Communities

communities of interest and practice

The Community Gold Rush

by

Social Networks have become quite popular on the Web, with services such as MySpace and Facebook commanding billions of investment dollars. Social Networks are the new public spaces, though they’re no longer owned by the government. We’re moving from the town square to the online community. What makes online public spaces different from physical ones is that in the online world what you say will remain there for a long time; the conversations are searchable and can be be copied; and we may never know who has viewed what we have said or written. Each of these facets can be seen in a positive or a negative light, depending upon your perspective.

With the huge rise in popularity of Facebook, we are beginning to see a backlash on the social networking system, that tends to mundane and frivolous aspects of our lives. Facebook and MySpace have been banned for public employees in the US, Canada and Australia, as well as in many schools. While it is true that Facebook conversations seem to be primarily focused on friends and family, business uses are on the upswing. Facebook is becoming a business platform that allows workers to let their friends know who they work for and maybe what they’re selling, so companies can leverage this as a viral marketing tool.

One of the limitations of Facebook is that the data are stored on someone else’s server, and the rules can change without notice. Skype, a free voice over IP service, had a recent outage for several days, leaving millions of users without communications. Depending on these free services for business may not be a wise decision and at this time it may be best to use web-based services in addition to other communication and networking tools. Another option would be to build your own service.

In contrast to the casual and chatty tone of Facebook, some niche business social networks are starting to mark out their own, but smaller, territory online. These include Sermo for physicians; E-Factor for European entrepreneurs and Emerald InTouch which supports collaboration for researchers subscribing to Emerald’s professional journals.

The Emerald service is built upon Elgg, an open source platform developed and serviced by Curverider of the UK. Emerald has taken the free software construction code of Elgg and created a niche network focused on research, extending Emerald’s basic offering of online journals.

Given the backlash against social networks once they reach a certain level of success, businesses may opt for smaller, controlled gateways to further online social networking. Since networking has always been an important aspect of business, it’s doubtful that these tools will be ignored by the majority of businesses. The trick will be to remain as open as possible to attract members, allow users to control who and what they connect with and offer a valid business reason to remain a member and invite others.

The competition to become the prime community for your niche market may be heating up and we may see another Internet real estate gold rush, as in the first Dot Com era.

Opting-in

by

Now that we’re inundated with information, e-mail and invitations to the next great Web 2.0 thing, pull is looking a lot better than push. Pull means that the individual decides what to read or who to talk to. I wrote about this earlier, in Please don’t push my learning.

One reason that I have been such a fan of Elgg is that this open source, social learning platform has at its core the concept that the individual has to decide to opt in, whether it be to connect with an instructor, a learner, a community or a group. According to Time, the growth of Facebook is due to its basic premise of opting in:

Maybe that’s why Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they’re refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet’s founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook–it’s just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you’re annoying folks, you’ll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.

The huge success of Facebook may be an indicator that it’s time to reconsider push business models, push marketing and even push learning.

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

by

npcarnival.gif

This is my first turn to host the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. I tried to focus on environmental themes, and I got a couple, but most importantly, all of these blogs come to you from Canada.

  1. First off is Robert Paterson of Prince Edward Island. Rob has been involved in many nonprofit organisations, from helping to create the Queen Street Commons to his work with National Public Radio. There’s a lot to pick from, but I would recommend his recent post on the Food Trust of PEI, which is focused on informing consumers of food what it is that they’re really eating.
  2. Next is Dave Pollard of How to Save the World. Dave’s posts usually address some deep subjects and there’s a wealth of practical information too. His recent post on the Essential Capacities for Communities is worth a read for any nonprofit consultant.
  3. Chris Corrigan from the west coast is quite experienced with open space technology and this week talks about More on Presence, Circles and Granola.
  4. Another west coaster, Jon Husband, shares his experience at Wirearchy. Read Jon’s recent post on how games are becoming mainstream workplace learning fare, at Playing Games at Work.
  5. Joan Vinall-Cox works in higher education and seems to be a natural blogger. Check out her Top Ten Tools for work and learning.
  6. Dave Cormier is currently working at the University of PEI and also co-founded Worldbridges, a unique nonprofit business. Dave recently posted An Introduction to my blog – Two years in review.
  7. I would be remiss if I didn’t include the photo blog created by one of our summer students at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute. Mark has just finished his term but I hope to continue to post some photos during the year, in my capacity as Director of Education. There are great photos and explanations about a wide variety of North American wildlife.

cnpc-cdn.jpg

 

Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Are our small towns ready for the next economy?

by

Is it a trend when more US citizens move to Canada, hitting a 30 year high last year? I like to think that as we all become interconnected that it will be easier to choose where we live and how we do our work, making obligatory daily commutes a thing of the past. Much as I want that, most people don’t have that option and few employers are willing to offer it. Rob Paterson notes that some professionals are moving to PEI for the lifestyle and bringing their work with them.

