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...