I’m thinking a lot about distributed networks at the moment, decision-making, conversations and how much community ‘platforms’ have moved on.
I’m not sure I even believe in the ‘platform’ concept any more as it so loaded a word with so many centralised implications. As well as this inherited value, so much of our activity is now so widely distributed across the web and physical world that we as individuals can now behave in any way we choose and share our stuff with whichever network we fancy, on our own terms.
The diversity is astounding; which makes me think that any sustainable distributed community support platform isn’t just one thing any more. It’s a ecology of patterns that members experience in different places at different times to achieve different community goals. I’m thinking a lot about Ron Donaldson’s ecology of web2.
When you think about it, this means that any ‘platform’ should be doing more listening than publishing, aggregating and making sense of distributed activity, than telling people how to behave and forcing them to adopt set rules of behaviour in one walled garden.
It’s the patterns that make up the networks and communities that we need to identify, not the technological platforms. And to get to the patterns, we need to develop common languages, which lead to shared mental models of the purpose of the ‘platforms’.
There is a particularly interesting post from George Oates of flickr about some of their community stuff, and this particularly jumped out at me:
Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.
What an interesting thing to say.
In a corporation, or organisation with pre-existing centralised structures there remains some reason for centralised control (largely to the benefit of the organisation).
How about across a huge emergent expanding bottom-up relatively structure-less movement of people?
Thanks Ed, how timely. As you know, I’ve been thinking about membership organisations and the platforms they develop, with tensions around walled gardens, centralised control, often mixed with the exhortation “we wish members would do more for themselves”. Well, they might, if there were fewer rules.
Recently I was impressed by Etienne Wenger’s ideas for social spaces and the social artists who may help create them.
So, wouldn’t it be great if an organisation thought:
How can we help people (e.g. our members) create the cross-platform social spaces for networking, discussion, learning, collaboration that they need, rather than impose our own platform and rules. What can we offer that attracts people to us, and the joined up patterns of spaces we are helping create? What is to be a broker and convenor within and between the spaces? Where does the new value lie?
I see no practical evidence that platforms have moved on in any way that improves deep understanding and collaboration around actions. Much better off we were in 1997 mainly with email
Does this not come back to what the purpose of the platform is? Presumably someone somewhere is responsible for its existence and support and may only be interested in the commercial aspects e.g. cost recovery or revenue generation and will consequently be less interested in the conversations and more interested in the number of users.
if the purpose of the platform is to encourage knowledge flows, efficiency improvements or innovation then it is an incumbent upon the platform owner to ensure the facilities exist to encourage those sort of activities. The rules of engagement should normally be around protecting reputational risk and compliance with any statutory regulations e.g. privacy. It should then be up to the community members to define their own operational charter, which will define the way they work together. If the rules of engagement are too restrictive then quite clearly they will go somewhere else.
I believe it will be the community itself, or certain allocated roles within this community, that will listen to the patterns and encourage common language and shared mental models to emerge. I’ve tended to think this will be a facilitator that takes the lead in this role, but I’m not quite clear whether is the same as the ‘Social Artists’ referred to by Etienne.
I may be in the minority here but I firmly believe that an unfacilitated community is destined to drift aimlessly between social networks, never quite achieving any goals.