airport english" -- online gaming, though, develops
techniques to accommodate vast varieties of linguistic preference and
cultural difference. I've been waiting a while to see simultaneous
translation utilities facilitate trans-national communities of
practice, but the software I've seen for that still is pretty clunky. 

Per Wikipedia and other examples there are vast arrays of parallel
discussions going on now online, all over the planet, excitedly
discussing identical topics and topic threads, but unaware of one
another and with nothing to connect them. The separation tends to be
simply linguistic: some brave technology stewards have tried
"multi-lingual", but that usually founders -- altho this very day
Google & China are tugging at one another over "multi-cultural"
differences, too -- it would be nice to get some of these techniques on
board with specifically trans-national apps.
  

    
Jack slipped in. Responding first to Nancy:

> The key here is focus and persistence, no?

Yes, I think those are key. But I found myself asking 'focus and
persistence' about what?  This brings up what John posted above
in #59:

> ...these polarities force us to take a step back from the tools and
> think about how processes play out in time.

And it seems to me that the kind of learning required to recognize
(let alone master) a set of social processes is quite different than
the kind of learning that leads to an understanding and mastery of
computer-based tools. (Tacit vs explicit?)

I think one of the things the three of you are saying in "Digital
Habitats" is that both ways of learning are necessary.
  

    
Both ways of learning are necessary, and part of stewardship is
ensuring and supporting both. 

Getting back to the discussion of current, common social platforms and
now they're less supportive of sustained conversation, it's been
interesting to follow the evolution of Twitter and engage with the
significant number of people whose experience of social software really
began there. One thing you see them doing is trying to fashion ways to
have sustained conversations in an environment that was built for
random short messaging, which I (and I see Gail) refer to as drive-by
conversation. Twitter chats would work so much better as realtime chats
or asynchronous forums. Why don't people go there? Gail said something
about contemporary technologies - I think forums and chats are
considered old school, "Web 1.0" technologies, and disregarded, even
though there's a clear desire to have sustained coherent conversation
among, for instance, the various ad hoc communities that are emerging
on Twitter, tied together by hashtags. I mentioned earlier the example
of the Sunday #blogchat, which I found hard to follow because of the
volume of comments. I had also joined a community managers' chat some
time ago that moved to FriendFeed with the idea that it would be more
manageable there, but the conversations were still fragmented and hard
to follow. 

I suggested earlier that, rather than move to something like a linear
asynchronous conferencing environment like the WELL, users might
instead "mutate" and adapt to the more fragmented environments, e.g.
getting better and better at bringing order to the relative chaos of
the twitterstream.

Nancy and John, have you paid attention to communities of practice
that form on Twitter? Are you finding any of the existing CoPs you work
with gravitating to that platform? 
  

    
First, Jack and language/culture and "linguistic separation."

Oh yeah, this is very real and persistent in my work. KM4Dev, for
example, has two sister communities SAGE in French and SIWA in Spanish
and right now it is the multilingual members who do or do not create
the bridge. And it is not just language, but the time and attention to
follow more than one of the language groups and weave things together.
I suspect this is something we in KM4Dev really need to pay more
attention to. Our meetings are primarily in English with some "whisper
translation" and ad hoc break outs. But it is a challenge. 

I have facilitated a number of multilingual online groups where we've
done everything from paid translation (costly), to voluntary
translation (quality varies, follow through) to simply embedding Google
Translate tools into our wikis. Surprisingly, the latter is better
than I thought. I wrote this up once on my blog... I'll try and dig up
the url. (must be somewhere in this batch!
http://www.fullcirc.com/category/language/) The wiki for one
consultation is here:
http://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/Gender+Equity+and+Women%27s+Rights

You might also enjoy Beverly Trayner's paper, 

Trayner, B. (2004) “Babel in the international café”. In Communities
and Technologies, Huysman, M. Wenger, E. Wulf, V. (eds) Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers. Available for download from this
page.http://iisi.de/114.0.html

Obviously there is more than technology at play. But while you can get
platforms with multilingual interfaces, few facilitate organizing
multi lingual resources and conversations. Again, from Bev, there is
http://shirikisha.com/ and the use of this platform in an EU project
where there are some great strides in this area. We should invite them
in to share how CHALLENGING this is. 

Automatic translation works at a light level, not for indepth
conversation (ha, I wonder if there are twitter translators? I assume
there are)

It is the community building, the shared practices, the weaving across
languages though - those messy human practices - that matter the most.
The closest I've come is to think of the domain as a network umbrella
and the language groups as communities within the network. Language
binds and separates us!
  

    
Small follow up on diversity. In my online work, professional culture
is more often a larger barrier than national culture. Interesting, eh?
  

    
Both ways of learning are necessary? Craig and Jon - YES YES YES! I'm
sure John will chime in more on this as our learnmeister!

On to <jonl>s questions! (you have good ones)

First, regarding the "in depth" conversation. I hate to say it, but we
also have to ask ourselves, those of us who are deeply practiced and
used to asynchronous discussion, are we the ones who are out in left
field or not? I have colleagues who say they are getting that deep
connection in the "loosely joined" floating conversations. It started
across blog comments, now FB, Twitter, etc. I don't think FourSquare
can claim deep group engagement in conversation, but heck, are we the
ones who can't see it? I feel compelled to keep asking myself the
question. No answer at the moment. 

Now, you asked

>Nancy and John, have you paid attention to communities of practice
that form on Twitter? Are you finding any of the existing CoPs you
work with gravitating to that platform? 

Speaking for myself, I have seen some very clear CoPs emerge around
hashtags and shared interest and yes, their conversations are
"straddling" as John likes to say, beyond Twitter. The #Kmers have
created their own website. The #LRNCHAT folks are pretty darn
intertwingled across many platforms. 

What I sense is there is less of a demand for coherence and shared
experience and more emphasis on access to the diversity of the larger,
less connected network. THIS is a shift in many ways. From the
polarities perspective, togetherness is less important in these groups.
Facilitating diverse individual participation (mostly through the
openness of the technology) is a dominant theme right now.

What I wonder is if this is a "swing of the pendulum" and people will
pull back and look for more coherence. Or if the early adopters, those
comfortable dipping in and out, who can more easily sense patters will
keep this mode and draw away from the rest?