Dave Pollard on The Wisdom of Crowds

There have been a flurry of blog posts on James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Dave Pollard's terrific review really encapsulated the issues that I'm paying attention to when working with distributed groups: how to avoid group think and individual arrogance while still achieving group goals.

Dave writes:

Groupthink can be prevented, he (Surowiecki) says, by ensuring the group has intellectual diversity, independence (from each other) and is neither too centralized nor too decentralized. A group with these qualities is inherently more knowledgeable and its judgement more sophisticated, informed and reliable than any CEO or 'subject matter expert' that business, with its cult of leadership, tends to rely on for making critical decisions.

In the distributed communities I work with, I see a need for constantly balancing control and emergence. Groupthink and singular control both sit at one end of the spectrum. At the other end sits another pair of unlikely siblings, chaos and inaction.

I agree that diversity, independence and the balance between centralized and decentralized is important to avoiding groupthing or tyranny by one arrogant individual. But for creating meaningful "work" -- output, convergence, creation, learning -- there also needs to be some bit of interdependence as well. Or perhaps it is more like letting go of ego. Listening. Being willing to change your mind and see another point of view. Distributed work cannot JUST be about individuality collected into a group. It also has to be able to embrace some part of the communal.

This balance is not just the science of process, but the art of thinking, feeling human beings. And it is very challenging online.

Nigritude Ultramarine - Because Blogs Can be Games Too!

Anil Dash wants to win an iPod in this competition.

Hell, I don't KNOW Anil. I read one of his blogs. But it's the weekend. I'm playing!

Diary of a Blog-Crazed Woman!

Well, the second week of my blog/onfac list blending is wrapping up. I thought I'd share my thoughts on both platforms (blog/list) as both worlds are helping me. I appreciate the coaching/feedback/welcome from my blogging friends and support from my ongoing list buddies.

Two Tools, One World?
I feel the inherent tension between groups of people who prefer different media. We have these preferences for very good reasons. Style, preference, habit are an intrinsic part of our trying to make sense of a group online interaction that is essentially experienced as individuals. Really an odd thought, eh? I wonder if there has to be some sort of sacrifice between one or the other, or if I can bridge between.

I have not been posting everything on both the blog and the email list. Yesterday I just posted a link to the list that I did not put on the blog. (So why do I feel guilty? Mamma mia!) I can't handle consistently doing both. I worry about spammish feeling, or at the least, fire-hose behavior of TOO much (which is typical of me!). Duplication seems, well, wasteful!

As a result of my inconsistencies, RSS readers get some here, some from the blog - both via RSS or the websites. I have to figure out is an easy method for feeding the blog posts to the onfac list IF that is desirable for the email only readers (I think there are RSS readers that plop things in your email box, but that requires each interested person adding a new tools. ) Guidance for you, gentle readers: If you want content, links, and leads, the blog may be the way to go. If you want questions, discussions and messy wonderful conundrums, the interactive nature of the list seems better suited. In any case, I'm having a bit of trouble juggling both. And where do comments and back channel email stimulated by either tool go in this classification scheme (I think about 40 so far)? Grin.

Reach?
I have no idea how much the audience is duplicated. The blog main page has 649 hits as of May 31st and I put up the first post May 26th. 707 requests for the feed file. 3177 hits on files in the weblog directory. That compares with 55,000+ hits on the directory that holds my online community toolkit from Feb 28 - May 31 (hm, why do the stats stop on May 31? Call ISP!). I have no idea how many people read the pages, nor how many people actually READ the onfac list. We have over 1000 subscribers. I suspect a lot of deadwood. Then again, "getting hits" is not why I do this, so why am I worrying? Maybe it's because I'm good at worrying. And face it, it is really cool to know!

Keeping Content Organized
On the process side, I REALLY wish blogger had categories. I'm blogging about a range of stuff that is going to be a mess pretty quickly. I don't keep a very narrow focus. In my year long procrastination about blogging, setting up categories was one of my key demons. I think it was worth worrying about. I should have worried more. Will I regret going with blogger?

