The Facebook rebellion: digital democracy is inevitable

Micah Sifry is trying to get his head around the implications of the Facebook experiment in digital democracy. I think it’s inevitable.

In the 3d world, a landlord doesn’t have the right to appropriate a tenant’s furniture. In the online world, if tenants demand rights and organize, they will eventually get them. As I wrote in the post linked above in response to this Shirky post, an online social network resident is like a medieval serf who is bound to his land and has painfully few rights. A combination of changed economic conditions (greater mobility) and changed political beliefs (government by consent of the governed), could transform the relationship between members and hosts, just as it did between rulers and ruled in the modern era.

Online tribes are mobile. We don’t love migrating, but we do it occasionally, because the environment is better — could be usability, functionality, or terms and conditions. The digirati tribe moved from Friendster to Orkut to Facebook. My civic project mailing lists have moved from Yahoo to Google groups in the last few years. The member revolt on Facebook could be part of an overall change in expectation about the relationship between digital landowners and digital tenants.

p.s. I saw Micah’s tweet but haven’t read his article on TechPresident yet because the site’s down as on Monday night and Tuesday morning. Will read when the site is back up.

Twitter is for conversation (especially in the workplace)

Julia Angwin writes a Wall Street Journal piece about how to Twitter. The article has good tips for beginners – find interesting people to follow, tweet yourself, share links – but gets one big thing wrong. Angwin writes that twitter is about self-promotion not conversation. Well, it depends.

Even though Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told Julia Angwin that “Twitter is fundamentally a broadcast system”, it’s not really up to Twitter. Early phone companies that thought the telephone would be used for business – for ordering catering and opera tickets. People use tools the way they want, and some people use Twitter for conversation. On the public web, tools like Tweetdeck, which integrate reply search into the user interface, and BackTweet make it easier to discover and participate in conversation.

My personal experience is that people in a variety of of my communities (Boston friends, Austin friends, Bay Area geeks, local netroots, etc) hang out on Twitter. We have intermittent conversations about topics little and big. One of my favorite things about Twitter is sharing everyday trivia with friends who aren’t nearby. It’s part of my social life with people I know in 3d.

So, how to have conversations on Twitter? Follow people you find interesting – people who’s work you like online, people you know from work or life. Don’t just follow big celebrities who won’t be listening to you. Follow people who are interesting and not so famous, who will have attention for conversations. Listen to what they say, and reply when they say something interesting. People can see your replies and answer you back. Voila, a conversation.

Inside organizations, the “social messaging” aspect of the Twitter format is even more pronounced. Mike Gotta maintains that microblogging isn’t a good term for the use of Twitter-like tools in organizations, where it is primarily about conversation. At Socialtext, we’re seeing that Social Signals is being used for questions and answers, link sharing, and work-related status. The format lends itself well to non-interruptive work-related conversation. The privacy of social messaging at work contributes to the conversational nature – people share more in protected spaces.

Broadcast is one use of Twitter, and there are plenty of celebrities and mass media figures who broadcast their thoughts and don’t follow anybody. There are also plenty of people using Twitter conversation as part of their personal and business social fabric – and the mode is about to become more common as Twitter finds its way in the workplace.

Scale effects in enterprise social software

When people think about social software, they think big. Thomas Vander Wal’s slide on tagging is a good example. At the bottom of the scale is personal use, and the largest scale is shown as a “mature system.” (see slide 25 below).

Organizations come in various sizes and shapes, from small businesses and workgroups to very large enterprises. Even large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees are tiny compared to the scale of public social software services such as Delicious (5 million users a year ago), and SlideShare (a million users in December)

The tools and properties of social software act differently at different sizes and scales. Bigger can be better, worse, or just different.

Tagging

At a large scale, with very large numbers of users and assets, tagging reveals the knowledge of crowds. A tag cloud in a large, active community reveals clusters of interests and enables discovery as a byproduct of many tiny acts of personal organization.

At a small scale, tagging doesn’t have these same effects. There isn’t enough distribution to discover interesting things about the topic space, and there isn’t enough density to make it a really efficient browsing tool on its own (although it does help with search).

On the other hand, smaller-scale tagging is useful. At a small scale, with good processes, tagging can be used to create workflows and update feeds that are useful and also adaptible.

