Communities

communities of interest and practice

Richard Florida in Sackville on 6 Feb 2008

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Richard Florida, author and blogger, will be presenting a lecture at Convocation Hall at Mount Allison University on 6 Feb ’08 at 7:30 PM.

The title of his lecture is “The Creative Class: The Role of the Artistic Community in Building Towns and Cities.” Everyone is welcome and there is no admission charge.

Given Sackville’s designation as a cultural capital this year, Florida’s presentation is timely. I may not be able to attend due to some client work, so perhaps some local blogger(s) will be able to get to Sackville and post a report.

Some (more) thoughts on online communities for business

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I’ve been asked on several occasions over the past year to see if it’s possible to build a “facebook-in-a-box” for an organisation or association, so I’ve put some thoughts together here. It’s still a work in progress.

This is a follow up from a previous post, The Community Goldrush.

Implementing a Niche Business Network

The success of business-oriented online communities depends more on implementation and mobilization of its members than any inherent design. In the context of many business associations, two motivators are evident. The first is an organizational commitment to create the online community and act on the community’s input. This would be the high level perspective in order to advance the goals of the association. An example objective of this community could be to identify solutions to common problems faced by members. The second motivator would be incentives on an individual level so that there are rewards for members who contribute meaningfully to the goal of the community.

According to Jay Deragon some aspects of an online community that would be attractive to adult members of an online community include:

  • The Learning Factor: With all the hype, craze and media coverage of social networking platforms, i.e. Facebook and Linkedin, many adults are drawn to the medium to learn what the hype is all about.
  • The Connection Factor: Once adults enter networks and learn the tools of the trade many are amazed to find the presence of other adults they know and many they don’t already engaged with the medium.
  • The Affinity Factor: Adults begin to find association with groups, causes, forums, media and other affinities which relate to their interest both personally and professionally.
  • The Business Factor: The predominant business segment using social networks today is employment recruiters. However, as the medium and adult participation has grown there is an exponential growth of business opportunities that adults are learning to facilitate using social networks as the medium.
  • The Creative Factor: Adults, and their businesses, are applying creative ways to use the technology behind social computing to extend its value to both personal and professional needs.
  • The Expectation Factor: When you consider the creative possibilities of social networks adults expect to the formation of some economic and social value to be derived from their participation whether currently or in the future.

The business models behind online communities are varied. Large sites, like Facebook and MySpace generate advertising revenue and the founders may be looking at selling the community to a larger media company. However, for smaller, niche communities, others may be willing to pay for access. According to Ross Dawson, the Sermo site, which only allows access to registered medical doctors, attracts physicians with a need to confidentially discuss cases amongst their peers.

The business models can become far more pointed with a clear target audience. For example, Sermo charges $100,000+ for financial institutions and others to access the medical discussions, so they can assess doctor’s responses to new drugs or medical advances.

Implementation Factors

Fist we have to have a good idea that many members of the association/organisation would be interested in the concept. This can come from market research, informal interviews, anecdotal evidence or previous experience. A suggested action plan could be:

  1. Have initial discussions with the association’s executives in order that they understand the concepts around the development of online communities.
  2. Align with at least one of the association’s longer term goals.
  3. Determine who will be the initial Mavens, Connectors & Salespeople (see graphic below) for this community.
  4. Design the initial technology and support structure.
  5. Start with a very soft launch and no announcements and work with the early members to grow the community.
  6. Once the community reaches a determined size, start looking for targeted sponsors.
  7. Continue to support the community with good conversations, technical support and whatever else motivates members.

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A Pictoral Commons

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Flickr has initiated The Commons, initially in collaboration with the US Library of Congress.

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

Perhaps this idea will be embraced by Canadian cultural and archival agencies in order to share our common visual history, instead of letting these pictures gather dust.

The notion of putting these artifacts online for sharing may be an idea that’s ready for take off …

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… or in other words, we should cooperate for the common good:

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I would recommend that teachers covering US history in the periods of the 1910’s or 1930-49 [the two sets currently available], should get their students to check out these photos and contribute some tags to show that the community finds them useful.

Update: Stephen has picked this up and linked to some other comments on this initiative. The fact that these photos are on Flickr is important because it links them to a community that understands tagging and probably includes many people who would not normally visit the LoC site. Flickr may be a proprietary system but the photos are accessible to all.

Aggregating Bookmarks

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I’ve used various social bookmarking tools, such as Furl and Magnolia, but have settled on delicious for a while. If you use many bookmarking applications, as well as rating tools like Digg, you might be interested in SocialMarker, which lets you save a page for filing on several systems at once.

SocialMarker lists 31 tools, several which I’ve never heard of, and a new bookmarking service, Mister-Wong, which is targeted at the education field.

Fair Copyright for Canada

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Have you joined yet?

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From the Facebook group description:

In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian government was about to introduce new copyright legislation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties … Instead, the government was about to choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a “Canadian-made” solution.

 Update: Now is the time to put pressure on your Member of Parliament. Check out Michael Geist’s list of Copyright MP’s.

Blessed Unrest

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Over the holidays I read Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken. This is a book that is more a reference than a story and what will serve me well after reading the book is the extensive appendix, which is about 1/3 of the book. Hawken covers many themes familiar to readers of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down.

