Category: Uncategorized

Listening to the conversation last week at the Lunch for Good event last week, Tom Coates’ mini-rant against explicit incentives for social software participation was running through my head. The overarching question posed to the participants over lunch was about how to increase people’s contributing content to online sites. But that’s fundamentally the wrong orientation.

In a recent Twitter conversation about leaderboards, Tom had the strongest perspective in favor of intrinsic motivation.
Flickr doesn’t need leaderboards to motivate actions, no need for competition. Nor Facebook. Or most blogs.”

Now, the specific topic on the table was a good one – about how to handle identity and reputation in a way that doesn’t *discourage* participation (about which more in a separate post). Reducing barriers to participation is important.

But participation itself isn’t about “contributing content” much of the time. Wanting “users” to generate “content” is the perspective of the site-host that wants to build a repository of content and perhaps generate revenue from site visits. But this is not the perspective of the participants.

Wikipedia itself – one of the grandparents of community content sites – really does build on people’s motivations to building a repository of information. But other types of sites build on a variety of motivations. When people contribute to tech support FAQs, they are adding to a knowledge edifice like Wikipedia; they are also increasing their personal reputation as an expert and investing in karma in the old-fashioned sense, contributing good will to the universe, in a way that may be repaid indirectly. When people are discussing politics on sites like DailyKos and Calitics, they are engaging in advocacy and organizing, not just submitting neutral “content.” Reviews of books, movies, music draw on people’s motivation for self-expression and cultural affiliation. Sharing observations and links on Twitter and Facebook is about social exchange as much as about the content itself.

People participate for self-expression, to make social connections, for social reciprocation, to enhance reputation. It’s not about the content, or it’s only partly about the content.

So enabling participation is about creating an activity that’s engaging in itself (per Tom Coates); removing barriers such as hostile behavior, and fostering the relational, expressive, and/or reputation aspects of the experience.

When Twitter paved the cowpath, turning the Retweet social convention into a feature, their design decisions highlighted the fact that retweeting had two different social meanings.

One meaning is a “digg” – a simple, one-dimensional, unequivocal “upvote” for a post. By “retweeting”, the poster is adding their social cred to the original tweet, and spreading it to their own social network. That cheerleading is the meaning that Twitter chose in implementing Retweet as a feature. This use has a competitive dynamic to it; people measure the success of the meme by how often it is copied. The direct copy has bit of a multi-level marketing, spam-like flavor to it – I put a meme out there, and have the most success if other people take up the meme and start to hold tupperware parties for their friends.

The second meaning is a comment – copy the original tweet, and add a pithy comment with your own quick take. This pattern adds value, meaning, personality along with the forward. You’re contributing to the conversation, not just repeating what someone last said.

This is the version I strongly prefer. From the point of view of Retweet as call and response, Retweet as simple repetition sounds like echolalia, simply repeating the other person’s words directly. This is the communication style of a very small child learning to speak – or someone who has autism, schizophrenia, or some other mental disability. Only those who don’t have the ability to vary communication will repeat words directly.

I’m not sure how often I’ll use Twitter’s Retweet feature. Surely there are some times when I just want to give something a thumbs-up. I strongly I’ll continue to quote-and-comment more often to contribute to the conversation. The problem with the “cheerlead” version being baked into software is that because it will be easier, it will encourage people to simply copy rather than comment.

Twitter’s implementation of Retweet as a feature is a deep example of a principle of social design – build simple software, watch users, and then turn a carefully selected subset of the patterns they develop through use into features. It’s important to be very sensitive to how to bake the pattern in, because subtle changes can have major effects on the social dynamic of the system.

Twitter watched and implemented, but they implemented what is, in my opinion, the wrong thing. Or rather, they implemented the thing that turns the Twitter communication pattern into something more like competition, more like spam, and less like conversation.

The twitter buzz yesterday was about two posts by Stowe Boyd and Randal (Rand) Leeb-du Toit advocating Social Business as terms for Enterprise 2.0, along with the launches of new consulting services.