I’m now in my fifth year as an independent consultant working out of a very small town. There are several others choosing to work from the home office and doing business anywhere. We’re still the minority though. The big question is whether this will become a trend and develop into the norm – people choosing where they live first. If it becomes the norm then there will be some fundamental societal and economic shifts; perhaps nine shifts.

Small towns are attractive to certain  types of people. I think that they appeal to young families as well as the newly retired or semi-retired, who want a slower pace of life. The challenge for small towns will be to offer what these folks really find important.  High-speed internet or even free municipal WiFi may be important. Access to a good passenger train service (with wireless Internet) may also be important.

There is an opportunity for small towns to position themselves as preferred locations for an Internet economy but the race may get fierce, as communities see their tax base leaving for greener pastures. The Canadian Maritime provinces need to establish the infrastructure that will attract knowledge workers and keep them here.  Companies like FatKat Animation in Miramichi are setting the example. However, our communities will also need good restaurants, multi-cultural experiences, openness to alternative lifestyles and all those other things that educated folks seek out.

It will be a big challenge to move from our not so distant agrarian economy to a knowledge economy, but if we miss the boat, we’ll end up as an economic backwater. What would attract you to move to a small town in Atlantic Canada? [by international standards, there are only small towns in Atlantic Canada]

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants Coming to Town

by

I’ll be hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants next week (27 Aug) . This will be an open call but special consideration will be given to environmental themes (due to my work with AWI) as well as any fellow Canadian bloggers. Drop me a note if you have something of interest and want to be one of the required 7 (no more & no less) highlighted posts.

npcarnival.gif

If you’re not familiar with the Carnival, the hosts change from week to week but you can subscribe to the feed. This week’s post is by Michele Martin on her Bamboo Project Blog with several interesting links.

Dog Days of Summer

by

A quick search and I find that the dog days of Summer can mean, “a period of stagnation or inactivity”. That’s how I’ve been feeling lately; not much that I want to say and not wanting to produce just C-level work, which Christian Long describes as:

Just write (or copy), link, publish…and get a guaranteed C in the audience’s mind. Some will be appreciative that the writing went down easy. That you offered them an encyclopedia of content that saves them a trip to the library. A few may even tune back in to see if you write anything again in the future. Emphasis on being polite. A few back-door rule makers and play-it-safe writers seem to enjoy the process. Quickly forgotten, otherwise.

Christian describes A-level blogging as much more engaging :

Or, and this only matters if audience matters, push equally hard on your own assumptions as you do your readers’ expectations. Take a topic well known or just on the scant edge of global awareness…and mash it up a bit, dust it off, tweak, twist, and deconstruct so that it begins to take on a life of its own. You and the reader(s) are no longer able to see the original question quite the same way ever again. Do that with a decent flair for writing — no matter how ‘correct’ in terms of the MLA — and there is an decent chance that the blog-grading-razzi will not only come back around again and again to see what’s grabbing your attention, but the off-line conversations between you and them will take flight as well.

My audience matters and I don’t have any A-level material (let alone B-level) churning through my mind. It could be the Summer heat or maybe I need a break.

Therefore, I shall pause here a while.

Five plus Three Random Facts

by

I’ve been tagged for the 8 Random Facts About Me meme by Michele Martin and Karyn Romeis. It comes with a set of rules and you’re supposed to pass it on.

Well, one random fact about me is that I don’t like to follow instructions. Interesting for someone who spent 23 years in the Army. For instance, when I wrote my military French language aptitude test in 1978, we were supposed to read a list of Kurdish words and commit them to memory. We were then asked to write down as many as possible. I thought the whole thing was absurd so I didn’t read the list and then failed the short-term memory test. I was placed at the lowest ability level and spent my Summer of language training in what we called, “Sandbox French”. But I did finish the Summer fluent in French, with a lot of help from a belle petite Québecoise.

A second fact is that I’ve been in the training  field ever since I was 14, when as an Army Cadet I learned Methods of Instruction and I still remember the picture showing the “sea of wasted effort” if you didn’t follow all the instructional steps. I don’t follow those rules any more.

