Full Circle Associates

Responding to a provocative post from David Wilcox, Steven Clift lobs a great post into the blogosphere. (Steven, post it to Onlinefacilitation too! Grin.)Here is a anippet.

Saving Internet 1.0 from Web 2.0 Dreams - My response to David Wilcox on E-mail Lists:

"I resist the technological determinism I see coming from tool fanatics based on hyper-individualist models that use the terminology of national democratization that in reality make things less democratic when applied locally or in smaller groups. Yes, thought leadership and well-edited experience sharing via blogging needs to be encouraged at all levels, but turning aside “old-fashioned” e-mail will drive a wedge into effective online communities of practice designed to reach out beyond the always-on broadband crowd to average Internet users. Anything that limits or removes the ability for someone to simply press “reply-to-all” to be part of public life, to publish, is a democratic step backward."

Steven has been doing a lot of work with the open source GroupServer platform. Dan Randow down in New Zealand has been doing some cool stuff with the platform. But what is really notable is that Steven's variety of online e-democracy groups and communities have been working collaboratively with GroupServer to influence the platform development. This is a great example of the adage "communities have been changed by technology, and technology is being shaped by communities." Steven and Dan are sharing the role of the technology steward. Dan, I suspect, is working from the more traditional IT, developer perspective, and Steven from the community perspective. Together, they represent what I believe is a more powerful development team that works with the strengths of both perspectives.

The other interesting thing shows up in the comments in David's post... and that is about boundaries. It goes to the tension I love to think about between the individual and the group, and more generally, around the way boundaries are a different animal in the network age.

When we are dealing with bounded groups, bounded tools make a lot of sense, even moreso when we can hook in and out of other more unbounded tools. But when we seek to create connections across and between bounded groups, getting out of our bounded tools makes sense as well.

Bottom line: it is still about being conscious of what we are trying to do, and then bringing together the tools that make sense both for the people and the purpose they are serving. Which means I'm not read to either "throw out the old tools" or "just use the new tools." I'm interested in the smartest configuration for any setting. So posts like Steven's and David's are really useful to me. (Yeah, blogs are good too!)

Tags: technologystewardship,, configuration,, lists,, forums,, blogs