Where is my place in this network?

"Where is my place in this network? What is my community within the network that allows me to hone and grow my practice of online group facilitation?"

These questions came up for me after seeing Joe Cotherel and Jenny Ambrozek's initial data from their survey of key informants in the "online community" sector. Seeing the historical antecedents, the ever changing influences over the years, has caused me to think about where I sit in that network and how I contribute to the practice.

Joe and Jenny are working on their final report, which I hope to share here and on Many2Many a bit later this month. If you want a sneak preview, you can see their slides from their presentation at the Infonortics VC Conference last month.

(Also posted on Many2Many)

The Art of Conversation

Via David Gurteen: Art of conversation: "Do you feel that many of the conversations you have are superficial?

Would you like to engage in conversations that show people who you really are?

The historian and thinker Theodore Zeldin... has set up a charitable foundation in England called 'The Oxford Muse', which invites people to have more challenging conversations - both with themselves and with others."

The Community of Practice Ecosystem

Miguel Cornejo shares his paper The Community of Practice Ecosystem - On competition, cooperation, differentiation, and the role of blogs..

This idealized ecology model may never exist in practice, but points toward specialization and cooperation. A single conversation and repository core (or a coordinated multicore system) relying for specific services on outside specialist resources, and actively linking to relevant content in the creative “fringe” of blogs. These blogs would keep the alternative and dissenting views solidly backed with content, thus ensuring the liveliness of community debate.

In real life, the most probable ecosystem will include some sort of collaboration as described above, and a number of initiatives or resources that refuse to collaborate or coordinate with the bigger, wider network. Thus evolution, and creative destruction, will persist, with the community’s practitioners acting as judges and tools of the usefulness, and ultimately the success, of each competing option.

Full document at Knowledgeboard.

Internal Channel 9 Team Email Thread

Internal Channel 9 Team Email Thread on Content Planning offers a fascinating peek into an internal email conversation at Microsoft. I asked Robert Scoble if it was as neat and clean as shown on the Channel9 site and he said some clips/garbage may have been taken out, but that there is a pretty clean email practice in the organization. Fast return, on topic writing and clip out the garbage. Wow. I wish that practice was more widespread.

An Example of the Complexity of Blog Based Conversations

Liz Lawley blogged on blog research. Elijah Wright responded via email. Liz asked to bring the conversation public and it was back on a blog. Alex Halavais responded (with a blog with comments in a second column with quite a bit of space. I liked that). Elijah and a few others post comments. A reader pleads for more context and then Alex provided a summary with some more context than Liz's original post.

This story exemplified three things to me:

• the complexity of following a conversation in blogspace, both from an attention standpoint and a technical standpoint. Think of the different ways readers might have tapped into the conversation, followed, or gotten lost. Without a rather sophisticated grasp of RSS, trackbacks and the ways things are loosely woven together, most would not follow this. (Tags on to my thesis that it is easy to start blogging from a technical standpoint, but it gets complex quickly.)
  
• the subtle impact of how comments are displayed in my perception of the conversation (Alex's comments-on-same-page give a completely different feel than the comments on Corante M2M). Seeing at least three comment formats in simultaneous play between Liz's, Elijah's and Alex's was very helpful.
  
• the care and passion with which some participate in the conversation. This demonstrates significant connection and reciprocity.

For me this is a really good example of how people move a medium forward, how they evolve a mode of intellectual and personal connectivity, and how embedded it is in practice -- a practice which may remain inaccessible or invisible to others.

I'm not suggesting we dumb down bloggging. Just noting that complex and subtle practices create by nature an exclusion which may or may not be desirable in different settings. Context is QUEEN!

It seems to me like I'm ready for more conversations about these practices of blogging between people. More than the tech talk. I'd love to sit behind some folks who do this and watch how they do it. Ask them what they are thinking. Ah, for a ton of free time!!! Any pointers to people who have done this?

The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland

Christine Boese, Independent researcher summons the spirit of Paulo Freire into her inquiry of blogs and the potentially controlling counterforce of organizational control when blogs show up in the workplace. Check out her paper, The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution

Weblogs and knowledge-logs, or “blogs” and “klogs,” have emerged into the post-dot.com bubble online world as a notable (and often non-commercial) social phenomenon. While some hear echoes of Web homepage voices from the mid-1990s, the blogging phenomenon during the Iraq war may have taken Web cybercultures in new directions. This qualitative and exploratory research considers the viability and social effects of the altered web page phenomenon of blogs and klogs as they affect the lives of information workers, in public Internet spaces, and with implications for private intranets. It combines ethnographic observations from a single case within the Iraq warblog phenomenon with the standpoints and personal observations from the author’s professional experience launching a klog inside CNN Headline News shortly after the war. It seeks to gain insight into the utopian and often unnecessarily technologically deterministic promise of a knowledge-log revolution and find points where the movement falls far short of that promise. While knowledge-logs can appear as efficient groupware tools for organizations, klog interface features allow political openings to change corporate cultures in ways most groupware never intended, with a goal of a dialogic, critical pedagogy through workers helping and teaching other workers outside the realm of “official policy.” Personal blog sites of journalists in the employ of large, knowledge-commodity organizations such as Time Warner release this same tension into public spaces and reveal the very real disruption on a large scale that klogs can create on a small scale. Ideas and models presented by Paulo Freire and Michel de Certeau are used as a lens for one possible interpretation of the events studied from March to November 2003.