Names have value. Sector names are powerful totems in the consulting business. As a recovering industry analyst, I remember well the desire to name trends, and to have your name associated with the trend. And when innovation happens, it helps to be able to call it something. At Socialtext, we pioneered the adaptation of internet tools for collaboration and communication for business use, well before there were names for things. It was a lot harder to explain what we were doing before someone coined Enterprise 2.0.

In this case, the proposed change from “Enterprise 2.0” to “Social Business” is a lot less interesting than the trend the advocates are describing. Boyd and DuToit’s posts both describe a shift from an early market phase, when early adopters experiment with bringing web 2.0 tools and techniques to the organization, to a more mature phase, in which people have a more sophisticated understanding about evolving their organizations to take advantage of the tools, and the tools are deeply adapted to be suitable for organizational use.

So, switch terms? Shrug. Think more deeply and act more powerfully to adapt organizations and tools? A good thing to talk about and to do.

My main question about the Peninsula Cities Coalition efforts to solicit public feedback on the California High-Speed rail plan, starting with a teach-in this past weekend, was whether feedback would have any impact at all. Coordinators included two local city council people, Terry Nagel of Burlingame and Yoriko Kishimoto of Palo Alto, seeking with good will to organize public input on a major public project. But the High Speed Rail Authority, the agency charged with building the high-speed route between San Francisco and Los Angeles, is an appointed body with a majority of its board members appointed by the governor. The mission of the agency is to get the project done, not to listen to residents. There isn’t any obvious reason that they would listen to the concerns of the people who actually live on the route the train will pass through.

The event gave me some cautious optimism that there was a way for public input to have an impact. Dominic Spaethling, a representative of the High Speed Rail Authority, mentioned that they will be seeking feedback from local governments in terms of how design choices will affect the local areas. And a representative of Senator Simitian’s office also sought feedback filtered through cities. The Peninsula Cities Coalition is a group of cities (five currently, Burlingame, Belmont, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto), and the series of events is an excellent venue for city officials to gather input from residents. Tactically, cities have local land use and permitting authority, so a good working relationship with cities is in the High Speed Rail Authority’s interests. So there may be a vehicle to funnel input through cities, and some interest on the Authority’s side to listen.

Another reason for optimism was the demeanor of Robert Doty, the Director for the Peninsula Rail Program, a combined program to develop Caltrain modernization and High Speed Rail. He has responsibility for interagency coordination and regulatory approvals, so on the ground, he’s a key person. He developed the highly successful Baby Bullet program for Caltrain. Doty seemed both practical and considerate of local concerns. For example, he acknowledged that the implementation of the BART-SFO connector was botched, in cost and design. He mentioned the 5 stairways, sounding like someone who’s tried to use them! And he seemed to have a good relationship with the local folk on the podium. By contrast, representatives of transit projects and agencies sometimes come across as high-handed, presenting a seemingly inevitable conclusion to their audience.

The day contained a number of panels and presentations, with various speakers representing different aspects and opinions of the project.
* Doty, as I mentioned, came across as no pushover, but as someone who was engaged with the community.
* Rich Tolmach, the California Rail Foundation, was opposed to the project, and is seeking ways to stop it.
* Dave Young, of engineering firm Hatch Mott Macdonald presented information explaining how tunneling might be practical. this is an approach that some hope will reduce impact long-term, and others dismiss as impractical.
* Greg Greenway, of the Peninsula Freight Users Group, advocated for continuing to use the corridor for frieght rail. However, the Caltrain corridor gets only about 10% of the freight that travels through the east bay, and compared to Oakland, the port of Redwood City is a tiny blip. It’s not clear to me that other design goals should be sacrificed to support what’s a tiny freight base on the Peninsula.
* Bill Cutler presented the Context Sensitive Solutions approach. This sounded like a fine process for gathering community input. But it was not at all clear how the Context Senstive Solutions process would dovetail with the technical and operational schedule for the actual working of the project.

Unfortunately, I was late and missed the first session by Gary Patton. According to the California High Speed Rail Blog, Patton talked about how the project can still be stopped.

