Full Circle Associates

James Farmer has been developing the idea of online environments which support "facilitate and accommodate semilatticed relationships." In his recent paper/posting Centered Communication: Weblogs and aggregation in the organisation he writes:

"Over the last decade business, educational and community organisations have attempted to enhance their operations through utilizing the web. A significant amount of this effort has been directed towards the development and management of internal communities, employee knowledge and organisational information. To this end, complex and powerful tools have been sourced, developed and implemented to create intranets, learning management systems, community sites, portals and virtual team spaces.

However, while many organisational communication processes have been revolutionised by direct interpersonal communication through email and Instant Messaging (IM), only limited successes have been achieved through the use of these web-based environments. It is argued that this has occurred as a result of the limitations in design of tools brought about by a tendency to embrace tree-like and centralised principles and their associated technological solutions.

In light of these arguments, this paper outlines an alternative, centred (as opposed to centralised) approach to online communication. In doing this, an organisational online communication model based around the use of weblogs and aggregation is presented and discussed in relation to its application in a large, distributed and complex setting. Key to this model are the assumptions that ownership, control, independence, choice and design for subversive use are critical in establishing conducive, motivating, authentic and effective online communication and knowledge environments."

Key to Farmer's ideas are that online communication is centered around the individual, not a group or a place (he references Christopher Alexander's community pattern designs). This resonates with the thinking I've been doing around "designed for groups, but experienced by individuals."

Here are a few snippets from Farmer's piece that I'm holding/chewing:

"there is a significant difference between reduction of physical or geographic distance caused by technology (i.e. Our ability to communicate across distances) and the epistemological distance which remains (Mejias, 2005)"
"communication technologies allow us to experience distancelessness of a sort but do not necessarily change the fact that we are communicating ‘about’ rather than ‘with’ other actors."
"In relation to this particular example then, centred communication online is achievable when the environment is centred in the individual and where the individual communicating is able to:
-Subvert and design their presence and it’s operation to suit individual needs (beyond simple choices)
-Represent themselves as a unique individual over time and retain ownership over that representation
-Select and control the medium and manner in which they access and participate in the environment "
in using multiple tools.. "the user is forced to ‘re-invent’ themselves in each new online context they work in, there being little or no capacity for the development and transference of an online persona from one context to the next with the exception of an identifying characteristic such as an email address or photo."
"whereas a discussion board or collaborative application focuses on communication outside of an individual, centralised around the discussion, these [email/IM]tools allow for communication between individuals that is centred on them (communication ‘with’ each other):"
"...patterns are more often than not the result of a particular organisational culture restricting or encouraging the sharing of knowledge and open and recordable information."
A whole bunch of stuff on blogs
"The model below puts forward one possible model for the use of weblogs and aggregation in an organisation. For the sake of clarity only a few of the interrelationships have been labelled."
Finally, perhaps the most critical question is whether centred communication through this medium is able to encourage more communication ‘with’ rather than ‘about’. Whether prevailing organisational and socio-cultural norms mean that there is little that can be done to facilitate effective online communication or whether we are able to, through centred consideration of architecture and design, achieve to some extent Bholar’s ‘ontological reintegration of the individual’, in this case, to the organisation.