Are blogs a tool of liberation?

Via e-Literate

From Contentious: 10 Cool Ways to Use Furl

I love practical blog posts. I enjoyed Amy Gahran's 10 Cool Ways to Use FURL, the collective URL tool.

Here are her first 10. Check the article for her pitfalls and recommendations as well.

1. Periodical or blog support: Links die. That's just the way the Web works. Online publications include a lot of links, and print periodicals list more and more URLs (for stories and advertisers). Creating a Furl archive to support your publication can help preserve the value of older links.

2. Discussion group support: Some online dicussions mention a lot of links – articles to check out, recommended sites or services, etc. Hunting through archives of postings can be exceptionally tedious, and often fruitless. If you designate a "furler" for your discussion group (someone who creates a Furl item for every link referenced in the discussion), finding those valuable nuggets can be much easier later on.

3. E-learning reference: The e-learning experience often yields references to online resources and examples that come from both the instructor (or course creator) and the students. Why not save and organize all that valuable material in a Furl archive, where topics relate to specific sections of specific lessons?

4. Editorial planning support: Journalists and other writers who produce stories for publications get their ideas from somewhere – often from items they find online. Typically, writers gather their ideas in preparation for a story meeting for each issue, and then sit down in a room or conference call, pitch them, and get assignments. Often in this process a lot of stories get e-mailed, faxed, or printed and passed around the group. That part of the process might be handled more effectively through a Furl archive.

5. Project collaboration or committee support: Similar to the editorial meeting described above, in the planning phase of many kinds of projects collaborators or committee members seek new ideas, useful resources, and relevant examples. A Furl archive can be a good way to collect, organize, comment on, and share such material.

6. Rudimentary blogging: Many blogs are little more than link filters. That is, the authors mainly link to relevant items, perhaps with a short comment, rather than write article-style entries. If that's all you want to do with your blog, why not just create and syndicate a Furl archive instead?

7. Research support: Journalists, scholars, and others who conduct project-focused on ongoing research can use Furl to support their work. For instance, this is what my "drinking water" folders in my Furl archive are for.

8. Telling friends about cool news stories: We all do it – see a cool story in the news, copy the text, and e-mail it out to a bunch of your friends. Probably some of your friends are sick of getting those e-mails. Why not offer them a webfeed instead, that they can check out at their leisure in a more organized fashion?

9. Online bibliography: Many white papers, research reports, theses, and other documents contain bibliographies or footnotes that feature Web citations. Again, links can die – but you don't want your audience to lose access to the source material. Creating a Furl archive for each such publication can help preserve your source materials for future reference.

10. Clips file: Many writers, designers, and others have samples of their work online, and they periodically want to show examples of their work ("clips") to colleagues or prospective clients/employers. Organizing all this stuff in a Furl archive is a more reliable and convenient way to store and distribute such materials than keeping a filing cabinet stuffed with paper and making lots of photocopies.

Well, there is one suggestion that really rings true for me that I can't resist posting:

* Furl needs real group access. Right now, only an individual can create a Furl account. However, you can provide access to that account to a group simply by setting up the account with an e-mail address designated specifically for that account. This is easy to do if you have your own domain and can create new e-mail addresses for it, or are willing to create a free e-mail account for it (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). That's not much of a hassle, but Furl should recognize that groups such as project teams will want to be able to access the same archive.

BlogTalk 2.0 Weblog Aggregation

via Stephen's Web ~ Edu_RSS ~ July 5, 2004. I have been playing offline and haven't had a chance to read much, but there are a lot of tempting links. That said, the lovely weather has been more tempting!

The 7 Person Conference Bike

Estee Solomon Gray points me to a great laugh and a whole other level of collaboration hardware! The 7-Person Conference Bike!

Another View: Blogging as Parallel Play

Michael Feldstein chimes in on Denham's post, noted in the previous entry. I like the suggestions that are emerging in this interplay, thus want to capture much of it directly.

Blogging as Parallel Play

This post is an illustration of why Denham Gray is right in his position thatthe blog is not the be-all and end-all to online purposeful conversation (e.g., learning communities, communities of practice, etc.). There are lots of great points in this post, but he gets to the heart of the matter near the end:

A cursory look shows little sustained turntaking, blog writers seldom reply directly to comments in their own blogs and themes ‘die’ quickly as individual writers move on to the next big item. Bloggers offer opinions rather than ask questions - inquiry and exploration are essential ingredients in knowledge formation.