Ranking and Rating

At the level of Amazon and NetFlix, ratings from a large base of participants quickly reveal the hits and the dogs. Rating is a quick action that lets casual participants contribute quickly and get something back in the form of recommendations to match their tastes. In a good-sized knowledgebase, rating is valuable to indicate which content is service its purpose and what needs improvement.

At a smaller scale, ratings are a very different tool than at larger scale. Ratings can be an excellent decision support tool to assess the popularity and priority of ideas in a finite period of time. Ideas are generated and fleshed out. Then, ranking and voting are used to prioritize the ideas.

There are also ways that ratings can be counterproductive at a small scale. In a discussion community where there are typically a handful of contributors or commenters per topic, having one or two ratings on each post is a meaningless waste of space (see an example of this anti-pattern on the Personal Democracy Forum, an otherwise excellent blog.)In communities where participation is high, asking for “ranking” – a low-engagement activity – can serve the purpose of reducing contribution. If you see something that you have a chance to make better, why make it easier to point out that it is broken than to go ahead and fix it?

Participation

Participation is an area where smaller communities have very different dynamics than large ones. In consumer communities, there are typically a very small number of very active contributors. The vast majority of people are consumers, and only a small percent do any amount of contributing. In a large community, that small number results in vast creativity, but it’s still a small percent of the whole. By contrast, healthy collaborative intranets have much higher active participation, often in the low tens to 50 percent or more.

Reputation

Large social systems have significant challenges with social misbehavior. Large crowds where people don’t know each other bring out anti-social behavior (trolling, spam, just plain idiocy). So large communities need to implement explicit reputation systems to reduce the noise caused by anti-social participants.

In smaller communities, where people use their real names and have real-world accountability for their actions, misbehavior is exceedingly rare. Facilitation is helpful to foster productive interaction and help a group head in a common direction, but explicit reputation isn’t needed. More implicit reputation revealed by contributions and participation can be interesting and relevant.

Principles

There are two social software principles that are at odds with each other:

  • social software gains value as more people use it.
  • social software is that which can be spammed

On the one hand, large scale networks can yield valuable insights, where large numbers of people tag, rate, and link information and each other. On the other hand smaller groups have higher participation, collaboration, and civility.

Administrators and champions who foster social networks should think about the scale of their community, and use tools and techniques appropriate for the scale.

What’s different about Enterprise Twitter

Twitter has taken off on the public web, and there are a variety of vendors who are offering “Twitter for the Enterprise.” As with social networking, it’s not enough to simply clone Twitter and deploy it for business users. Here are some of the key ways that enterprise microblogging is different.  This is part two of a series on what’s different about enterprise software. Part 1 is crossposted here and here.

With public Twitter, people use nicknames. Many people add a profile link that identifies who they are in the real world. Many do not, and tweet pseudonymously. In a business setting, the signal is tied to the user’s real-world identity, derived from their company directory entry and business activities. You can navigate from a signal to a profile, and discover a lot about the person in their work context.   A significant part of the value the people get from enterprise social software is finding the smart and plugged-in people in their organization.  Microblogging helps discover the interesting people, and the links to rich work-context profiles reveal more about what the person does and what they know.

With public twitter, one of the common usage patterns is to share links. Well-informed, insightful people scan the news, and share interesting tidbits with their followers. This valuable pattern on the public net gains power inside an organization. People can share links and commentary about to documents they are working on, for example, a marketing plan or a budget. And they can share private commentary about public links. For example, there can be a company-private discussion about a move by a competitor. Enterprise microblogging allows users to share links to private content, and to share private discussion about public content.

Confidentiality

The main difference between Twitter and enterprise microblogging is confidentiality. You’re not sharing information with the big wide world, only with your colleagues.  As in personal life, confidentiality frees people to share more openly about nonpublic topics.    Of course, people need to be still cognizant about what they share, as they do in meeting rooms or around water coolers.

Inside an enterprise, microblogging has a different balance of transparency and privacy than email. With email, your message is visible only to the people you choose to send it to.  With enterprise microblogging, the recipient chooses who to follow, and whose messages to see. This provides useful “ambient transparency” in an organization, for example spreading useful knowledge about products in development and customer relationships.  Enterprise microblogging is more private than public Twitter, and more transparent than email.

