Full Circle Associates

My acid test for explaining something about this crazy online world is to see if it makes sense to my mother or my husband. Both used to live mostly offline lives. My mother is getting wired so this is changing a bit! ;-)

When I go off all passionate about some online interaction thing and faces go blank, I stop and check myself. I am speaking from an insider context. Poor, poor communications. I revert to a story or a scenario. Then the light comes back on in folks' eyes.

When I came upon Dale Pike's note on a weblog workshop he ran at UNC in March I had a nod of appreciation for his use of scenarios. Dale wrote in his Stand Up Eight Weblog :

"One of the greatest challenges to introducing weblogs to someone who doesn't know much about them is that 'weblogging' quickly becomes a huge and interconnected jumble of processes and procedures. As you get your mind wrapped around the concepts, you don't realize how significantly you are changing your own processes. Ask someone who religiously uses a news aggregator to stay current to explain the difference between weblogs and email or weblogs and discussion groups and they may have some difficulty articulating why the medium feels so unique. Threaten to take away their aggregator, however, and you'll soon see just how embedded the processes can become.

I also started thinking of usage scenarios for weblogs. Everyone uses them for their own purposes, but there seem to be certain categories of use that are particularly well-suited to the medium."

He goes on and gives some examples.

One of the things that has REALLY ticked me off is how people draw conclusions about a tool based on their experience -- really one scenario. In fact we can probably surface a negative scenario for each positive one. And without this, we can't really understand the factors of success or failure -- tool, context, process -- the whole shebang.

How can we build a collection of scenarios that show the multiple facets of both online interaction tools and techniques? Some wiki that we all contribute to? How do we bring the multiple perpectives we need to advance online interaction? And keep it from being a "this is better than that" world? Is this collaborative research? Is Wikipedia a model?