One of the reasons is the very nature of the format. Responding here to Denham’s post on my own blog, I am obliged to address my regular readership primarily. If I addressed Denham directly, it would sound a bit weird. The context of my blog is an existing converation between me and my readership, of which the author of the post to which I am responding may or may not be a member. Rather than entering into a conversation with him, I am simply quoting him in the conversation that is already in progress (or, perhaps, the monologue that is already in progress). In contrast, were I to post a comment on Denham’s site, it would be weird for me not to respond directly (e.g., “I agree with you completely, Denham."). I would have entered his virtual parlor, so to speak.

While conversations can (and occasionally do) occur over trackback, from what I can see they (a) usually don’t last very long, (b) are very difficult to reliably stimulate/cultivate, and (c) rarely support sustained exchanges between two or three conversants, even when they do get hot. “Conversation” through blog strikes me a bit like parallel play in toddlers. We don’t blog with or to each other; we blog next to each other. Sometimes I pick up what you do in my play, and occasionally the kid next to me may, in turn, pick up on what I did. But we’re not primarily engaging each other.

On the other hand, this lack of direct engagement may be precisely one of the features that make blogs work. To begin with, I don’t need to follow social conventions and respond within the bounds of what Denham wrote. I am free to go off on a long tangent, covering whatever his post has triggered in my thought process rather than whatever I feel that I have to say in direct response to him. Second, if I’m not entirely comfortable with direct conversation, then I can feel safe within the intimacy of my blog/diary and choose not to look around to see what other people are saying in response to me. (In my blog, I get to decide whether I want to allow comments or trackbacks.) This can be liberating and valuable.

In an ideal world, you have both blogs and discussion boards. For example, in an online learning class, I’d like to implement a “trackforward” feature, where you can selectively pull an entire blog post (presumably by RSS) directly into a discussion thread, taking the conversation out of blogland (and off of the home turf of the original blogger) and into a common sandbox where everybody is invited for supervised play together.

Denham: Knowledge exchanges in the blogosphere

I'm in a gatherer mode today - bringing together some links and blog posts that reflect some of the thinking I'm doing in my work. Commentary at the bottom.

Knowledge-at-work: Knowledge exchanges in the blogosphere
Denham writes:

Do blogs really provide an easy, effective medium for deep dialog, creative abrasion and sincere knowledge exchanges?

IMO voicing, personal publishing (= push?), journalling, ephemeral commentary and cross-linking to like-minded blogs, is but a small facet of effective exchange.

At times I think k-logs are hyped by a few evangelists. If you look closely at the record, things are not all that rosy

* reciprocity is very poor - bloggers tend to say this does not matter, it is more important to be heard, to 'voice' or 'push' and publish your view - but reciprocity and a compact record help preserve the memory and emergent meaning

* 'community' happens from individual enclaves - bloggers retreat to their personal spaces to reply, the common 'space' is then fractal, distributed and walled - it lacks cohesion and persistence

* the 'record' is fragmented even categories and RSS feeds do not produce a coherent easily readable discourse that flows

* empathy is low - most times it is about branding and spreading memes and personal opinion rtaher than engaging in dialog.

Feel you need a more neutral container, a safe 'knowledge' space to commune, a 'Ba' to build trust and sustain dialog, equal edit access to encourage true collaborative writing (annealing / refactoring / facile annotation), an easier turn-taking flow to practice persistent conversation before you can have full sharing, develop the cohesion & trust to enable creative abrasion, supply sufficient context for sharing meaning and a pull space for deep listening / reflection.

K-logs are great for gathering news, RSS certainly helps with being informed, blog tools assist with finding memes - somehow I still feel blogging lacks the structures to engage in deep dialog. A cursory look shows little sustained turntaking, blog writers seldom reply directly to comments in their own blogs and themes 'die' quickly as individual writers move on to the next big item. Bloggers offer opinions rather than ask questions - inquiry and exploration are essential ingredients in knowledge formation.

I don't question the basic belief about the social construction of knowledge. But I do question a few of these points. For example, I would not say that empathy is always low. I think empathy is much a factor of one's network (extent, quality or lack thereof) than the medium in which the interaction takes place.

I agree that we are still seeking the structures that bridge from information sharing to sense making. No new opinion from me on that. Flog that blog!

As to bloggers offering opinions rather than asking question, I'm not sure of the extent of that behavior -- I have no data. I have seen that when I ask questions in this blog, I get responses. And I try to respond. (There are some tool issues involved, as well as time!)

What I am wondering about outloud now is how I use my blog. Do I come at it from a more social construction from past experience and thus get a more community based experience out of it? Does my past inform my blogstyle? How do I find others who share this communal approach in a more explicit way?