communities & networks

Nancy White & Tony Karrer have put together the Comunities & Networks Connection. A vast content hub of good writing by cool people - many of whom you will already be familiar with but probably some new ones too.

Share the blogging lurve...

enemy public?

There's this interesting discussion going on around this post by Mark Pollard. This is topic that deserves a full post and some no-holds-barred discussion. Bring it on.



1. What makes a bunch of people a community?

"Community" is one of those words that gets used a lot to refer to many different things. Artists, nurses, hip hop fans, people living in Marrickville, people aged over 65, people who buy a certain brand of bike. We use it because it's handy shorthand and it's nice way of referring to people. "Community" is so much more pleasant that "rabble" or conspiracy".

This lexical laxness is all very well but it starts getting a bit tricky when we have to define what community is in the abstract. Especially what is and what is not a community. Having a list of specifications for what makes a community or not is all very well (and I've got a few lying around if people are interested) but I've come to the conclusion that it's rarely helpful. The definition of community is fuzzy round the edges (as membership of communities often is - but that's post for another day). For every totalizing claim you can make about communities, an exception can be found.

You have a bunch of people who share something. The question is not: "are they a community?", the question is instead: "is what they share sufficient for them to start interacting?" and then the interesting stuff really starts....

2. Identity Parade

The above was just a preamble to the main point of this post. Shawn talks about the mark of a community of practice being members willing to spontaneously identify themselves as members of that community. I am a artist, nurse, hip hop fan, Marrickville dweller, aged over 65, brand x bike owner. This is a very useful corrective to the desire of some institutions to impose the community label on others but I think that we need to drill down into this identity thing a bit deeper.

Mark states that "the pull of identity is strong" and he's right. But sometimes we resist that pull. Many professional communities insist that members use their real full names. One such online community like that ran a Carnival for a week - where the rules were turned upside down - people were actively discouraged from posting under their real names and several people took the opportunity to create multiple identities for themselves. There was some mischief and bad behaviour - but a noticeable increase in activity.

In general in many social groups, authenticity is valued and people prefer to keep a relatively stable online identity. Gavin makes the point that communities are about belonging. To which I would retort that many communities are but at an individual level you can participate in a community and not feel that you belong and at a group level there are communities that do not prize belonging. Gav might respond by saying that his definition of community requires belonging. To which I would say, sure it does - but what about these associations and social groups that don't fit his criteria?

Human beings crave public acknowledgement and social belonging but also require privacy and anonymity. These paradoxical desires makes (un)managing comunities painful & unpredictable. For example, in one internal corporate email list group I helped with, many people would send their questions to the community via me - so their identity wouldn't be revealed. After they got answers, they would decide whether to embark on a conversation with their respondent directly. You can say that was a group with a low level of trust (and you might be right) but that was a pattern that worked for them and their context. I could have enforced complete transparency but that would have been counterproductive and not met their needs. It would have been a betrayal.

Anonymity is not the antithesis of community - it's a contrast to a public identity. Anonymity may or may not be a welcome behaviour in some groups and it may or may not allow useful interactions to occur. Expect to find anonymous behaviour in communities and understand that it may be valid. The members of a community get to negotiate what works and doesn't work for them and really we need to listen vey closely to what people might want (and it will rarely be the same for everyone so we need to build in lots of flexibility and options).

I realise that this may seem like nit-picking and I want to stress that I'm not having a go at anyone mentioned - but I think there are some assumptions here that need taking apart. The better we understand the contradictory pulls of human nature, the more effective we can be in our communities.

brands: long tails, complex systems, stories, communities

Sean offers a link to this paper by Mohammed Iqbal. It's fascinating reading because it provides a grounding for a fancy that I've been toying with for a while now: brands as complex systems.

The Long Tail of Meaning

MI's paper talks about a power law distribution of brand propositions associated with a brand. You might even call these brand propositions (with their rational and emotional aspects, their blind cravings for meaning, their roots in lived experience) by another name: "stories". Trad advertising focuses on identifying what the big stories around a brand are. May be one, may be two, a handful at most. These stories can then be blast-broadcasted out via TV, print, even a viral widget for Facebook. However these stories are simply the biggest, loudest and most palatable associated with a brand. They aren't all the stories out there.

Narrative Ecosystems

One thing the long tail model doesn't make very clear is that entities you find in the distribution may not be isolated from each other. Just as a curve in sand may be the mark left by a snake, the long tail itself is the mark made on a distribution of entities (books, songs, brand propositions, dreams) by human choice. If you've ever worked with stories, you'll realise that they exist in an ecosystem - the long tale tail chatters to itself uncontrollably. There may be a single story that someone wants to communicate perfectly to their consumers, employees, citizens or subjects; but once it has been released into the wild it rarely stays unchanged. Instead it interacts with all the related stories that are being told. You don't own your brand. You never did but that comforting deceit is becoming harder and harder to maintain. You can't control the story ecosystem - you can influence it, engage with it, add to it but you can't control it.

