Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

There is some confusion about what ‘social networks’ and ‘communities’ are, and where they differ. To complicate this, I have heard people relating the different words to different technical platforms differently, if you know what I mean. So here is a very high level attempt at explaining it.

Socially speaking:

Social networks are maps of inter-connected nodes, centred on individuals. That’s it; they are maps of opportunity and inter-connectedness, based around a person. How many ‘friends’ you have is an explicit indicator of influence. People collect friends much as my nephew Zach collects football memorabilia; some people game the network to see how many friends you can get, but there isn’t strictly a purpose to this networking, nor is there a ‘knowledge’ element to this networking.

Communities occur when groups of people get together to achieve a common goal, share a common purpose, behaviours, or rewards. Communities have shared values and decision-making processes. Communities are places where the networking is focused on ‘knowledge’ – sharing, transforming – learning as a social process.

Therefore social networks can provide the groundrock for communities to form around points of interest and concern. Your social network is the people around you, the community is when you get together to achieve something communally.

Technically speaking:

Social Networks offer individuals virtual tools to link their distributed activities in one place, network with eachother and share stuff with no associated cause/rationale beyond ‘social networking’.

Community platforms are focused on communal activities dedicated to consensual action or knowledge transformation around a specific topic/issue/campaign. The groups function in Facebook is a start towards community technology (although it is weakened by its lack of alerts and inability to see group members’ profiles unless they are ‘friends’), while the rest is social networking.

Relating technology elements to social models:

It is easy to confuse the words we use for social models with technology words (e.g. forum). This can lead to greater confusion down the line. One of the lessons learnt from working with The CILIP communities team was that we should have established a glossary at the beginning so we all knew exactly what we meant when we used words like forum/CoP/Community etc.

A ‘forum’ (technical: bulletin board variant) can be used for community purposes or not, as can a blog, a twitter account, bookmarking, flickr, youtube.

A ‘forum’ (social: common ground for discussion) implies common space and related social mechanisms like guidelines, processes etc., which maps to a ‘forum’ (technical), while a blog (technical) doesn’t neccesarily map so well to this social model.

This is because, generally, blogs are rooted in individual publishing, where the blog owner has the ultimate right to do anything they like; it’s their turf. There are great examples of bloggers who use their blogs as communal spaces for shared thought and knowledge transformation; David Snowden, JP Rangaswami, Steve Bridger or David Wilcox (to point to a few excellent heavyweight examples which I recommend you read anyway), but these are in the minority. Generally, blogs can be seen as personal spaces where the control is in the hands of the owner.

We might see ‘communal’ type behaviours emerging across blogs, particularly after the Kathy Sierra incident earlier in 2007 which lead to Tim O’Reilly proposing a ‘code of conduct’ for bloggers to subscribe to and promote. This code of conduct is effectively a set of community behavioural guidelines for a widely distribtued community. Here there are:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments
4. Ignore the trolls
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person
(Tim O’Reilly’s proposed code of blogger conduct)

These guidelines are very similar to those you would find on any managed centralised community space. They are about keeping good behaviour without stifling debate (a notoriously tricky balance).

With regard to the Social Network sites:

Social network tools are here to stay, but they will increasingly afford ‘Community’ with more communal functionality. It is quite possible that, in the words of Emma Monk (a fellow emint member) there will be a divergence between Social Network platforms that encourage more ‘communal’ activity and those that are keener on the ‘networking gaming’ style:

The ones which feel their userbase are achievement driven
may well branch off down a gaming route where they start introducing more things for users to achieve than sheer number of friends. Others who feel their userbase want more meaningful ways to interact may well start to introduce more ways for those with shared interests to communicate; forums, blogs etc.
(Emma Monk in emint discussion)

The ‘community in a box’ software tools will suffer as the social network platforms sharpen up their community offerings.

This may be better for individuals as they no longer have to remember their passwords and sign into all the different communities they want to be a part of; the social networks model lets us sign in to one platform, once, and reach all our communities (I have this with all the google groups I facilitate, and the groups in Facebook reflect this too).

Logging into all the different locked down (registration required) communities with different logins will fade away (via the social network platforms’ open-ness and OpenID).

Communities will become more inclusive than exclusive, and increasingly distributed; they will have outposts in the different social networks and third party applications like flickr and youtube. People will thus be able to choose the tools that suit their preferred style of interaction, and interact with communities on that basis (e.g. I want to share my photos with this community, and some bookmarks with that community).

We explored this with Amnesty’s Make Some Noise movement but it was still a fledgeling concept. You can see it in full action with newer campaigning communities like Unsubscribe, which has outposts in all the major social networks like Facebook, and third party applications like flickr. They are using the distributed community model (social) across different platforms (technical) to build a community.

This approach from the community builders allows me to behave in the way I want to in my spaces on my terms, while sharing the things I want to share with different communities, rather than fitting into a behavioural box defined by the technology choice.

This does not mean the social guidelines don’t exist though – they are now more distributed.

In the big picture, the traditional ‘forum’ (technical) will become a smaller part of a larger mix of individual tools with ‘social affordances’ – those which can serve my needs and those of distributed communities.

Forums are wonderful things; they inspire serendipitous moments, collective space theory, but combining them with a communal grouping or aggregation of blog posts, related to a shared bookmark tag, flickr group and youtube channel enables huge power from a bunch of people interacting with the tools they want to, rather than being forced to use one platform with a login, that demands 100% of members’ attention.

It will be interesting to see if this affects accepted participation ratios of communities: perhaps one reason for the 1,9,90% rule is that lots of people want to share, but on their terms, not those dictated by techology. Perhaps it’s about behaviour and personality too, but I diverge; we will definitely see a new way of measuring social cohesion in communities though.

This will throw up a whole new range of faciliation techniques and a new technology learning curve for members, but it will be for their benefit as the technical skills they will learn can be re-used for other communities. They won’t have to learn diufferent platforms’ quirks for different communities.

It won’t weaken the best thing about Community, which is that it means something to people as a group as well as individuals. Community aspires to common goals and shared ownership of problems, successes and decisions; it makes us less selfish by our association, and hence awareness of the holistic nature of the world, and more aware of those around us (without going too Sangha on the situation, but I am seeing the growth of this approach in local NGOs and social enterprises in Bristol).

A Social Network isn’t geared this way; it’s about how many people you know and the opportunities and influence that affords to you.

And that’s fine; communities rise out of this opportunity; communities will be more prolific because we are all closer to eachother.

The trick will be to keep the community stuff powerful and purposeful, in an era when networks are increasingly seen as more groovy.