How Much Time am I Spending?
Don't ask. Too much!

Technology - Ease of Use and Features
The reason I started with Blogger was because it was really easy to set up. My main snags were getting the proper paths set up on my webpage (I am not using Blogger's hosting). A few wrinkled eyebrows. I needed a pointer to the feed information - it was easy, but not so obvious to me. (Thanks, Bill). But now I am getting into the many subtleties of blogging - plugins, formatting options, blogrolls, profiles, trackbacks. Although blogging is tagged as "easy web publishing," it quickly gets into a much geekier pursuit which requires more knowledge, skill and frankly, patience for some of us!

On the "Blogging Community"
I don't know how much of it is the network I already exist in or how much is the blogging community, but it has been "hella nice" (as my son might say) to experience the welcomes I have received and to see my blog on the blogrolls of some mighty find bloggers. I hope I live up to their trust. It makes me nervous every now and again, which is a healthy thing.

Next Lessons
I want to get my "blogroll" up - links to other blogs I'm following and build some publicly viewable blogrolls and link lists at www.kinja.com and http://.del.icio.us -- all sorts of interesting stuff out there. I want to get trackback working and hate to admit that I do want to know who is linking to my blog. I have registered at http://www.technorati.com and as of Friday evening I have 23 links from 19 sources. Can I say it is research instead of vanity? Please?

I'm sure I'll find both tools and methodologies to make it better as we go, but YOU here, let me know what you want/think. You are the main reason I do all this!!

Report: Community Tech Isn't Reaching Those Who Need It (if they do)

I have just skimmed the report, but David Wilcox posts a fulsome review of Loader and Keeble's literature review of community informatics initiatives. I have shared David's past musings on the interface between academic and practitioners in this strange field called "Community Informatics," and "Virtual Community Informatics" (list here). I have some good friends who are researching in this field, but I always had this sort of side feeling of "hey, why do these guys keep having meetings in cool places? Why are they not working out in the field?" How do we do a better job at interfacing between the important academic work and the nitty gritty of practice?

Ruby's Report from the NTEN Conference

Although I theoretically work with technology and NGOs, I am not as hooked into the US NGO/Tech network as I should. I read about them and know some of the folks. (As an Indy, I go to few conferences). It was great to read Ruby Sinreich's lotusmedia.blog posts from the March NTEN event. There is also a conference wiki.

Ruby's blog is a wealth of links for those interested in technology and NGOs/NPOs. And she lives in a beautiful part of the world that I still miss (until it gets hot and muggy!) Thanks, Ruby! (And does the Cat's Cradle still exist in Chapel Hill?)

CPsquare Open House in the Netherlands, June 13th, 2004

While some of us are in town for the aformentioned Virtual Communities conference, it seemed like a good idea to convene a F2F for members and friends of CPSquare (a CoP on CoPs). So we are self organizing a CPsquare open house . We are gathering 10am to 5pm Sunday, 13 June, with a break to wander out for lunch. It looks like it will be in Amsterdam at the Tree House. JOIN US! Feel free to let me know if you have anyquestions.

I'll be in the Netherlands from the 11th - 16th. Give me a shout out if you are there! We may be doing a workshop on Distributed CoPs on the 16th if there is enough interest. (I suck at marketing.)

Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook & eMerge2004

Collaborative Learning Environments Sourcebook - Looks like a promising and growing collaborative collection on collaboration from Martin Terre Blanche, Vasi van Deventer, Nthabiseng Motsemme, Chris Janeke, Johan Kruger, Piet Kruger, Lazarus Matlakala, Cas Coetzee, Matshepo Nefale and Louise Henderson.

It is great to see visibility for the work of colleagues in South Africa and other places outside of N. America and Europe. I'm convinced that most of the really creative stuff is out there, out of view.

I'm looking forward to learning about more of these activities at the eMerge conference (all online! June 28 - July 10. Disclaimer, I'm on the presenting team doing a duo gig with the fabulous Tony Carr from University of Cape Town!)

