Tryangulation

Exploring online communities

I've been invited to contribute to a project to redesign an international online community, and that has got me looking into different kinds of successful communities and how they got that way. Two conferences with an emphasis on community building just wrapped up in the US, and Common Craft posted a nice summary of the lessons learned. The social scientist in me was gratified at reading remarks like "community planning is a farce" (because communities take on a life of their own) and "don't start with the technology" (because you need to set your goals first). Read the rest of Common Craft's post here.

One of the conferences I mentioned was the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas. A few of the first resources to come out look interesting. One is Mukund Mohan's ten step checklist for starting your community. Among the suggestions are (2) understand why you want to have a community: is it a platform for your ideas, or for members to share among one another? (6) identify your influencers, the first few that will really help you get started. Click here to see the Community 2.0 conference blog that has several more participant contributions and links.

The other conference I referred to was the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. It appears that a lot of the presentations will eventually end up on line, so I'll keep an eye on it. I was particularly interested in a blog post by Kathy Sierra reflecting on the keynote speech she gave at SXSW. On her blog she points out the irony that, even with all the technology that enables us to meet, chat, video conference and share online, we still want to go to conferences and meet up face to face.

Communication technology can make it easier to move large amounts of information around, but it's still not the best way to help people connect emotionally, to inspire, and to create a feeling of belonging together. After reading the links about building online communities, I suggest you read Kathy's post here which includes a list of suggestions for building some face-to-face time into your online community.

To put this in the context of education and learning, I'd say there's definitely a place for classroom blogs, podcasts, video conferences, and anything else that will broaden the opportunities for students to interact with others far beyond the school walls, but there's no replacement for an inspiring, challenging teacher at your side.

Add notes to del.icio.us without typing

As a result of sharing del.icio.us with nearly 150 people at school in the last year, I have a growing fan base and lots of networked buddies who are passing bookmarks around. Awesome!

While I'm really pleased to see so many happy new users of del.icio.us, I'd like to gently point out the usefulness of the notes box when you post a new bookmark. You can type anything you want in this box to help you remember why you saved the book (or to give your friends a hint when you share bookmarks). 

If you don't like typing notes, just do this:

1. Before tagging a website, first use the mouse pointer to select some text.
2. Tag the page as you usually do.
3. When the posting box opens, the highlighted text is already pasted into the note box!

Presto! Notes without typing!

New site for finding the best feeds

I've written before how feed aggregators like Bloglines are very useful for collecting and managing feed subscriptions, and how this can be an important tool for research on the web. For an example you can look at my public feeds --that is, the subscriptions that I allow others to see-- at this link.

Right now there are about 83,000 people like me who have public subscriptions on Bloglines, and about 35% of these people (like me) organize their subscriptions into topical folders, and (like me) average about 20 feeds per folder. 

Now the clever people at the University of Maryland have created Feeds That Matter. FTM interprets all that information about nearly 3 million individual feed subscriptions to generate lists of the most popular feeds in the most popular categories. If you are researching one of these categories, you can quickly find the most reputable bloggers for that category and find information and resources that have already been filtered by like minded people.

I did a spot check of the education category, and found that I am already subscribed to 6 of the top 20; not bad. But if I want to branch out into a new area, this is one of the first sites I'll visit.

Knowledge is messy

We had an interesting conversation today following up on the work we started last week, about managing information and knowledge for diverse groups and purposes.  As we were wrapping up I was reminded that managing knowledge is more organic and more potentially chaotic than managing information. A definition of knowledge that has helped me states that knowledge is the application of information, meaning that information doesn't become knowledge until you do something with it (develop a skill, make a decision, solve a problem, teach, etc.). A definition like that implies that knowledge doesn't exist apart from "knowers".

Because knowledge happens in human organizations, it is prone to more organic, and even anthropomorphic, metaphors. This is illustrated in a nice little article by Verna Allee, Knowledge and self-organization. Allee restates some qualities of knowledge and is a little heavy on the anthropomorphic (knowledge "is messy," "seeks community," "travels," and so on). Because knowledge is so closely associated to the individuals and groups who share it, it is much less easily differentiated than information from human mental processes like emotions, opinions, intuition, memory and worldview, as well as with other "knowledges" residing in those particular individuals or groups. Separate bits of information can be kept on a piece of paper; knowledge cannot.

So knowledge is messy. It's hard to keep knowledge in separate, distinct categories, so it's also hard to manage very strictly the acquisition, utilization and transfer of knowledge. Allee writes that "highly adaptable systems look sloppy. But the survival rate of diverse, decentralized systems is higher. This means we can waste resources and energy trying to control knowledge processes too tightly."  Hence the problem with overly elegant and rational user interfaces that have not taken sufficient consideration of how people interact "rationally" but with large doses of intuition and emotion.

Perhaps that's also a factor in how people learn more effectively and work more creatively if they utilize more varied mental and psychomotor processes: we create a richer environment in which that knowledge can live.

Follow the link for the article: Knowledge and Self-Organization by Verna Allee