The Art of Enterprise Social Software

As you can see, it’s not enough to take an existing piece of social software and run it behind the firewall. Adapting social software to the enterprise requires consideration about how business and social environments are different, and how social software can be used to provide business value.

Government 2.0 in early beta

Last week I went to the “government 2.0” session sponsored by the Social Media Club. One sign that the space is in a very early stage is that the panelists were very different:

The story that moved me the most was David Canepa. A thirty-ish former staffer for Leland Yee, Canepa keeps a blog and a facebook profile. A local tv campaign interview was posted to YouTube.  David isn’t following a playbook, he’s just trying to reach out to consitituents.

Recently, David got into hot water when he invited Facebook friends to a local African-American community event.  Apparently the event had a fee, and some people were concerned about impropriety.  He’s working to get the policy clarified so he can continue posting to Facebook.  David would love to get more comments on his blog, and to figure out how to use the net to get feedback on local development issues.

Interestingly, David is getting stuck in a different place than local officials in Menlo Park, where I live.  Local folk don’t seem to have a problem with Facebook. My favorite local Facebook status update: Heyward Robinson is the mayor.   However, the local government in my town have gotten legal advice that they can’t host public discussions online because of an interpretation of the Public Records Act.   Another local elected official, Terry Nagel, helped build her reputation by hosting a site to report frequent power outages in her city.

David was a bit nervous about being on the panel. Individual local elected officials are breaking ground on their own. David wished that the session would have more interactive advice. I think there’s an unmet need to get some of the early champions of social media in local government in the same room to build on what each is doing well, and overcome the obstacles people are finding.

Where David Canepa’s concerns in Daly City are about building a local constituency, NASA PR folk are doing outreach to a national and global community of people fascinated by space. Instead of fielding the same two simple questions from mass media interviewers with soundbite answers, Veronica McGregor is finding an audience of educated, passionate fans, eager to understand the details of NASA technology and science.  Her staff wonders how long they’ll need to continue parallel efforts to feed the traditional media and the growing community of fans.  One of the key signs of an early market is the same case study used again and again – NASA is the poster child for social media in government.

Even NASA gets stuck. Ariel Waldman’s story is funny and sad. She was hired by NASA to help with social media, through a government contractor whose contract has a firm policy against employees using social software on the job. Oops.  Undaunted, she’s now doing SpaceHack, and indie site for space science hackers.

Evan Ratliff was the quietest panelist. His article on Wired describes the hurdles in opening the federal government for online communication.  Efforts to provide access to citizens are slowed by well-meaning policies like the Paperwork Reduction Act, which requires a laborious approval process for gathering information from more than 10 citizens.  Bev Godwin, one of Obama’s egovernment staffers, comments in Ratliff’s article that “Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys… Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.”  Ratliff reports that some federal government sites are forbidden to link to nongovernmental sites, because a link is seen as a government endorsement.  One Wired article barely scratches the surface.

The takeaway from the panel – “government 2.0” is in very early beta. The most advanced people are learning every day.  There is plenty of opportunity to adapt lessons from the public internet and the private sector to improve democratic governance.

What’s different about enterprise social software?

When people talk about “enterprise social software”, they envision “Facebook for the enterprise” or “Twitter for the enterprise. But creating enterprise social software is a matter of adapting patterns from the public web, not copying identically.

What is “Enterprise Social Networking”

In the public web, social networking software has become embedded in people’s lives, as a way to stay in touch and to coordinate. Similar patterns will bolster collegial connections, expertise discovery, and collaboration. However, there are some significant differences between a social network on the web and a network behind the enterprise firewall.

What is Friending?

In a public web social network, the primary gesture is identifying others as “friends”. The graph of friends delineates the boundaries in which each individual shares information. Contact information is assumed to be private unless shared with a friend.

But in a business social network, the lines of visibility are defined differently. In a plain-vanilla corporate directory, the assumption is that every employee has the right to see contact information for everyone else. You don’t need to mark “Dale” in marketing as a friend in order to see his phone number.

