Tue, Oct 12, 2004
TARDIS, Collective Memory, and Meetings
#
GerryGleason taught me a new word today:
TARDIS,
which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. It was used
in DoctorWho for time and space travel. It looks like a phone booth
on the outside, but it's got infinite space on the inside. It sounded
to me like infinite closet space, a place where you might store all of
your belongings and never look at them again. (2G6)
My hard disk sometimes feels like a TARDIS, the Internet even moreso.
In order to have CollectiveMemory, we
need to
have better indexing of this infinite closet space. And search
engines are not the end all and be all of information organization.
We need to constantly refactor and distill information, a manual
process that helps learning and also helps us find things later. (2G7)
With this in mind, here are some guidelines for high-performance
meetings: (2G8)
- Always scribe in real-time on a SharedDisplay. After-the-fact
minutes are better than nothing, but they're not better than
real-time distillations. It helps focus conversation, and it gives
you an artifact to which you can refer later. These days, when I
attend gatherings where no one is at the whiteboard, I start to
squirm. (2G9)
- There needs to be a medium for building on relationships you make at
a meeting. This could be as involved as a mailing list, and it
could be as loose as an attendee list with contact information. (2GA)
/collaboration |
Posted at 11:00am
E-Advocacy Brown Bag Discussion
#
EmyTseng invited me and about 10 others to join her at the
CommunityTechnologyFoundation in SanFrancisco for a brown bag
discussion of e-advocacy, especially relating to underserved
communities. The folks I meet through Emy are always interesting,
and I especially appreciated the ethnic diversity of those attending
this meeting. I don't get too caught up with race when it comes to my
work, but I'm definitely conscious of the fact that most of the folks
in this space are white men. (2FS)
Some quick takeaways and thoughts: (2FT)
- Advocacy tools need better multilingual support. It's not enough
to localize tools; you also have to make them usable. (2FU)
- There's certainly a lot of room for folks in the e-advocacy space
to collaborate. But the real problem is not choosing tools, but
knowing what online capabilities exist and how they can be
integrated into an overall advocacy strategy. (2FV)
- Many small to midsize nonprofits struggle simply to keep their
computers running and their email working. Transitioning to using
more sophisticated tools is a big, big step. (2FW)
- Some people brought up issues regarding in-fighting within
coalitions over who owns or controls mailing lists.
IdentityCommons offers an interesting technical solution to this
problem, in that it gives control to the individual. (2FX)
- Several folks talked about the need for techies to avoid jargon and
speak in a language these organizations understand. I disagree.
SharedLanguage is not one over the other; it's different
communities developing SharedUnderstanding. There's no one-to-one
translation between technical and nontechnical concepts. Techies
have to work to understand users, but users also have to work to
understand technology. Only then does SharedLanguage emerge and
coevolution becomes possible. (2FY)
/events |
Posted at 2:37am
Online Community Summit: Friday's Sessions
#
Notable talks and comments at last Friday's sessions at the
OnlineCommunitySummit: (2F4)
- SorenKaplan described iCohere's work with WorldVision, a billion
dollar nonprofit with 20,000 employees worldwide. There was an
online collaborative process leading up to a conference, using
iCohere's software. (2F5)
- DaveDeForest discussed the online communities at the MotleyFool.
There's a 40:1 read-write ratio on their bulletin boards. The
Fool's strategy for monetizing the communities was to get the
readers to pay, and to comp the writers. The comping process is
transparent in that participants know that some people are being
comped, but the actual process for comping people is not concrete.
When the Fool went to a pay model, it had a 90 percent attrition
rate. 73 percent of its community participants are also likely to
perform another transaction on the Fool. (2F6)
- MarkWilliams discussed Apple's support forums. Right now, he's
handling everything -- management, development, etc. His managers
tell him that the objective is to reduce phone volume, but he
sees the two audiences as separate. RobertLabatt noted that Apple
does a great job of converging threads on its support forums. (2F7)
- AnneMcKay posed the following theory, citing last year's
TheAtlanticMonthly article on
introversion:
You need extroverts for a successful online community. I would
argue the opposite, although I have no numbers to back me up. We
had an interesting
discussion about this very topic in the CollaborationCollaboratory
about a year ago. It would be interesting to do Myers-Briggs
analysis on online communities in a future case study. (2F8)
- SteveDeMello told stories of "bad behavior" on some of ezboard's
online communities, and noted that hosts should only deal with
black-and-white issues. The best pressure is peer pressure.
