Social communities

Information is power.

Thus less surprising are the buzz of information and the communication of it. My project here at Stanford is about information and how we can transfer that information from in-the-field to an information database. Initially the project is focused on an open-source news application to be used in emerging democracies. Very few people are reflecting on what this information is and for what purpose it exists? The question “Do we really need all this information?” emerges…

One of the main sources of information today is blogs. The creation of blogs has revolutioned the possibility for the individual to produce information and participate in debates. The question remains: If we are all producing information, who will read it? Who will have the time to read it?

Today there is a need to be constantly up to date of all the discussions. Of course not all information you find out on the web is relevant and you have to find a way to filter through this information noise. Yes, I label it as noise. Why? Look at this analogy. You are in a room with 50 other people. Usually you are only involved in one conversation and not all the conversations at the same time. Today the situation on the web is really like following all the conversations simultaneously, which clearly is a bit schizophrenic.

As more information is produced you will have to filter through it. Today the only available functional filter is really for you to choose which blogs (or feeds) you want to read. Nicholas Carr recently touched this area discussing how many RSS-feeds you can really read per day. He said in his blog The Mainstream Blogosphere: “Some people max out at 5 feeds, some at 50. I’ve even read some people claim they’re topping out at a truly nauseating 200. I currently have 27 feeds, and that’s way too many. I’ve gone from adding to pruning. Most of us will ultimately cut back to a handful of blogs that we read regularly, supplementing them with the odd post from here or there. That’s only natural.”

I totally agree with him.

I have drastically cut down on my selection of blogs and is down below 10 feeds that I check each day. I therefore challenge the thought of everyone having their own blog. The idea of everyone having their voice in the debate is something that is very important, especially in emerging democracies. Group blogs are thus far much more interesting than everyone having their own little space in the cyber, as they also strengthen the community aspect of the blogs.

Blogs are great, but not everyone should have their own.

Social entrepreneurship is basically to create a social impact on different communities, but how are these communities really reacting to entrepreneurial solutions, and especially new technology? For any social enterprise it is crucial to understand the audience and even more important to understand how they will react to exposure to a new technology. I talked to a friend about another thing, and he sent me a link to a manuscript of a speech “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” that Clay Shirky held at Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003.

As intended by pointed out creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet supports lots of communications patterns. Social software may contain point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way patterns, and thus the challenge to create the right structure of the software is huge. A lot of people, such as Dave Weinberger, Ross Mayfield, Tony Perkins, Estee Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky and even the functional web design guru Jacob Nielsen, have been addressing these issues at different angles of attack, but I will here focus on the mentioned speech made by Clay Shirky.

Shirky first start by looking and the psychological nature of individuals in a group, based on a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups”, written in the middle of the last century. A group will strangely enough react to any external force in somewhat mysterious ways. To make a long story short, Shirky summarizes this behaviour:

“He [Bion] said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what’s going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual. “

The nature of any social software relative to the group is further explained by Shirky.

“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.”

The group will self-destruct? Help! Can that really be true? Clay Shirky thinks:

“If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we’re seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do? Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?”

Should we just stop this doomed road of ours then? Of course not. The above posed questions are not that easily answered, yet there must be a way to solve this? Right? Of course again, but Clay Shirky summarizes the challenges in four basic design points. Before moving on to the design points, three relevant issues identified by Shirky have to be accepted whether we like it or not:

1. Technical and social issues can never be fully separated.
2. The “members” of a community are not all the same. As trivial as that might seem it is extremely important, as any attempt to define any social software will fail otherwise.
3. The core group is a group of people that are passionate about the goal of the community and has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

Now it is time to just accept these facts. Done!

We then quickly move on to four crucial points of design of any social software according to Clay Shirky.

1. The user has to feel part of it, has an identity or handle. (Choose the word that feels right to you. The debate about identify has no immediate relevance here.)
2. You have to design a way for there to be members in good standing, that is a reputation or virtual recognition.
3. You need barriers to participation. To be part of the community you have to take action. A complete open community will quickly outscale itself, and destroy itself by the growth of it.
4. Closely connected to the previous point is therefore, that you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. This is crucial part of any social software. Conversations are killed by scale, as they require dense two-way conversations. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

The reader is referred to the manuscript of his speech for more details about these design points. (For the specific problem with scale, look at this article by him.)

What happens if you do not follow the will of the community that is more or less listen to it, so you might as well design the software this way from the beginning. Shirky says: “The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.” The good part is that the group will find a way to fulfil the needs of the group, but the bad thing is that they will do it in a way you did not intend them to.

Compare the solution in which the group is solving this process to strategic management of any new venture, which normally divides that process into four stages: conceptualisation (technology and need identification), pre-venture (technology and commercial pheasability), entrepreneurial and organizatorial. The group will go through the same kind of process to solve these issues. At first they will automatically find the problem (conceptualisation), and they quickly move on to identify the possible solutions within the existing social software (pre-venture). The entrepreneurial part of this is really the users imagination to create these structures with the available tools to find a solution inside the existing social software, and then the organizatorial is the self-assembling part of the group around this new “solution”. Misson accomplished by the community! Sounds fairly simple and neat…

If the group will solve this themselves, why is this bad? Simply because the group should not have to solve this by itself, and even more important, the group might be damaged in the process. In all social software, you have a real community and a virtual community. If the virtual community does not fulfil the needs of the real community, a tension will be created between the virtual and the real community. That tension (like every physical tension for that matter) can produce negative energy on the real community. If you on the other hand match up the needs of the real community with the right solution inside the virtual community you might create a positive energy and thus strengthen the real community by the virtual community. Great, hey? So just do it.