Games, Mobiles and Mah-Jongg

Amy Jo Kim blogged this today and I can't help a quick comment - then I really will get to work. Mobile mah-jongg a $3.8 billion game | CNET News.com. AJ was one of the first people to point me to the implications of games in this new distributed world. Mah-Jongg is a structured game. What will happen when we get better at improvisation online? Games without the structure?

John Smith, Alasdair Honeyman and I are going to play with this idea a bit on June 14th at the Ifonortics Virtual Communities Conference. A hint for those going. We plan to disrupt things a bit. A game? No, far more than a game. Improvisation!

John Smith, Nancy White and Alasdair Honeyman
Improvisation and design in distributed communities

Learning is a fundamental aspect of community experience. It is arguably an improvisational activity, as are facilitation and community cultivation. But the discourse about online communities of practice usually focuses on design, not on improvisation. Why is that? What if we looked at how we design technologies from the point of view of learning and improvisation? Does it change what we think and say? From our experience the answer is yes. Design seems to imply the arrangement of known elements. But we all work on a global, multi-cultural and multi-literate stage where nobody can know all the elements involved. Among other things we give examples of how:

* Design is an ongoing activity.
* Design is the (re)-arrangmenet of known and unknown elements.
* Everybody is (potentially) involved in design.
* Straddling technologies changes the game once again.

In practice, what elements are more appropriately improvised or invented on the spot? What is the difference between design and improvisation?

Pollard: Wweblogs are Excellent Communications Media, But Lousy Communications Tools

Dave Pollard plays a few more soulful notes on the conversational fugue around tools and human beings online. He plays off of Ton's post on Blogs as Personal Presence Portal, which sites a slew of other people who I sense are willing both think AND practice what it takes to have a fulsome online communication experience. Presence is the central theme right now. I'd like to know how that expands from personal presence to group or collective presence, which includes such arts as listening!

Lots to chew on in both Dave and Ton's postings. Or did I just totally mix my metaphors? Music? Food? It's all good.

David Coleman on Social Networks and Collaboration

Social Networks and Collaboration is the latest "guru's corner" (what the heck is a guru any more these days?) by David Coleman of Colllaborative Strategies. He focuses how does SNA adds value, rather than how can social-network related offerings make money. Ah, fresh air! (There is also a great thread on SNA and CoPs on John Smith's ComPrac list - RSS feed here).

David's newsletter is always worth a read. (Though the more I look at his map of collaborative tools, the more I think I disagree with it -- and with most attempts at tool categorization. But I can't quite yet put my finger on what bugs me. More on that later.)Caveat: know that if you select the "text only" email option, you may get empty emails. Is there a prejudice against those of us who prefer text only? (Try dialing up from Kenya and you'll know FAST!)

I'm feeling flippant. It must be Friday!

Streaming Media Without a Dedicated Server

ONE/Northwest , a great resource on tech issues for non profits/NGOs, pointed to an article by RealNetworks on streaming media without a dedicated server.

HTTP streaming is an alternative approach to serving RealAudio and RealVideo files on the Web without the added management requirements and expense of server-side streaming software. Although this techniques is not well-suited for high-volume sites serving numerous simultaneous streams, many smaller Web sites can benefit tremendously from this simple and inexpensive approach.

I picked up on this because I'm very interested in how we integrate audio and visual elements into online communication. Bandwidth, file size, etc. are all still VERY real issus for the populations I work with in 2/3rds worlds, but keeping the "warm" in "electronic communications" (Paradis, 1996?) is essential. Voice, music, images are all part of warm. Text written with attention to warmth is clearly part of it.

E-serenity, now!

E-serenity, now! from the Christian Science Monitor via Jeffrey Veen.

Uh, with my firehose of posts I think I am one of the candidates for an Information Sabbath. Definitely food for thought!

Webjay - "Mellow Chat"

Thanks to a link from Seb here, I have now started toying around with a playlist of music that might be experienced by a distributed group while they are chatting. I'm not sure of the logistics yet - everyone has a second browser open and they hit "play" at the same time? Could people change the list? Add to it?