GailWilliams agreed with Steve's assessments, and noted that while
paid communities helped filter out trolls, they didn't eliminate
them entirely. (2F9)
- During a breakout session on metrics, Gail suggested that our
biggest problem is understanding and serving lurkers. (See my
previous
entries
on lurkers.) (2FA)
- TomCoates informed folks on the IRC BackChannel about
Wiki proxy, a cool
little proxy that automatically links terms to
Wikipedia. (2FB)
Finally, ReidHoffman and RossMayfield gave a quick walkthrough of
SocialSoftware. I was amazed at the blank stares in the room during
this talk. These folks seemed to have some awareness of
SocialSoftware, but certainly not a deep understanding. The previous
day, MarcSmith said that threaded forums aren't going away. I agree,
but the common wisdom in the group seemed to be that threaded forums
tend to be the end-all and be-all of online communities. I strongly
disagree with this assessment. Dave asked what Wikis offered that
threaded forums do not. That question missed the point: It doesn't
have to be one over the other. (Ross enjoys needling folks by
claiming that email and threaded forums are dead, but I don't think he
actually believes it.) My response to Dave was that there's great
potential for integrating Wikis and threaded forums (as I and others
do with blogs). (2FC)
/talks |
Posted at 2:13am
Online Community Summit: DeanSpace
#
ZackRosen, ZephyrTeachout, NiccoMele, key contributors to
HowardDean's presidential campaign, spoke about their online efforts
last Thursday at the OnlineCommunitySummit. Some key points: (2EP)
- As Dean volunteers started using MeetUp regularly, the campaign
started hosting regular conference calls with MeetUp leaders as a
way of disseminating information through its communities. (2EQ)
- One of the early grassroots activities was distributing flyers as
PDF. Nicco recognized this and decided to distribute official
flyers as PDF also. Once this happened, the grassroots flyers
largely dried up. (2ER)
- Related to the flyers issue was the vetting process. Initially,
the campaign reviewed contributed flyers, but on the advice of its
lawyers, it decided not to officially approve of any outside work
to avoid liability. This was not a problem, and according to
Zephyr, the community tended to be more risk-averse than the
campaign. After all, they wanted to elect Dean, not hurt his
chances. (2ES)
- The cross-pollination between the different mediums was relatively
low. In other words, folks who blogged didn't necessarily
participate in MeetUp. (2ET)
- Replacing volunteer organizers with paid organizers tended to kill
communities, regardless of how good the people were. (2EU)
The theme of this talk was that the campaign was reactive, not
proactive. It tended to watch things happen and to try and
facilitate the good things, rather than start things themselves. (2EV)
My takeaway from the talk: You can't organize self-organization.
There are things that you can do to catalyze it, but in the end, if
the circumstances aren't right, it's not going to happen. What you
can do is get out of the way when it does happen. This is an
important lesson for folks trying to replicate the success of the Dean
campaign and other self-organization success stories -- OpenSource,
MoveOn, IndyMedia, etc. (2EW)
/talks |
Posted at 1:37am
Online Community Summit: Marc Smith
#
I spent last Thursday and Friday at the OnlineCommunitySummit in
Sonoma, California. ForumOne, which organizes the event, brought
together a fantastic group of folks -- about 60 people, including
corporate and grassroot community facilitators, foundations, venture
capitalists, consultants, and researchers. ZackRosen joked that he
wanted to come to this gathering, because he always sees the same
people at the other events he attends, and he didn't recognize anybody
at this one. I saw several familiar faces -- Zack, TonyChristopher
(who informed me of the event), JerryMichalski, JanHauser, PaulKing,
ThomasKriese, and others -- and recognized the names of several other
attendees, but most of the group were new to me. (2E1)
I enjoyed meeting and talking with MarcSmith, whose work I've blogged
on multiple
occasions,
and who kicked off the day by giving a fantastic overview of the work
he's doing at Microsoft. Marc is doing very, very good stuff, and I'm
not just saying that because it overlaps with some of our own work and
thinking. (2E2)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 1:14am
Wed, Oct 06, 2004
Blue Oxen and the Commons
#
There's a fascinating
discussion going on in the GivingSpace
collaboratory about the commons,
instigated by PhilCubeta. Since that discussion is really focused on
the OmidyarNetwork, I thought I'd throw in my two cents by describing
how I see the BlueOxenCollaboratories fitting into this discussion. (2DK)
See more....
/blueoxen |
Posted at 4:45pm
Mon, Oct 04, 2004
My New Nephew
#
My older sister, SujeanKim, and her husband, IsaacWatras, had their
first child today, a baby boy: ElliottMarcellusWatras. Welcome to
this world, Elliott. Tell your parents I was just kidding about not
visiting until you were potty-trained, and that I'll see you and them
as soon as I can. (2C3)
/personal |
Posted at 8:05pm
