Friday, April 01, 2005

Jordan, OWL, Online Community and Community Software

I subscribe to a persistent Bloglines search for "online community" which unearths interesting nuggets when I have time to scan (or when I'm in work avoidance mode.) Today I found the work of Jordan. (September 5, 2006 edited to remove non functioning hyperlinks.)

OWL.1 - Design Philosophy
What we need is an Organizational Whuffie Liaison; a structured way to trade hacker whuffie for cold hard cash. Taking inspiration from my alma mater, I was taught that intelligence and dedication should be enough to get by in life. Those who refuse to compromise craft their own life lessons through trails of momentary misdirection.

But what is Owl? It lies somewhere in the intersection of RentACoder and SourceForge. It’s a project marketplace where ideas are proposed, designed, developed, and funded. It tracks sucessfully created projects and builds upon some notion of whuffie. It promotes cross-pollination through code reuse. It is driven fundamentally by economic incentive.
OWL.2 - History of GroupWare
To gain perspective on Owl, I’ll be exploring the histories of tangential pieces of software in the next few posts. I’m going to start with Commercial GroupWare, as these are the pieces of software that have been most influential (from a userbase perspective) to the current state of online community.
OWL.3 - History of Online Commmunity
Today I’m going to be doing a rundown of the technology behind online community. This is a far more academically interesting topic than Commercial GroupWare, simply because we see technology being driven by what is possible rather than by what is economically viable.
I've just scanned the three articles so far, but I had to smile to note the third part, as today is the 20th Anniversary of The Well. Online community has been a central part of my life since 1996, so I'm a relative newbie, but I feel like a part of this larger network of those who have experienced true community online.

1 Comments:

Blogger Nancy White said...

Jordan, I think you raise a lot of good issues and questions. Two catch my eye: what are the experiences of kids who grew up with online community (vs those of us who adopted later in life) and what is the impact of our online life/patterns on our offline/geographic patterns.

My son is growing up online, but his online community is very different than my experience (he says I am totally old skool). His is much more networked; mine reflects my pre-online patterns of a "home base."

So that would impact our offline patterns as well. I look forward to reading what you write!

10:08 AM  

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