Webjay - "Mellow Chat" by Choconancy

Online Roles and Characters

In 2001 I wrote a small piece on Online Community Member Roles. Over the years I've received email from people suggesting other roles, or roles that reflect a certain context. Somehow it helps people sense patterns of behavior. Of course it also runs a high risk of stereotyping. But it keeps popping up on the radar screen.

In this evening's blogtroll, I came upon Meatball wiki on communities in the Power of Many blog. Hopping over to the Meatball Wiki page I found a wealth of work on online roles and characters. Also a link to Social Roles in Electronic Communications.

OK, I'll stop blogging tonight. I know. FIREHOSE!! And I'm reminded by Judith that I need to get my blogroll up. SOON!

Instant Gratification - Get an IM when your site is visited!!!

Instant Gratification - Get an IM when your site is visited -- I have been experiencing and playing with the "gratification" stuff around blogging compared to other online forms. It is a different sort of drug. Then I saw this. Endless!

I tried it, but it seems blogger does not allow the script!

NMC 2004: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined

Stephen Downes pointed to UBCWiki: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined a while back and I finally looked at it today. WOW! This is COOL! Especially after my previous post on conferences and precious F2F. I will be on the road so I can't toddle up to UBC (go if you can - it's a beautiful place) but I'm going to try and participate online. Now, to figure out of I a decentralist, centralist or fence sitter? I think it depends on how much chocolate I've had! I think I'm a meta fence sitter tonight.

I'm REALLY looking forward to this!

Shirky: The backchannel and conference design

Ah, one of my favorite themes about the intersection between online and offline interaction. Clay Shirky on Many2Many takes a look at the impact of online channels related to F2F events in Many-to-Many: The backchannel and conference design.

I could blather about this for hours but here are the three thoughts I'd like to put out to the blogosphere.

1. How can we best use our F2F time, including at "conferences?" - I think it was Pete Kaminksi, but I'm not sure, who said something like "our F2F time is too precious for work." Now my dividing line between those two is fuzzy as hell, but I totally agree that it is time to think about the precious F2F resource and how best to use it. This challenges ANY conference model, but in my mind it suggests more things like Open Space.

2. What are the ways we can use pre/post online work to make the most of the F2F time? In the sometimes successful (yes, into every life a little rain must fall) Muckabouts I've been party to organizing, the use of pre for agenda creation and relationship creation/deepening and post for reflection and next steps has been powerful. I use this in my work in international development as well. It works. Furthermore, by starting online, people see how they CAN develop "real" relationships with each other as they verify what they first "sensed" online and then experienced F2F. Starting online also makes it easier to go back online. I know this goes contrary to a lot of "common wisdom" of starting F2F, but I believe in it strongly. Again, context and how you do it matters, of course!

3. Control and Responsibility - The more we can support people taking responsibility for their learning and experiences, the better off I believe we are. This is really what those jargon words, "capacity building" and "sustainability" are all about. A few individuals can catalyze all they want, but change or forward movement requires the whole wave to wash upon the shore, not just a few drops! I think these online adjuncts (or are they central?) are one area to explore to support the wave.

Now, the things I have been thinking about a lot in terms of technology in the room at F2F conferences (IRC,IM, wiki, group annotation, etc.)include:

• How does this divide us? When is this productive? Deletory?
  
• What are the preparation implications (tools, training, etc.)
  
• When do you turn it off? Why? Who says?

Online Facilitation at Royal Roads University - 2003

Susan Byrne and Linda Waddell wrote an interesting paper about the preparation and execution of online facilitation in distance courses as part of their Masters work in Distributed Learning at Royal Roads University (a lovely place just outside of Victoria, BC!)

On page 66 they offer their recommendations:

Based on the findings of our project, we believe that RRU
could enrich learner and online facilitator satisfaction by:

Defining and developing an RRU online facilitation model and
standards for facilitating at RRU.