More than that, what on earth is a “friend”? Will people simply go around “friending” high-ranking executives? Should I need to have to specifically mark my colleagues in the product group as “friends”? What does it mean if someone is not my “friend.” The gesture of explicit friending doesn’t have much value, and has plenty of potential annoyance and harm.

In Socialtext, we use the “following” gesture common to Twitter and Friendfeed, and don’t support “friending.”

Where does Profile data come from?

In public web social software, people type in their contact information, alma mater, significant others, pets. In an organization, there is often already a repository of basic contact information in the corporate directory. HR and IT departments share responsiblity for keeping that information up to date.

Therefore, a business social network needs to draw on corporate systems of record for basic contact information. Admins need to decide what information comes from the corporate directory, and what information users should add themselves.

What are the Activities in an Activity Feed

One of the features that’s most compelling about Facebook is the ability for people to see updates on their friends activities. Talia is dating / no longer dating / once again dating Jeremy. Bob just watched xyz movie. Scott is reading xyz book.

This activity stream is compelling inside the firewall, for a different set of activities. People will be interested in updates on what their colleagues are working on, what documents they have edited, what key events have happened in enterprise systems. For example, “Shawn closed the support escalation ticket for Major Customer Q.” It would be nice, and foster adoption, to have some “small talk” applications that enable people to stay in touch regarding ordinary life. It can be highly valuable for the business to be able to be notified of important work-related updates.

In social networks, the context of the activity feed is one’s social life. In an enterprise social network, the content is one’s work activities in enterprise systems, documents, and processes.

What does an admin do?
In private label social public social networks, administrators do things like configure the available features and the fields in a profile. In business social networks, administrators integrate the social network with existing directories and applications. They play a greater role in defining communities and creating social boundaries.

In a consumer social network, the individual assumes that she has control over privacy and disclosure and there is controversy if those assumptions are violated by service providers. In a business social network, the administrator has more control. In some cases, this level of control is good and appropriate. Competing customers shouldn’t see each others information, and the activities of the M&A groups should be secret. An appropriate level of business confidentiality, like an appropriate level of personal confidentiality, increases sharing and honesty.

In some cases, admins are familiar with applications deployed on a “need to know” basis, and want use these familiar practices to set up applications designed to gain value by increased sharing. There are gray areas that will need to be worked out in software design, effective practice, and cultural evolution.

Next in the series: What’s different about enterprise Twitter

Imagine decentralized community organizing as a DISO app

In several different contexts (climate change organizing, local political blogging, marriage equality organizing), I keep coming across situations where individuals participate in multiple social networks, and want to organize across social networks.   Distributed organizing feels like a potential use case for distributed social networks. Here’s how it might work…

I have an OpenProfile someplace. Perhaps it is on my blog. Perhaps it is on my local group blog or environmental club.  I can “friend” people who belong to this site.  I attend a “creek cleanup” and that is visible in my activity stream.  This OpenProfile may be hosted along with my OpenID. (If not, my OpenID registration at the site asked me for an OpenProfile link)

When I join a new cycling site, and log in with my OpenID, it asks me if I want to share my OpenProfile with the site.   It gives me a couple of coarse-grained options, or it allows me to share my profile, item by item on this site.  I can see my profile in this cycling site, too. The cycling site lets me add a type of bicycle to my profile. It asks if I want to share this information with other communities. I say no because I don’t think it would be interesting to my other friends. Several of my environmental friends are on this site and also chose to share their profiles.  I can see they are here too.

The cycling club is sponsoring a “bike to work day”. I join. It asks if it’s ok to let my other communities know. I say yes. The information appears in my activity feeds on my blog and other communities.  I can see who is already participating in the bike to work day.  I want to tell more of my friends, including friends in the environmental club.  An invitation form lets me choose which people to invite. I can choose from all my friends, including those I know from this site and the environmental club.

Elements of this system:

* I have a core profile.  I can chose whether to share this profile with other communities
* When I share a profile with another community, my relationships are visible there to others who have chosen to share
*  Additional profile elements can be added by other sites. I can choose whether to share these elements offsite.
*  Activities are part of my activity feed.  Activites are shared by default with the local community. I can choose whether to share them with other communities (all communities, or some communities)

I can’t see Facebook connect meeting this need.  Groups like the environmental club and the cycling club want more control over member contact than Facebook gives them.  But atomized social networks keep the environmental group and the cycling club from easily spreading the word and inviting new people. Distributed social networks could help people connect, while preserving local privacy and reducing social spam.

