Monday, December 03, 2007
Distribution
Ed Mitchell talks about 3 types of online community. Moving from centralised to decentralised to distributed basically means moving from managing via boundaries to managing via attractors. The centralised community is held together by common protocols whereas the distributed community is held together by social objects. Neither is better than the other but those with a preference for control will feel more comfortable with the centralised model. For the distributed model to work, you need a way of tagging (or literally branding) your social objects and making their movements between members at least partially visible. Ed says: The key is aggregation at the core. I'd qualify this by saying: the key is easily visible and malleable social objects (text, photos, audio, links, maps, etc). Aggregation is one way of achieving that but not the only way...
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3 comments:
Absolutely valid and highly timely feedback; Ta.
I am working with iShed in Bristol on a regional innovation/commissioning project which is approximately based around this model, staring with a wordpress config, mailman list and a bunch of third party bits for video etc.
http://www.mediasandbox.co.uk/
While the wordpress config is a central space from which to share the stories of those commissioned as they do their R&D, we will use any third party app that the 'commissionees' choose to tell their stories with (mindmap, video, blog post, etc.) - so I guess you could refer to those as the 'social objects' - yes absolutely. Good clarity well appreciated...
My question:
"Ed says: The key is aggregation at the core. I'd qualify this by saying: the key is easily visible and malleable social objects (text, photos, audio, links, maps, etc). Aggregation is one way of achieving that but not the only way..."
It's good that you spotted this as I am still unsure of the word aggregation and what *exactly* I mean as I flip flop around the borders of socio-technical design stuff and technical stuff.
What other way might you be referring to?
What other
Ed - To me aggregation means pulling everything together and presenting via a RSS feed or a portal. Another alternative is users being able to find things by search (e.g. findable because an item has a specific tag) or through hyperlinking between people and stuff (I see that Pete is into the same things as I am. I see Amy is a friend of Pete's and find that she is also into the same stuff and then I find her material).
OK - that is what I think too -
1. agregation of materials centrally
2. find-a-bility of materials via tag-based search
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