Increasing competencies of online facilitators by providing
more training in online facilitation.

Identifying and using a model of instructional design, which
consistently promotes interaction and provides opportunities
for more in-depth learning. This model of instructional design
should also enhance online facilitation.

Bottom line: they wanted more interaction and presence from instructors and instructors feel pressured (time/competency?) by these requests. No surprise. The scalability of online interaction is a huge question that came right to the forefront with distance learning.

The issues of standards is tougher. It is style? Substance? Freqency? And wouldn't these be contextual?

It is an interesting read.

Explaining this Weird Online Stuff With Scenarios

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?

A Checklist for Assessing: F2F or Online Meeting?

Nancy Settle-Murphy and Penny Pullan of www.chrysalisinternational.com shared this checklist as a tool to help determine of you should meet F2F or remotely. Nancy had shared it on the Yahoo groups OnlineFacilitation list I facilitate. I offered Nancy this feedback:

I really nodding in recognition with the second half, but the first half was harder for me to fall into step with. I think some of the characteristics you identify with F2F meetings are also REALLY essential to distributed meetings. 1-4 particularly apply to distributed mtgs. 8 can work really well remotely. 10 may be a reason FOR an asynch meeting.

Can you share a little of your and Penny's thinking about these as stronger indications for F2F? Or is it the whole group together on the first table that is the indicator?

Nancy responded (and kindly said it was ok to share this on my blog):

Our thinking was that if the list of statements on page 12, taken together, were mostly answered with an "I agree," then chances are, a FTF meeting may help achieve objectives in less time, with richer results. We drew from our own personal experiences as meeting facilitators, and considered the conditions under which remotely-facilitated meetings can work well, and when FTF sessions typically produce better results. I emphasize "usually," since sometimes it is possible to, for example, have a useful in-depth discussion with people you've never met. It's just usually more
productive and more revealing, given all of the ways we communicate nonverbally, to have these discussions FTF (yes, there are exceptions!). And yes, you're right that statements 1-4 can apply for those who wish to/need to meet remotely---we were thinking that if "yes," was the answer for all of these, then FTF might produce desired results more quickly. Again, this is based on our experience as FTF and remote facilitation over the years...

What this reinforces for me is that any tool or process to help us identify how we might do something - F2F or online - needs to allow us to include context. My context recently, for example, is distributed groups that at BEST can be F2F once a year. I have many people call or email me asking me, "how should I choose a tool or remote prcoess for my group." My most common answer is, "it all depends."

(This has an echo to Clay Shirky's essay Nomic World.)

BumpList: An email community for the determined

Lee LeFever of CommonCraft is celebrating the one year anniversary of his wonderful company. Cheers, Lee. He pointed out this great group today. I had to join (and of course, the obligatory guilt of bumping someone!) because I'm fascinated by the dynamics (or lack thereof) in a mail list group. Check it out... BumpList: An email community for the determined

Feed Bleeps and Blops

As a novice, I'm screwing up right and left and learning from it. I think I had my feed files in the wrong place. Testing now to see if I got it right. Otherwise, no one subbed will have seen the (many) posts since June 27th. Live, learn and always, EXPERIMENT!

Check The MetaWeb Graphic

The Metaweb from Nova Spivak of www.mindingtheplanet.net

I love the upper right quadrant, but I get a hit off of David Snowden's distrust of 2x2s which oversimplify issues -- or even misrepresent them. In this case the dichotomy of the two axis emphasizes the unnatural split between information connectivity and social connectivity.

I'm struggling with a similar categorization problem in the Tech Study I'm collaborating on. We categorize to simplify and show patterns, but it is the categorization people remember, not the complex substrate from which it springs.

Is this a problem or am I worrying needlessly?

Technology and Cultural Contexts

Trolling my blog roll I came upon a link from Ross Mayfield to a story from May 9 in the Portland Oregonian. It resonated with a pattern I see in my work inside but even moreso outside of the US. People consistently use tools in ways designers -- with their particular experience and cultural contstructs -- never imagined. Of course, I think it is brilliant how people adapt tools to their needs. (I also worry about the cultural implications of how tools affect the community of users. That's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.)

