Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Networking - past, present and future

October 2, 2008 – 6:32 pm

This is a write up of a presentation I gave about networking at The Knowledge and Innovation Network’s gathering in March 2008.

I am suddenly inspired to write this up after enjoying Ron Donaldson’s excellent ecological explanation of web2 and Dominic Campbell’s admirable work for Barnet Council at Unicom’s social tools conference this week (great write ups of the sessions from Suw on Corante).

Three pieces came together for me at the conference today:

• Judith Lewis from iLevel said “… the internet taught me to be an extrovert…”
• Ron Donaldson said “… the early adopters patterned our direction…” (when describing how all these www2 tools have been adopted and the patterns of their use laid out)
• earlier conversations with Dominic Campbell (who told me to write this up in April) about twitter and personalities and public declarations as how we may be experiencing “declarative immaturity”

This is a piece about networking: past, present, and future.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

It’s meant to be delivered with a mix of semi-serious bafflement about these www2 tools which I use all the time (and the stupid things I have done with them) combined with moderate rage about how we are in the middle of some briliant changes but also a huge amount of hype and evangelism which can alienate the very people we want to enthuse.

Without a doubt, the comedy angle of it will be lost in my rambling verbiage write up, so remember it’s half curmudgeonly, half comedic observation. And I will go on a plain English course, soon.

The current setting is an industry with software providers and agencies primarily interested in shifting product or selling adverts on web services with some brilliant editorial and specific technical affordances designed to encourage ‘growth’.

Compering this situation are somewhat evangelist early adopters encouraging certain patterns of use that they have found suits them personally (see Crossing the Chasm for the risks of this in marketing speak).

On top of that is our great societal paradigm of ‘Growth’ (which was built on unfeasible debt, astoundingly greedy bonuses and the gradual transfer of state monies to the private sector).

On the growth theme, we’re also seeing a cultural tendency in these softwares and practices towards celebrating quantity in our lives as we count and publicly display our ‘value’ in terms of numbers of friends, comments on our blogs, size of our name in our friends’ tag clouds, recommendations on linkedin etc.

It’s like being a teenager obssessed with how many friends you have, but it all being laid open for all to see. Yes you can ignore it, but it’s tough.

I’m not saying that people don’t value their online interactions qualitatively, but too often I have seen inferences that people are better than others or more qualified for work because of how many contacts they have.

Think of the old addage ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ but on gnarly stimulants. People do this for themselves - they ‘game’ these social networks to see how many contacts they can get; groups are set up with the sole purpose of being the ‘biggest’ group.

The message is written (not so) implicitly all over the networking technology: ‘more friends is better’.

Dunbar’s theory on the practicalities of this aside, this all makes me feel rather uncomfortable and un-loved (ah poor me) when I foolishly compare myself to others. For some time I thought it was just me being so neurotic in a curmudgeonly response to fads, but further to sharing these feelings it seems others feel the same way.

In parallel to this, we are learning what is public, private, personal and political, and what to say in public with our social tools.

I have made some amazingly stupid (but harmless) blunders on almost every social tool; but it’s a new world and thus it’s OK to do stupid things as long as we learn from them. The boundaries between these four are blurring rapidly and different people’s ethics come into play.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

For example, an indignant and possibly righteously furious ex-employee of an organisation might be tempted to tell the world how they have been badly handled; whether this is ‘professional’ or ‘public’ or not is up for debate, let alone the discovery that the world doesn’t really like hearing this sort of thing; it discomforts people to hear of others misfortune and, frankly they would rather not know. Either way, airing your wounded pride may not necessarily be the best thing.

I am well aware that I could simply not use all this groovy new social networking stuff (as I have been told when I am also being called a neurotic curmudgeon), but I like it and I range from helpless declarer of things or total recluse.

If ‘networking is the future’, along with transparency and open-ness as we are repeatedly told, then more ‘quality’ needs to go into the design of the products and the messages sent out by early adopters.

We are also in the middle of a huge wave of new bottom-up, open, cheap, inclusive, participatory, engaging conferences, driven by the people for the people.