My least favorite aspect of the day was the “Open Space” section. I say this as someone who has attended and coordinated many open space session and unconferences. These can be excellent in two very different ways. When there’s a general area of interest, such as digital mapping technology, it’s wonderful to have people with interest and knowledge have sessions on the topics they care about. It’s not infrequent for projects and other follow-ons to be spawned from great sessions. But there’s no requirement for follow-up. When there is a common goal, it is a good way to have people self-select into interested groups and develop next steps. In this case, there is a common goal, but there was no clear charter for groups to serve that goal. Someone from the Peninsula Cities group volunteered to collect the writeup, but there was no clear sense of follow-up. This part of the program could have been better designed. The session I was in was a brainstorming discussion about how to use online tools to support the public input process. I’ll blog more about that separately.

At the event, I had a chance to meet in person the author of the Transbay Blog, a blog that covers transportation and land use issues in the Bay Area, after meeting by blog comment and twitter. I also got to to chat with Robert Cruickshank, who writes the California High Speed Rail Blog, which advocates for high speed rail, as well as Andy Chow and Brian Stanke of the Bay Rail Alliance, a rail advocacy group.

These days blogs and advocacy groups are at least as important sources of information on issues such as this as traditional media. So far, the event has been covered by Palo Alto Online and the California High Speed Rail blog

Disclosures:

I helped the coordinating team for the event, including setting up the online event registration and helping with outreach. And I wasn’t able to make the meeting where the Open Space session was planned. I’ll also send the feedback to the coordinators, with suggestions about how to better use Open Space in this context.

I live in Menlo Park and work in Palo Alto. I cross the tracks at least twice daily by bike. I like walkable, bikeable, liveable neighborhoods with access to transit. I’m interested in having a much better system of regional transit, and in ways for our society to wean ourselves from fossil fuel. I lived in Boston during the big dig, and watched the city pay the cost of trying to undo a bad decision to build an elevated highway through town 50 years earlier.

Though I’m concerned that the structure of the High Speed Rail project makes citizen input more perilous, I believe in general that the likelihood of having an impact gets infinitely higher when you show up and try to make a difference in a practical fashion.

Thanks to @dbschlosser’s link on twitter last week, I listened to Neal Stephensons’s lecture on the decline of genre. As a writer of what can variously be called speculative fiction and good books, his primary interest is in the fate of the genre and community he’s been associated with. Though I agree with the thesis that genre as we know it is in decline, I have some different perspectives on the nature and causes of the change.

Stephenson sees speculative fiction as fundamentally about intelligence – books and movies about smart people; and about exploring the impact of ideas. The genre has become increasingly mainstream, since it is increasingly cool to be a geek, an intelligent person with an informed passion. Stephenson makes it a point to describe intelligence outside of the framework of social class, of going to a brand-name school, of the signs of high culture; an informed passion for machine shop metal work is also geekery and good.

But there are some key aspects of the transformation of genre that Stephenson doesn’t address. The primary transformation over the last 10-15 years is in distribution, in marketing, and in the creation of publics and communities to engage with art. The existence of a broad “mainstream” and identified “genres” was related to older techniques of marketing and distribution. Powerful, expensive mass marketing was used to promote the biggest hits. More targeted marketing was used to reach narrower but still broad demographic categories of buyers. And, of course, physical distribution in bookstores meant that books needed to be shelved in one place, grouped with other books that people in the audience category would be likely to buy.

Given the limitations of mass media and the more targeted niches of mass media, the categories of audience were broadly demographic. Mainstream movies have tended to be segmented by gender, there are “chick flicks” about relationships targeted at women and “action films” about violence targeted at men. Music in the US was segmented in an invidious fashion by race, with white and black radio stations, and the categorization of similar musicians into differing genre shelves based on melanin. The emergence of internet distribution and the “long tail” means that the formerly cartoon-broad marketing categories are no longer applicable, and the allocation of physical shelf space is no longer relevant. People are free to describe content outside of marketing categories, and to organize themselves in groups that may or may not bear a resemblance to the groupings created by marketing departments.

Around culture in general, and speculative genres especially, fans have an easier time finding each other, creating large and active communities around Harry Potter, the Lost tv series, and much more. There have always been associations of fans; the internet makes it much easier for like-minded fans to find each other and the bond around fictional worlds and other art.