What amazes me is that the results of the study seemed to be a surprise to the writer, but a given for the anthropologist. We are living in a global society, but in the US, we still persist in a US set of glasses. Ross referred to this as ethnographic disruptions. If we look at it from a global perspective, it is not disruption. It is common sense! It is only the blinkered who are surprised.

Intel study upsets ideas of how products are used:

"One of the things this project helped me see very clearly was the ways in which we were assuming the cross-cultural nature of the home, that there was a physical thing that was the home that would be the same everywhere. The assumptions around that got built into a lot of things that we and the technology industry more broadly were doing...

In the West, one of the critical metaphors we use to divide up our time and our space is the idea of the negotiation between work and leisure. ... But what if there's a third set of activities that are really important? What if there are things around play, or religion or health and wellness that don't neatly fit into the work or leisure category?

One of the things that became clear in Asia, and is becoming true in the West, but we're not really good at seeing it, is that people are using these technologies for those third activities. In Asia, it's visible in the way people use mobile devices to support religious activities. The nicest example is people using their mobile phones to find Mecca. LGE, a Korean handset company, has produced a Mecca-finding handset with GPS technology in it...

...In the U.S., we imagine that mobile phones are linked to individuals, and it's a mode of individual communication. In fact, the model of privatized ownership is one of our foundational social notions, even within the family. We have one of everything -- our own cars our own TV, PC . . . But people believe in different ways of ownership . . .There's a bunch of working classes and ethnic groups that own phones in common. The model is not individual-to-individual communications, but node to node, or social network to social network, and that model is proliferating, particularly as devices move out of middle classes and into a wider spectrum in society where people are never going to own them individually.

I definitely saw women in middle-class homes in India who describe themselves as regular Internet users who had never touched a PC. The way they could say that was that they'd been dictating messages to children and grandchildren, and those messages were being inputted into the computer."

Social Software ideas | A Whole Lotta Features

I have this love/hate affair with software features for online interaction. Goes to the previous post about our piling more garbage on that really does not go to the heart of the challenge. At the same time, I'm seduced by possibilities. Check out a few ideas Matt posted in December 2003.

Social Software ideas | A Whole Lotta Features:

"While social software may be the internet revolution du jour among venture capitalists, as a user I'm still waiting for the killer social software app that lives up to all the market hype. Recently I've been thinking about how the current crop of options could be improved upon, or at the very least, how they could be leveraged to be something useful for users. I've come up with a few ideas, some half-baked, others fully baked. I offer them here in the hopes that someone, somewhere already built it or would like to build it."

Holy Crap, Flower Porn!

Flower Log. Does this have anything to do with online interaction? Naw, just me really enjoying a bunch of flower pictures. The gardener gene is not quite s strong as the chocolate gene, but HECK. I found the link off of

Technology and Online Communities

This is an older post, but it has a gem I'd like to echo here... Matthew Haughey writes:

"It seems like every cool new technology idea has to overcome what drags down older forms. Or maybe we just move on to new ideas hoping the old problems won't catch up with us."

Building Distributed Communities of Practice

Stephen Downe's notes from from the International Centre for Governance and Development's workshop, Building Distributed Communities of Practice for Enhanced Research-Policy Interface 28-31 May, 2004, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Amazing notes with a soupcon of analysis from Downe's.

Theory Development for Organizational Platform of “User Collaboration Innovation Community ”

Jen-Fang Lee and Tzu-Ying Chan, of the National Cheng Chi University of Technology & Innovation Management, Taiwan, offer this paper Development for Organizational Platform of “User Collaboration Innovation Community ”. From the abstract:

...this study proposes the concept of the “User Collaboration Innovation Community”, tries to understand this new phenomenon by conducting projects where the opening of source software is the subject of this analysis, borrows the observation variables and propositions adopted by Mintzberg on structures of the innovative organization, and summarizes the opinions of scholars of organizational economics, the relationship between property rights and organization performance. This study further infers a series of conceptual framework and propositions on the relationships among “organization structure, property right, and organization innovation” for “the organizational platform of the user collaboration innovation community”. We expect that the construction of this concept framework will function as a concrete description and presentation of the innovation model of the “User Collaboration Innovation Community” and will serve as a clear path to be followed for continuous research in the future.