Thirdly, I love sports that have few rules. I used to run every distance from the mile (4:21) to the marathon (2:38), but my knees won’t take it any more. I now enjoy nordic skiing and road cycling, and both have simple rules — keep going forward.

You might think that  I should add five more facts, but I already posted to the Five Things Meme as well as the Five Goals Meme, so I think that I’m up by five ;-)

Remaining true to not following instructions, I won’t tag anyone else.  Happy Friday.

Are you open for business?

by

OpenBusiness is a website dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship based on open principles and is not just about open source software. These folks have developed an Open Business Guide, in the form of a wiki, to discuss the specifics of operating an open business:

Open Source [software] was the first sector in which peer-based production led to quality products. However, innovative business models have started to appear in other economic sectors experimenting with open approaches. Now there are online record labels using Creative Commons licenses, Open Source film projects, peer funded music labels, p2p finance services and the list of innovations regarding information management in the widest sense almost endless.

The wiki gives a lot of practical advice on how to profit by being more open. It is in many ways a simpler and synthesiszed version of Yochai Benkler’s work, The Wealth of Networks, which I would recommend as THE major reference on the digital networked economy.

On a related note, Matt Asay reports the COO of Fotango quitting when he found out that his company was abandoning its open source business model; stating, “Open source is not a tactic. It is not a strategy. It is the only practical way of competing in this marketplace.”

Closed companies are still making money, and profits, in much the same way that buggy makers continued to sell their products after the internal combustion engine was produced – for now.

carriage-factory-museum.jpg

The old, closed model is doomed and openness is something that every company and non-profit organisation had better understand – soon.

Community of Practice Case Study

by

I’m working on a community of practice for green building technologies and am discussing business community networks here in the Maritimes. I thought it would be a good time to review some lessons from the first online community I was responsible for.

The first online community of practice for which I was responsible was a project to enhance collaboration of members of the learning industry here in New Brunwsick, Canada (LearnNB).

The initial focus of this CoP was research and development, especially business models and commercialization. It was not intended to be a theoretical or academic community, but one looking at the development of practical applications- be they products, services, standards or models. Membership was open to anyone.

The major events during the course of this project (2003):

  1. Establishment of an initial blog
  2. Report on best practices in the establishment of a community of practice
  3. Interview protocol and initial interviews in New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia
  4. Evaluation of technology platforms for the web presence of the community
  5. Discussions/conversations/interviews with interested members
  6. Establishment of two web-based systems for discussions, one private and one public
  7. Continuing discussions in person, via e-mail and through blogs with interested parties
  8. Fine-tuning of technology platforms

Here are some highlights from the Case Study:

Conclusions

  • A sense of community cannot be forced;
  • Communities are self-defined;
  • Communities are conversations; and
  • Communities evolve over time.
  • Face-to-face contact can be the impetus for online conversations, while
    • online contact can be the impetus for face-to-face meetings.
    • Communities of individuals appear to have stronger bonds than communities of companies;
    • blogging helps to define dispersed communities; and
    • password-protected web sites do not encourage conversation.

Recommendations

It was recommended that if there are future efforts in this area, then we should:

  • Keep the online community spaces for special projects and events.
  • Advertise the community space for others to test out blogging.
  • Encourage more community members to use blogs as a community building tool.

I felt that any efforts to foster community should be addressed at the grass roots level. Centralized command and control does not work well in this inter-networked world. Regional initiatives or very local initiatives seem to stand the greatest chance of success. Provincial [state] boundaries are blurry, and not part of many people’s sense of community.

Finally, the online community space never became an active place for discussion, conversation or sharing of ideas and knowledge. I keep plodding away with this blog, and Stephen Downes is also a local voice with a larger worldwide audience. Other Maritime bloggers who discuss learning & technology include Robert Paterson and Dave Cormier, both on Prince Edward Island. A more recent blogger is Charlene Croft in Nova Scotia, with some excellent insights.

Design for collaboration

by

David Sean Lester is focused on collaboration and makes some interesting points on what to consider when designing for collaborative learning. David’s premise is that collaborative learning happens best in a middlespace and then he provides a comparative list of design considerations to support collaborative versus individual learning, for example:

  • practice vs theory
  • learning environment vs learning requirement
  • distributed leadership vs designated leadership
  • role seeking vs goal seeking

This is a good list for any instructional designer who is looking at incorporating collaboration into the design of a program, not just adding a few collaborative activities.

I should note that David and I had corresponded several years ago but lost touch. Thanks to Facebook we reconnected and I came across his new website.