Joining the Swarm: Communities

Trad advertising (TVCs, print) still works reasonably well for the head of the tail or the simple/complicated domains. It's not going way but as the rest of the tail and the complexity that forms it becomes more visible, we need other ways of dealing with it. Which is where those pesky community things come in. The stories/meaning/brand propositions become more diffuse and far more messy. You get the whole distribution around you, not the edited 30-second highlights. The leadership that's required here is a little different from yer standard issue.

The gift of the internet has been to surface human behaviour as much as it has been to change it. Can we handle that?

community unmanagement

The "Chief Conversation Officer" meme cropped up again recently here and here. And it's been coupled with some conversations with community managers such as Scott Drummond.

What I find interesting is that a bunch of people from diverse areas have picked up the label "community manager" - some from a knowledge management background, others with histories in marketing or PR, still others with technology backgrounds or even social activism.

What these people have in common is that they have been tasked with managing a "community". And "community" seems to be any group that is not a formal organisation or a bunch of autonomous individuals. This needs a bit of unpacking.

Organisations and Individuals

Organisations are established to create predictability through coordination. This coordination requires hierarchy and hierarchy requires managers who will coordinate subordinates. Interaction outside their formal roles was deemed irrelevant. In effect, the employee relationship was between an individual and a corporation (or government department) through a manager.

The creation of corporations also created consumer mass markets. And corporations tended to model their consumers as individuals. Everyone knew that these consumers interacted with each other but these interactions were secondary to their individual relationship as consumers with corporation.

The Rise of 'Communities'

This division of the world into individuals on the one hand and organisations on the other has always been artificial. What technology does is make it harder and harder to maintain that artificial division. Communities are what fill that gap. The social glue. Or may be a shock absorber between David & Goliath.

Unmanagement

The problem with these non-organisational groups is that you can't manage them. You can't sit down with members of a community, agree objectives and resources and then get on with it. Well, you can do a bit of that but communities tend to reject managers - "Who died and put you in charge?" is the first reponse. "I'm not coming back here again" is the second. They need stewards, facilitators, hosts and bouncers. Sometimes they need leaders but that leader may not be you. But they do not need managers.

What makes a Community Unmanager?

• You care. I don't want to say "passion" because it's a horribly over-used word but community unmanagers have to care about both the topic they are involved in and the people around them. If they don't then their community will feel betrayed.
  
• You help other people make stuff happen. Facilitation. Listening. Responding. Encouraging. Exactly how you facilitate is up to you. You can be gentle and nurturing. You can be aggressive and confrontational. It depends on the kind of people either already in your community or who you want to attract to it. But be mindful of what you are like and what that means for everyone else.
• You are aware of your environment. Online this may mean having the technology skills to get people up to speed with the tools. It might mean having an eye for design. It certainly means being a good host.

tribes vs communities

"Community" is term with a whole bunch of associations: collective, fuzzy boundaries, warm, social, perhaps a little suffocating, possibly a bit leftie.

"Tribe" has a different set of associations: also collective but harder boundaries, us against them, perhaps a little ruthless, possibly a bit atavistic.

Etienne Wenger and his many collaborators produced the theoretical work around communities of practice in learning & knowledge sharing. Meanwhile marketers & advertisers chose to identify* consumers based on the tribe they belonged to - trying to link abstract market segmentations to real social relations.

As online social spaces proliferate, we are hearing more about communities & tribes. But the more I hear these terms, the less I think they usefully describe what these new social groupings are. Few of our online groupings are either "tribes" or "communities" as most people would understand them. They are too loose, too ephemeral, too dynamic.

We don't have the words for what these things are yet. We have a language lag.

*And identity is important to both communities & tribes.

community in a can: ning vs wordframe vs facebook

Over the past few months, I've got involved in more & more online communities using a range of different tools.

Ning - Getting more & more popular, Ning offers a pretty good entry-level on-line community environment. You can create a personal profile & blog, you can incorporate a forum, video & photo uploading, all that stuff. Obviously Ning has been designed for "fun" communities than "work" communities. There is no native wiki functionality and no real document management capabilities. Boo!!!

Wordframe - As the name suggests, Wordframe is more about words. You get wiki stuff, a document library and the ability to incorporate external blog feeds into the environment. Wordframe is not available for free.

Facebook (again) - As noted earlier, I'm not too keen on Facebook. However given its omnipresence you could do worse for an online community environment. Apart from a forum & a wall, you don't get a whole heap of functionality and precious little customisation. But sometimes it's more about where you are than what you're doing.

This Techcrunch article is pretty good - though might now be out of date...

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...