From the Association of Internet Researchers - 8 new papers book on opensource.mit.edu

So many papers, so little time. There are some interesting papers noted on this post to the AIR-L list (this is an archive page) -- [Air-l] 8 new papers book on opensource.mit.edu.

There is one that looks like an interesting starting point for me, and right from Washington State (home!) Daniel Stewart's Status Inertia: The Speed Imperative in the Attainment of Community Status*

The Sociable Media Group 2004 Papers

Just started cruising through MIT's Sociable Media Group . There are a bunch of interesting looking papers. Time to do some reading!

2004 Papers

Anthropomorphic Visualization: Depicting Participants in Online Spaces Using the Human Form. [pdf]
Ethan Perry
M.S. Thesis, MIT Media Lab

Telemurals: Linking Remote Spaces with Social Catalysts [pdf]
Karrie Karahalios and Judith Donath
Long paper, ACM Computer-Human Interaction 2004, Vienna, Austria.

Artifacts of the Presence Era: Visualizing Presence for Posterity [pdf]
Fernanda Viégas, Ethan Perry, Judith Donath, and Ethan Howe
Siggraph Sketch to be presented at Siggraph 2004, 8-12 August, Los Angeles, CA.

Social Roles in Electronic Communities
Scott Golder and Judith Donath
Extended abstract of a paper to be presented at AoIR 2004

Anthropomorphic Visualization: A New Approach For Depicting Participants in Online Spaces [pdf]
Ethan Perry and Judith Donath
Short paper, ACM Computer-Human Interaction 2004, Vienna, Austria.

The Keep-In-Touch Phone: A Persuasive Telephone for Maintaining Relationships [pdf]
Scott Golder
Presented as a poster at CHI 2004. (view poster [pdf])

Online Personals: An Overview [pdf]
Andrew T. Fiore and Judith S. Donath
Short paper, ACM Computer-Human Interaction 2004, Vienna, Austria.

"Scientists, designers seek same for good conversation": A Workshop on Online Dating [pdf]
Andrew T. Fiore, Jeana Frost, and Judith S. Donath
Workshop, ACM Computer-Human Interaction 2004, Vienna, Austria

Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments [pdf]
Fernanda Viégas, danah boyd, David H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Potter, Judith Donath.
HICSS 2004 (conference paper)

Piping All Your Political Messages Down One Stream

Progressive Pipes aggregates political and activist news in one handy place.

A Bunch of Interesting Links from the Weekend

Online Conference Discussions - From January 2004, this article echoes what I have seen in practice for integrating online pre/during/post interaction with a conference or other F2F meeting. Our F2F time is too precious. We need to make the most of it. This is one way.

Clancy Ratliff shares an interesting paper -- "Push-Button Publishing for the People": The Blogosphere and the Public Sphere. Lends more ideas as to how we E-ngage ourselves in the public sphere.

Charlie Lowe reflects on the impact of the interesting wiki on CommunityTiedToOneTechnology as it relates to his site. He talks about removing forum modules from Kairosnews. All blogs, all the time. What does this mean for people who prefer forums or story modules?

David Huffaker's thesis, Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers. From the abstract:

Contrary to prediction, the results indicate that there are more gender similarities than differences in blog use. However, some gender differences were noted, regarding emotive features, sexual identity, language use, and some components of personal information. Males average more emoticons in their posts than females. Males also reveal their homosexuality more often than females, expressing their sexual identity or coming out. Males reveal their location more often than females, while females present a link to a personal web site more often than males. Finally, males use a more active and resolute language than females.

That's enough for one post. I gotta pee.