The approach taken by “the movement” to address problems, noticed by Hawken, is one that makes sense to me, given my own consulting business as well as some local initiatives that I’m involved with, such as our Commons.

The term solving for pattern was coined by Wendall Berry, and refers to a solution that addresses multiple problems instead of one. Solving for pattern arises naturally when one perceives problems as symptoms of systemic failure, rather than random errors requiring anodynes. For example, sustainable agriculture addresses a number of issues simultaneously: It reduces agricultural runoff, which is a main cause of eutrophication and dead zones in lakes, estuaries and oceans; it reduces use of energy-intensive nitrogen-based fertilizers; it ameliorates climate change, because organic soil sequesters carbon, whereas industrial farming releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and is the second-greatest cause of climate change after fossil fuel combustion; it improves worker health because of the absence of pesticide; it enables soil to retain more moisture and is thus less reliant on irrigation and outside sources of water; it is more productive than conventional agriculture; it is less susceptible to erosion; and it provides habitat for pollinators, birds, and beneficial insects, which promotes biodiversity. On top of all that, the resulting food commands a premium in the market, making small farms economically more viable. Solving for pattern is the de facto approach of the movement because it is resource constrained. It cannot afford “fixes”, only solutions.

This evening, I’m off to an executive meeting of the Sackville Community Supported Agriculture group, as we plan for this year’s challenge of supplying 60 families with good, locally-grown produce; up from 20 families last year.

An alarming fall in privacy protection

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Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection.

From The 2007 International Privacy Ranking, it is quite clear that Canada is on a slippery slope to join our neighbour to the South. The USA rates on the worst end of the scale, as an endemic surveillance society, along with Russia, China and the UK. In 2006, Canada ranked fairly well as having significant protections and safeguards but this year we have arrived in a situation of some safeguards but weakened protection. The report notes that for Canada, there is “an alarming rate of fall in protection“.

It’s time for Canadians to wake up and smell the coffee.

Via the Creative Class Exchange

Head East

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Canada’s east coast seems to have some of its happiest residents. While not rated high for all those cosmopolitan virtues that Vancouver may have, it seems that we are happy “down east”. Living in Sackville, we’re in the middle of four happy cities – Charlottetown, Saint John, Moncton and Halifax – all of which placed in the top ten. From CBC News:

According to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canadians are most likely to be satisfied with the quality of life in places like Saint John, Moncton, N.B., and Charlottetown, all of which placed in the top five of a survey of 18 Canadian cities.

We also have lots of water that is not being drained to extract oil, reasonable housing prices and some interesting new businesses. So sell that expensive house and head east with the extra cash to fund the start-up that you always dreamed of :-)

Photo by gmcmullen

Big Consulting Companies Jumping on Bandwagon 2.0

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It looks like social media (wikis, blogs & social networking) are going the way of e-learning and knowledge management (KM). That means big companies charging big fees for cookie-cutter solutions. Jon Husband reports on this phenomenon for 2008 and advises Caveat emptor:

Big firms either 1) develop standardized methodologies and practices (their business models depend upon it), or 2) if their business model does not depend upon the standardization, they will charge you a mint and a half (McKinsey ?)

The organization(s) [clients] will in my opinion get better advice rooted in critical thinking and experience and focused on results, as opposed to maintaining an expensive dependency on canned rhetoric that may not be based in much experience. For example, what exactly is “Advanced” Web 2.0 technology ? Blogs with lots of colourful widgets ?

As I’ve said before, Free-agents and natural enterprises are better. The upstart independents and small consultancies have Clayton Christensen’s disruptive Sword & Shield which the incumbents (large consultants) don’t have. With early motivation to enter this emerging field (Shield) and now with with years of experience and skills (Sword), we the “upstarts” should be able to hold our own.

When e-learning and KM first came out, it was difficult to market your services without expensive campaigns. On top of that, the IT tools were expensive. Now the best tools are open source, leveling the playing field even more. The rules have changed for 2008, and we upstarts can significantly engage in a conversation with our markets using our own tools with which we’ve developed a certain expertise.

The game is afoot!

Blogs at the core of KM & Collaboration

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I’m helping to create a collaborative work and learning space for a group of executives and this is part of the introduction to the site:

Blogs: The main communication tool is your blog, which each participant has registered in his or her name. Think of your blog as a professional journal, where you can record your thoughts and ask questions of your peers or the staff. Each blog post has a unique identifier, called a permalink, which can be referenced by others. Blog posts do not need to be perfect essays. Blog posts can help make sense of your learning process. Comments can be made on another person’s blog, or you can discuss it on your blog and then connect with a hyperlink to the other one. This creates a network of the conversations around an issue or topic. Here’s a video called Blogs in Plain English.

Wikis: Blogs are personal, while wikis are for groups. A wiki is a collaborative web document that records all activities so that any person can add to it, without losing what was previously written (it’s like “track changes” in MS Word). Here’s a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Jon Husband has dusted off a piece on blogging and dialogue that he wrote in 2004, which I think bears repeating:

  1. Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable “body of knowledge”.
  2. Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.
  3. Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action – information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.
  4. Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.
  5. Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.
  6. Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

The more online communities and social networks that I’m involved with, the more I view blogging as a core process that keeps them going.