Full Circle Associates

I am in the midst of more than one interesting conversation (see previous post) this week. I'm also participating in iCoheres online conference on Virtual Organizational Development. I was sitting in on a telecon/chat today with Frances Long of KnowPlace, listening with one ear while I multitasked on today's deliverables. Near the end, someone asked about what we thought about relationships built online. My ears perked up.

I think about the relationships I form and nurture online all the time because there are a lot of them and they are significant to me. At the sametime, my non-online friends still look at me with skepticism.

I think you can and we do form significant ongoing relationships with people online, some of whom we may never meet F2F. In someways I think it is easier to develop these relationships than, lets say for example, someone you meet at a F2F conference and with whom you do not have an online interaction.

In online relationships we can build identity and deepen the relationships through a series of smaller, frequent communication interations. For those of us who spend a lot of time online, this fits smoothly and seamlessly into our daily practice. It may be emails, blog comments, discussion boards, IM, or skype. But it is a fabric that gets woven over time and which can be revisited with a few strokes of the keyboard.

For the fantastic people I met at the AI conference in September, I did not have this ongoing, persistent connection. I have emailed them, but alas, not a peep in return. What felt like the start of a new connection has faded and without significant rekindling from one side or the other, it will evaporate and remain one of those one time connections.

Now some of this is clearly an indictment on my habits and practices. No question. And the ease with which I do form online relationships has an obvious downside: volume. What kind of quality can I maintain after a certain threshold. Serious questions.

But the nubbin is that I can and do form serious connections with people online and maintain a larger network of connections than I did before I went online. This is because I can build relationships with frequent, small, iterations of communication that fits into my daily practice. I wish I could have done a social network analysis of my network pre online and now. I'd love to try and see if what I believe is really true.