I’m a big fan of them. I design and run them. I’m one of the early adopter evangelist types in this instance (my blended facilitation work uses online social networking before and after the conference too), dragging people out from the quiet corners, forcing them to collaborate, waving my horn around.

Although I keenly try not terrorise the shy people, and try to include interventions that benefit all types of person. Ahem.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

Likewise, network and community facilitators may make efforts to ensure that the ‘power laws of personality’ (whereby popular confident people get more popular and thus are identified as more important etc.) are handled sensitively in order to help groups achieve their goals by including everyone’s offerings. A similar subject is seen at a recent debate around Open Space facilitation for example.

In the land of online communities, the KPIs are still focused largely on numbers of people, numbers of comments, ratio of readers to commenters etc. In the ‘knowledge’ world, assessing ‘knowledge’ transfer or transformation still eludes beleaguered knowledge management professionals, so the temptation is to place value on quantity (docs, contacts etc.). Hmm…

People who don’t make endless comments in online communities are called ‘lurkers’, and community managers are told to drag them out into the open and ‘convert’ them - success being seen as them making comments, which can be counted and presented in a fancy report to management.

It’s wrapped up in nice talk about engagement, but if not handled sensitively, rather whiffs of centralised community dictatorship. I’ve been there and know that when you obssess over this as the facilitator, you make a rod for your own back when you have other routes to ’success’.

For example, when we decided to publish the first community book on KnowledgeBoard, we found that many of the people who stepped forward to voluntarily write whole chapters (not ‘metoo’ comments in a forum or empty nice comments to blogs) had not made any comments onsite ever - it just wasn’t their thing.

Who are we to (albeit non-directly) tell people to behave in a way that suits us?

(See the presentation on slideshare)

We are in a time when it is considered very important to behave in a highly extroverted manner with a public display of how many people we know.

What about the shy people? Those less confident than the highly literate www2-ers? They who aren’t attracted to shiney new gadgets? Those who just don’t get ‘technology’. How about the busy people? Those who feel uncomfortable in big groups? People with no small talk?

It breaks my heart that people using social networking technology can be made to ‘feel small’ by a friend of theirs’ tag cloud (and before you snort derisively, they do). That is not good design; that is blunt and myopic. And the business logic behind it? If you convince people they have to make more friends, they will see more pages, which means more advertising.

Do we all have to learn to be extroverted? That would be a new tyranny - the tyranny of ’social’.

I referred to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to express the point about how we are all different. I know it attracts disparate opinions but dont’ get hung up on it.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

My point being that networks, communities, events, pubs, offices, squats etc. are composed of people who are different. Being that they are different, I bet that they would want different approaches to their social interactions, not this new tyranny.

Odds on, some of them won’t be good at having millions of friends, and might prefer to have deeper relationships with fewer people. Yes, they can still use the technology, but all the messages in and around it are implicitly discouraging this, which makes them feel bad.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to feed the cats and worry that I’m publicly declaring nonsense…

So - some ideas about the future of networking:

• People will tire of the relentless networking ‘growth’ paradigm just as most bloggers eventually tire of relentless blogging (links from one google search ‘taking a break from blogging), and others learn to turn their mobile phones off
• We’ll start seeing the networkers being network-ed out and taking a break and telling us how great occasional solitude is.
• The software providers will adjust their packages’ design to afford deeper relationships between users
• ‘Networking’ will move from ‘growth’ to take more purposeful ‘knowledge-y’ stuff into account, and services like twine will focus on groups congregating around activities and objects rather than random chat and endless expansion, while other services like the Cynefin software will finally bring qualitative analysis to the fore
• ‘Unconferences‘ will increasingly focus on specific issues and become more ‘constructivist‘
• Community and network facilitators will learn to know their members better and focus on network optimisation based on qualitative interaction analysis rather than ‘number of members’
• ‘Engagement planning’ will consider people in their context long before processes and technology appear on the agenda
• Those who say that ‘Community’ has gone from being local to being interest-based and global will find that the ‘local’never went away, it just didn’t need any sell-able technology (beyond door knockers on your neighbours’ doors)