In Stephenson’s talk, he takes a few swipes at the “postmodern” schools of cultural theory, where critics call into question the ability of artists to control their material; related disciplines examined that lack of control with the lenses of gender and politics. Now, postmodern critics can swim slowly in a small barrel. I went to college at one of the hotbeds of postmodernism. It was rather common for grad student teaching assistants and undergrads flaunting scarves and cigarettes to claim that the text deconstructs itself, therefore imply strongly they were smarter than shakespeare. This was annoying. I avoided really engaging with the ideas until my senior year and then after I graduated. The extreme views of the junior disciples notwithstanding, the postmodernists and their economic and political cousins had some valid points.

Stephenson talks about the disappearance of the Western as a genre; the simplest explanation is the decline of social confidence in the “cowboy and indian” narrative. Fewer people were sympathetic to stories about heroic european people fighting native americans. Cultural criticism would identify the pattern. Stephenson makes a really insightful point about crime getting absorbed into television because of the good fit of detective stories to episodic structure. He makes a much less compelling point, I think, about romance being absorbed into everything – there’s still a big divide between chick flicks and action flicks – though I can’t talk about this in huge detail because those are the mainstream hollywood movies that I don’t go to, in part because of lack of identification with either broad gender stereotype. So, another argument explaining why sci-fi themes have broad appeal is that they operated outside the narrow confines of hollywood gender stereotypes.

Stephenson makes fun of the post-modernists, saying that it’s ridiculous to think that, say, Heinlein was not in full control of his material. But Heinlein is notorious as an old-fashioned pre-feminist whose female characters and gender relationships reflected stereotypes. The classical writers of science fiction, who wrote about colonists exploring other planets and experiencing tensions with the beings they found; world-threatening conflicts; male heroes with buxom heroines; in a world with the cold war, colonialism, and sexism, were tightly bound to social structures they could not clearly see. The postmodernists had some valid points.

So, I think that changes in technology, economics and social structure have at least as much to do with the decline of genres as they were constructed 50 years ago.

Over the 4th weekend I did a test install of WordPress MU and BuddyPress. There are several community projects that I’m involved with that could use this sort of technology, and I wanted to explore how far these new tools get there. The answer, I think, is not quite that far yet.

WordPress MU allows you to create a multi-blog site (for example, a blog hosting service, multiple blogs for local food in different communities). BuddyPress lets you set up a social network with profiles, a “shoutbox-like” feature, activity streams, and groups. In theory, this could let you connect a social network of social networks. In theory, the “open stack” of standards would enable independent sites to hook into the network, too. But we’re not there yet.

Here’s the vision that would mirror the structure of existing communities in the world. Say, the SF Bay Area environmental community. There is a large loosely connected overall community. There is no way to get a big picture of what’s going on. Individuals have closest ties to a number of smaller groups in their town, subject matter area, political group, affinity groups. I’m using the environmental community as an example, but see this model everywhere – in politics, music, sports, many places people get together.

So, imagine:
* a main site that aggregated posts, calendar events, and a view of the overall people network, giving an overview of the community.
* “chapter” sites that have their own posts, discussions, calendar items, and social ties
* independent sites, with existing urls and applications, that register with the central community and have their news, calendar events, and activities aggregated into the main site view.
* each “chapter” and independent site has substantial power to communicate with its group of users (unlike the FaceBook model.)

An individual has a single login for the main site and its chapters. Oauth is used to bridge authentication for people whose primary identity is kept at an independent site.

The OpenStack conversation is currently focused on solving authentication technical and usability problems. These are needed and useful. But authentication is just convenience. We’re saving people from typing another username and password.

Distributed communities are about killer applications – about doing powerful, bottom up community organizing and political campaigns, about building hyper-local news sites with a sense of community that reflects how people affiliate and feel, about enabling networks of people who engage with music, sports, gardening, some sort of culture. I’m really eager to see progress at the functional end of the stack – the standards and sample apps that actually let you bridge and aggregate social networks.

I wrote a bit about this topic earlier here, focusing on distributed profile aspect.