Category: Social Software

I’ve been running a slow burn at the Shirky thesis that social software killed Dean. Today, I read this Washington Post article on the implosion of the Dean Campaign while working on a piece about tools for online activism.
Disgruntled campaign exes spilled the beans about the divisions between Dean’s protective chief aide Kate O’Connor and Joe Trippi, the charismatic leader of the online troups; Trippi’s weaknesses as an operational manager; and the campaign’s inexperience with the national media.
The article re-inforces my impression that the Dean Campaign lost on basic execution. The internet took the campaign farther than it would have otherwise gone. But winning requires traditional campaign chops too.
Clay Shirky contends that Dean lost because of the internet. Deluded supporters poured out their feelings in blog comments, and had nothing left to give on election day.
Clay is thinking like an analyst, not an activist. Here’s the relevant question. If Clay wanted to:
* get a candidate elected
* get legislation passed, or stopped
* have a local administrator change a policy
Would he use internet tools as part of the organizing effort, to get the word out, find like-minded people, and co-ordinate action.
If the answer is yes, then it’s reasonable to conclude that internet activism was a partial success. It’s part of the solution, though it’s dangerous to conclude that it is the whole thing.
If Clay isn’t thinking about what it takes to win an election or an issue advocacy campaign, I don’t think the opinion is relevant. I love Clay’s writing, and think he is devilish smart, but I think he is missing the point.

You might think that XFN would be even more even more decentralized and emergent than FOAF.
Both are decentralized ways for individuals to describe their social relationships, in contrast to the centralized social networking services from Friendster et al. XFN uses hyperlinks to describe the linker’s relationships with the linkee, while FOAF (friend of a friend) uses a file in XML/RDF format listing all the friend relationships.
The reason that hyperlinks are generally such a nice way of showing emergent patterns is that they reflect millions of tiny choices that individuals make about what’s relevant.
But the XFN site anticipates that the primary use of XFN will be in blogrolls. If that’s the case then the relationship is buried in markup, in a list that doesn’t change very often. This replicates one of the major problems with relationship profiles — they are static, while relationships change slightly with every interaction.
Am I really going to update my blogroll to add a “met” attribute for Kevin Marks after meeting him in person at Etech? That kind of micro-maintenance will happen even more rarely than people clean their closets.
Kevin Marks’ “vote links” are a much simpler and likelier use of expressive hyperlinks to show emergent opinion. The choices are simpler — vote-for and vote-against. They let users express distinctions they want to express. In an article about Diebold’s ghastly security holes, you can link to Diebold with a vote-against link.
By contrast, do people really want to declare a relationship as a “crush”, “date”, or “sweetheart”? (These are real XFN vocabulary terms). Imagine the agony of deciding when to switch from “date” to “sweetheart”. Is it after the first kiss, or the third date, or flowers, or what?
Link emergence works when the links are frequent and simple. XFN won’t create link emergence, because the links are static and complicated.

Traction Software has apparently taken out a Google Ad for the words Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext. Traction is our competitor in the enterprise social software market. Ross saw the ad on his Flickr profile and other blogs quoting Ross’s personal blog.
At Socialtext we respect honorable competitors but this is pretty low. If Traction wanted whuffie as opinion leaders and googlejuice as A-list bloggers, they might try to say intelligent, articulate things about the Social Software market instead.
If there’s an alternate explanation for these symptoms of Ross-envy, then let us know.

On the other hand, Ross Mayfield alleges that the blog echo chamber gathers and amplifies the fittest memes.
* Blog-communities collect conversation, making it easy to form and find groups of people with similar interests.
* Blog amplifiers like Technorati and Daypop make popular memes audible above the noise. In political and organizational contexts, these tools and techniques will be powerful ways to get a zeitgeist check.
Popuar ideas are “fit” by the chosen evolutionary metric. But not all loud ideas are valid. Millions of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11, and that the terrorists on the planes were Iraqis. Doesn’t make the ideas true.
The zeigeist amplifiers make good counsellors but bad dictators.

The blogging session at O’Reilly Edemo had one part of the point. Yes, political blogging is “about” a new generation of A-list opinion leaders, those on the panel among them. AND it’s about building groups of the like-minded. AND its a tactical tool that campaigns can use to co-ordinate in public and in private.
Social software tools play a variety of roles:
* express opinions
* build community of the like-minded
* discussion among the diverse
* tactical organizing in campaigns for elections and issues

Getting to see people in person, whom I’d met by blog and #IRC.

Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.
Relationship definitions in social network services don’t reflect this — they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.
From conversation on #joito last night.

Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.
Relationship definitions in social network services don’t reflect this — they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.
From conversation on #joito last night.

“It is ‘reconnection’ that is the most powerful feature of these social network services, not new connections.” – Chris Allen, on the long, rich analysis of social networking services that I haven’t finished reading yet.

As Socialtext deployments grow within organizations, here are some reflections on enterprise social software deployment patterns, based on observation of usage patterns of weblogs and wikis at scale on the public internet.
There are three main tiers of social networks in an organization, as Ross Mayfield describes. These map to different usage patterns of social software.

• Project teams are creative networks, groups that work closely together. These teams use shared workspaces to communicate and collaborate intensively, and maintain a continuous, shared understanding of project status. Schedule and presence capabilities will make it easier for these groups to co-ordinate.

• Communities of practice are social networks. Knowledge workers want to be able to scan, discover, and meet other in their disciplines across the organization. On the public internet, there are communities of bloggers in technology, law, teaching, and other fields using this model today. There are established wiki communities in technical areas, like Apache and non-technical areas, like, for instance, Kayaking, RSS subscriptions provide an excellent method for members of communities of practice to discover and follow relevant projects and conversations. Blog search engines, including Technorati and Blogstreet, that are used to discover network relationships among blog communities.
• The enterprise as a whole is a political network. Weblogs can be used by executives to communicate in an individual voice across the organization. On the public internet, the relevant model is popular bloggers such as Joi Ito in Japan and Doc Searls in the US. The link structure enables the discovery and tracking of popular ideas, with blog search engines such as Daypop and Blogdex.

Network	Size	Application	Distribution
Political Network	~1000s	Publishing	Power-law (scale-free)
Social Network	~150	Communication	Bell-curve (random)
Creative Network	~12	Collaboration	Dense (equal)

• Each creative network creates its own core of strong ties among users who can act upon information.
• Social networks provide a source of new ideas.
• Political networks assure the rapid distribution of fit memes that benefit from social filtering.

As on the public internet, there are valuable emergent properties of the social software network that are greater than the sum of the parts.

• Within and across creative and social networks, managers gain visibility into multiple projects and disciplines
• Users can more efficiently manage attention by choosing their own subscriptions and notification frequency, instead of being flooded by email.
• Once critical information flows are made visible with a rich link structure, the organization can analyze and improve the information flow by monitoring social dynamics, identifying key hubs and structural gaps.

The adoption of social software starts by benefiting the workgroup with tools for rapid and convenient collaboration, fostering participation. Over time, the aggregation of content, and the emergence of link structures and social network patterns provides value to the organization overall.