Using alevin.com for OpenID via WordPress plugin

One of the benefits of yesterday’s move to WordPress was a handy plugin to use your blog url as an OpenID server. This lets you use the login info for your blog on a good number of other sites around the web. Highly recommended for fellow earlyish adopters; if you can maintain a WordPress blog you’ll find this easy.

I had used MyOpenID as training wheels. But its method of using your domain as openid server involves DNS settings, and dealing with domain registrars is typically a hellish process. The plugin from Will Norris and Chris Messina lets you provide OpenID login for the blog owner and any other blog authors, in addition to enabling OpenID for blog comments. It was quite easy, for an only modestly geeky definition of easy. Using alevin.com as the OpenID greatly reduces the microsecond time barrier to using OpenID when busy and multi-tasking.

The MyOpenID feature that it’s missing is a history of the sites you’ve visited. That’s a handy reminder of apps you’ve used, and a good OpenID adoption feature. Thanks, FactoryJoe.

Social network for voter education

Deborah Bowen tweeted the other day about the use of social media for voter education. Here’s an idea. Thing is, people get voting recommendations through their social networks. I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking at initiatives, downballot races, and other nonobvious choices, I look to maven friends who have some knowledge and perspective. The standard voters guides are somewhat useful, but they lack the perspective of a knowledgeable friend.

So, the opportunity is to have a social network application that enables mavens to fill out sample ballots (in full or in part). For each choice, the maven can add a comment and links to provide explanation and reference about their choice. Anyone can be a maven by filling out part of a ballot and explaining their choice.
Voters can choose to follow one or more “mavens”. Mavens who are connected and well-respected will gain more followers. The maven’s activities can be visible in an existing social network (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), so people can discover mavens in their social network. A maven can choose to have their profile and ballot be “public” (anyone can follow them), “private” – they need to approve new followers before followers can see their choices, or “networked” – your friends friends can see your ballot.

The system can display top “public” mavens, so followers can discover new sources of recommendations. Voters should be able to see the public and networked mavens followed by their friends.

This system would build on the existing social networks people use to make voter decisions, and would expose people to a wider range of information and opinion through the social network. Experts and influential people would rise to visibility. The ability to share comments and links will drive education around the ballot. And the roots of the system in the social network ought to encourage civil behavior, which could be severely problematic in a public opinion-oriented system.

What do you think?

Games and politics 2.0

Had a lovely brainstorm yesterday with Nicole Lazzaro about the connection between game design and politics 2.0. Nicole is a game designer and theorist whose new games are coming out soon. Her games combine entertainment with sustainability themes, and her company is devoted to the triple bottom line.
The new forms of social network political engagement have attributes of games. Whether it’s Beth Kanter’s Birthday Cause to raise money to send Cambodian kids to college or the Courage Campaign’s Please don’t divorce us collaborative photo album, organizers are leveraging social incentive to affect actions and attitudes.
Nicole’s focus is in the emotion of game design, which is particularly important for social action. When implementing game design for social change, do you stimulate empathy (the Please don’t divorce us Campaign), catalyze peer pressure to contribute (Kanter’s Cause), or trigger disgust at behavior you want to be socially unacceptable (like, say, throwing out recyclables).
Social movements take advantage of the technology of their time; the international anti-slavery and women’s rights movements were facilitated by international mail service and ocean transport that was low-cost and safe enough for activists to occasional travel and meet.
Meanwhile, today’s mainstream social action and political campaigns are still in the world of big fundraising, massmedia and bulk email, and haven’t yet gotten the coordinated social network mojo of the Obama campaign, let alone the grass roots improvisatory spark of Join the Impact. This seems like a world of opportunity.
I’m not the target audience for Nicole’s current games, though I think they are beautiful and cool. (Sorry Nicole). I’m not about to re-test my ability to play computer games while holding down a job and carrying other social obligations. And even Nicole’s gentle social incentives aren’t quite enough for me. I’m much more driven to play and create real-life, nomic games that affect the social and natural 3d world. And I see some pretty powerful ways of connecting Nicole’s principles with that.