Full Circle Associates

Every time I re immerse myself in thinking about the space between communities and networks, my mind races. I should be doing April billing, prepping for travel, finishing editing, yet I keep jumping into conversations with my networks and communities about NETWORKS and COMMUNITIES! This morning we had a great one on Twitter and I wish I could drop everything, keep conversing and then reflecting. But I can’t. So here is the marker for the conversation, as best I could capture it by favoriting all the related Tweets –> Twitter Network - Community Conversation. If someone can continue to hold the space for this conversation as it wanders across media, please, I thank you in advance. There are some FABULOUS thoughts from aroberts, csessums, edmittance, band, budtheteacher, peterscampbell, stevebridger, melmcbride, CourtneySellers , injenuity
, nandito, coyenator, webb and MtnLaurel. THANKS!

For more of my obsession, tags…
Community
Networks

Thanks to a tip from Beth Kanter, I played with Tweet Clouds today. I tried three options, shown below in screen shots. The first is just my tweets, the second my tweets plus @replies and the third adds my del.icio.us tags. Fun! Notice any patterns? What I find most interesting is the difference between my tweets and my tags!

(The larger size images are easier to read, but too big for the blog page!)

I’ve been helping launch a global online workshop this week, support a massive proposal development and get ready for a F2F conference. (My session on integrating visual practices in whole systems change process has notes here.) Oh, and nurse my husband through knee surgery. So I’ve been silent on the blogging and Twitter front. I had not watched my blog stats much until I installed WordPress and, as is totally obvious, when you don’t blog, your traffic drops like a stone. Makes sense.

Same goes for Twitter. If you don’t tweet, you don’t get tweets back!  Beth Kanter pointed me to TweetStats :: for NancyWhite and help me get a great visual of my Twitter patterns since I first signed up in November, 2006. I don’t tweet when I’m really busy.

D’Arcy Norman, this morning on Twitter. A sure community indicator.

This month’s NetSquared Net2ThinkTank asks bloggers to share their thoughts on How Can Nonprofits Use Twitter? Should They Even Bother?

Here ya go, Britt….

Without diving too deep, I think my advice is to learn to use Twitter as an individual who happens to work for a non profit, then with other twitterers in your NPO, think if Twitter makes sense to you. It is one of those tools which really requires a sense of the possible practices to really then think about strategic application.

This image from Allison is too good not to reblog…

Allison’s Blog: Twitter connects once again

I have been doing little editing/clean-up bits for the upcoming “Stewarding Technology for Communities” book and one of the things we want to get right are the technical terms - and we want them to be understandable to people who may not be techies. One that I was chasing down yesterday was API, or Application Programming Interface. I wasn’t clear if APIs opened up access to functionality, the actual code, or both. I decided to ask my Twitter friends. Here is what I learned - I thought I would share it with you.

reply to NancyWhite

• davecormier @nancywhite it’s like exposing the underside of a lego block. if you make your block to fit the holes, you can connect to it 04:27 PM January 02, 2008
• D’Arcy Norman dnorman @nancywhite: APIs expose functionality so you can write your own code to incorporate it. 01:17 PM January 02, 2008
• Chris Lott fncll @NancyWhite also depends on what is meant by “access” to code– a proprietary system w/API can provide access to code 11:13 AM January 02, 2008
• Chris Lott fncll @nancywhite APIs provide access to existing functions, code and data, any or all of which can be used to further functionality. 11:12 AM January 02, 2008
• Scott Leslie sleslie @nancyWhite forget what I just said. I thought you were asking a different question. Just waking up. 11:42 AM January 02, 2008
• Scott Leslie sleslie @NancyWhite both, it depends. Some API’s focused around giving you functionality, other’s around data (though w/ data, there are other ways) 11:41 AM January 02, 2008
• Jan Karlsbjerg JanKarlsbjerg @NancyWhite API’s make FUNCTIONALITY accessible to other programs/programmers. 11:38 AM January 02, 2008
• Lion Kimbro LionKimbro @NancyWhite: APIs make functionality accessible. Even if code is available, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “accessible.” 12:21 PM January 02, 2008

I pretty much ignored work, blogs, and Twitter over the holidays to be more present with my family and to give my brain a break from thinking about work all the time. (By-product of a work-a-holic practice.) I did go through my Twitter contacts and accept all the requests to follow. Then I made my feed public. It was the “Return of the Plankton.” The convergence of those two things put me over the edge. The flow from Twitter was more than I could digest. I lost the feeling of intimacy of connecting with friends and friendly strangers.

Then I read Jim Benson’s recent post on Twitter, Seeds of a Meme. And I started nodding.

Twitter has been called a conversation ecosystem. It is actually part of a larger conversation ecosystem that includes .. well .. everything. Blogging, Facebook, email, chats at a coffee shop, daydreams.I see Twitter as a plankton layer-level of the ecosystem. Every animal on earth does not need to eat plankton, but without plankton we’d all be in a world of hurt. “Everyone twittering” seems like an absolute nightmare.

Everyone will not be twittering.  Everyone will not be blogging.

But conversations will start in one medium and move to another and then another.  From Twitter to blogs to mainstream media to public discourse.  Twitter and its successors will seed the conversations of the future.

Spot on, Jim.

From a practice perspective, I have to trim back down the number of people who follow me. I’m not sure I care if my feed is public or not, but it does act as a filter on requests to follow and discovery of new people. It’s not that I’m against discovery, I just can’t handle the volume.

I am not a whale, a filter feeding white anemone, damselfish, nor a basking shark. I do not eat plankton as my primary diet. My form does not have enough of those feathery things, with large surface areas to filter in all the phytoplankton. For my phytoplankton (Twitter) is seasoning to the rest.