Conclusion
Listen to the users and define their needs, but also realise and bear in mind that exposing them to a solution might change the behaviour. The key here is to interrupt the real social fabric as little as possible, and the change of behaviour of the community will be minimized. By this you are at least increasing your possibilities to success.

I read an article today about teenagers and blogs. In the short article some figures are presented on the differences between the blogging by youths and adults. Only one out of 14 adults is writing blogs, while there is one out of five youths writing. Even more interesting these figures become for the reading of blogs. Furthermore is one out of four adults reading blogs online, but almost four out of ten youths are reading blogs. That is in itself interesting, yet not surprising as youths seems to be more adaptable to new techniques, which another article partly addresses.

There are however another result presented in the article that is more interesting considering there has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere and then especially questions like What is a blog? How should we blog? The nature of impact by blogging has been discussed a lot, and especially the movement of open source journalism have emphasized the political effect of blogging. It however seems like the youths mainly use the blogging to keep in touch with each other and communicate, which might not be that surprising. Even if the social effect is not the dominating part of blogging it surely is a major part of it.

That makes me wonder if it is not so that the majority of the blogs really are “social blogs”, primarily used in the sense of online diaries, and not for the purpose of ‘marketing’ political ideas, at least not directly. Maybe the blogs are more beginning to take the form of small social communities, bond together by the people that reads and discuss blogs. Thus it seems and partly based on the article mentioned, that the blogs are not part of the new corporate blogging sphere nor part of the open source journalism such as Instapundit. That raises a provocative question without any answer from me…

Is the blogosphere really the major ‘threath’ to the Big Media that everybody says it is?

Personally, I would definitely like to, even in the technology intense future, have time to sit back, relax and reflect without the sense of having to be online all the time. What scares me is that I sometimes feel the need to be online all the time, and that even when I am offline, I still am online. What are the reasons by this feeling? I wrote a draft of this blog and then discussed the draft with a friend. She actually made me change the scope of the blog, and the conclusion was that it is not only a technology problem, but also a problem in us.  I will come back to this feeling a bit later in the blog.

Before looking at any solutions to help us relax from the ever so present feeling of being online and always reachable, I will give some background. Recently I wrote a blog about the future design of social software, and those thoughts is emphasized by another blog. The two blogs fairly well summarize the future needs of social software according to me, and concludes that the virtual and the real world is going in different directions and not as a unit. This is emphasized by an article in today’s New York Times by Mark Wallace. This development of virtual community scares at least me. Do we really want to live two separate lifes? One in the real world, the other in the virtual world. Some people have even gone that far that they in principle only live in the virtual world. Clearly the social softwares themselves cannot solve this issue.

This past Monday, Marko Ahtisaari, who is the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia responsible for Strategy and Planning of Design Activities came and gave a speak about the future of our shared cell phone network. He previously worked in Nokia’s Venturing and Corporate Strategy units, where he was responsible for identifying and driving new growth opportunities based on user experience. He had some very interesting new ideas on the development of new products during the seminar. I had the opportunity to in more detail discuss the future of cell phone systems during lunch and the effect of them in and on the society. The seminar was based on his blog,  “Blogging over Las Vegas”, where summarizes parts of the reasons for the remarkable growth of the cell phone industry by: “The primary human benefit driving the growth of the mobile industry was that of social interaction, people connecting with each other. Initially this meant calling people – a familiar activity at the time – but with a new twist: the cord had been cut. Over time this began to also mean sending short text messages… “

By cutting the cord, people would be able to feel more free, but as the web evolved we got more and more restricted or online. I think that cell phones can be used to really make us free from this feeling of being hooked up, and Marko Ahtisaari outlined seven future challenges of our shared mobile future: Reach, Sometimess Off vs. Always On, Hackability, Social Primitives, Openness, Simplicity and Justice. (For a full description of these challenges the reader is referred to his blog.) All of the challenges are very much interesting yet different in their nature, but I will here focus on the Sometimes Off versus Always On and the Social Primitives. How do we create the proper linkage between the virtual community and the real life community? How can we create the right technology solutions so that this is possible? And will this really help us go offline if so just for a moment?

A very appealing thought is to use the cell phone technology. The reasons are simple. The cell phone has, like Marko Ahtisaari says, become a hybrid of a lot of things, and we carry it with us almost all the time. We use the cell phone as a clock, calendar and in some cases even as an email client. Why not use it to help us in our daily social interaction with other people? There are of course dangers with this approach, but I am not talking about putting web browsers on the cell phones to solve this.

People mainly use their cell phones to call their friends and family. Thus we primarily use the phone to call our friends and family. A solution for us to know when a person wants to be offline would be to bring your phonebook and your buddy list in the instant messaging software or the social community closer. By that you can in your cell phone specify if you are available or not. I like the idea very much, even though it is not a perfect solution. What we really need to do is to realise that we have to give ourselves the possibility to go offline. Thus I really think that one of the more important parts of the speech is really how we can face the challenge, citing Marko Ahtisaari: “How do we design to be sometimes off in a world that is itself always on?”

A rather surprising answer: Use cell phones.