Pieces of me on community... : ideas

quick note on third places

b2ix — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:14:00 GMT

Scott Hanselman, a recent Microsoft hire, poses a question to software developers about identifying their third places. I don't know Scott, but I love the fact we have more folks joining MS who are familiar with the notion of third places and the like. This concept, along with many others, is something that I've been thinking a lot about as I look closely at the overall experience for folks on MSDN and TechNet. I think the more community we types here, the better. While Seth Godin believes that community is the job of the future, like Nancy said, it's the job of the present . Nice to have another community person in the mix. Welcome to Microsoft, Scott. Let's go and change the world now :-)

When individual interests and the public good intersect

b2ix — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:28:00 GMT

With a new fiscal year upon us, my role is shifting a bit. as a part of that, i've been taking a closer look at community planning, broadly speaking. during this process, i keep on coming back to a best practice of sorts that occurs when individual interests intersect with the public good.

while this can be applied to just about anyplace where individuals and the public intersect, i'd like to call out flickr in this regard. one of the killer features (in my opinion) on flickr is "interestingness." according to flickr, many actions go into determining whether or not a picture is "interesting." these actions include:

where the click throughs are coming from
who marks it as a favorite
it's tags
and much more

taking a closer look at those actions, they are all focused on the self. clicking through to a picture is to actually display the full image. favoriting is so you can find it again. tagging it helps you to find it among countless other photos. in short, the individual actions of people then go into surfacing "interesting" photos for everyone.

what is the public benefit? seeing what others on the site find most interesting. other benefits include inspiration for photographers -> better photographers, or the joy from looking at beautiful photos. many of these items are also very individual goals, but overall, the public benefits as a result of these actions.

how this relates back to overall community planning is that i think a rather nice framework, or at least pillars to keep in mind, can be derived from this example.

1 -- know your audience
2 -- what's in it for them? identify the actions and items of highest individual value
3 -- what's in it for everyone else? identify the actions and items of highest collective value
4 -- determine the points of intersection
5 -- focus efforts on making it as easy as possible for the individuals to perform those actions, find those items, etc

note -- this is in part derived from earlier readings on flow, game design and the like. nod to amy jo kim for first drawing my attention to this

Building connections to build communities

b2ix — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:54:00 GMT

working in community, it's easy to get wrapped up in the technology, the measurements, the key performance indicators, the cost of doing, or not doing community...

when this happens, i find it helpful to take a step back and look at community from completely different perspectives. thankfully, i am able to complement my community work at microsoft with active civic involvement in the community with several local nonprofits. it just so happens, in the past month, I recently attended back to back retreats for two such organizations.

i won't get into the nitty gritty of each, but one common thread throughout both retreats was this notion of relationships between people. after all, what is community if not a series of intentional relationships with others?

To me, that is the core of what we do -- community building. Through our technology, we are building new ways for people to share their experiences with others in such a manner that this greater sense of self arises. No longer is it just an isolated experience of one person, but it's the experience of an individual that is then tied to the experiences of others. Experiences and content put forward by participants may match one to one the experiences of a good number of people. Likewise, the experiences of an individual may only be connected to a select few. Regardless of the total number of connections, the message is clear -- we are all in this together.

why bring this up? partly, it's front and center on my mind given how recent these retreats were. also, there has been a recent focus on this notion of measurements within the orgs i run. bob posted on this recently, and some of my earlier thoughts can be found here. another motivator is dave's recent musing on community, in addition to some recent readings for an advisory board on which I sit.

So pooling all of this together, I guess I am just struck with the fact that to really measure the impact of community, we need to understand and identify all the ways in which connections are formed with one another through the specific tools and services we offer. Sometimes this may exist within the confines of a particular venue, say a blog or a particular forum. Other times these connections occur through serendipitous discovery in tagging or social bookmarking. Once we are able to get a better grasp on all points of connection can we truly measure the full impact of community.

I fully realize that what is discussed above is not a simple, nor quick approach. Indeed, there is a lot that needs to be done to fully capture all of that information for current and future community solutions. This of course does not mean that we can't do our best to measure the impact as we go. As with anything, this is an iterative process that builds upon itself. It is my hope that through a greater understanding of how community is formed, will we really get a clear picture of the full impact of community.

(xposted)

Newspapers opening up blogging to the masses?

b2ix — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:53:00 GMT

I read via Influx Insights that The Telegraph is going to be hosting blogs for it's readers. Like Influx, I find this to be a rather interesting development. In many ways, this seems like a natural evolution of people identifying themselves with a particular brand they trust. Of course, there is the flip side of this and it could go down in flames like the LA Times experiment with wiki editorials.

(orig posted on my beta blog)

Intel's research on domestic satellites

b2ix — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 01:33:00 GMT

There's so much here, I don't know where to begin. Genevieve Bell is spearheading research at Intel that looks at this notion of "home" first, and then seeing what sort of tech opportunities may exist. Given my work with community and technology, this is of particular interest.

Here's a choice quote...

What for me is interesting, however, is the ways in which these sites [second homes] now seem to represent a place to get away not only from work, but the technologies of work and the work of technologies.

In some ways, this reminds me of the notion of the "third place" -- that which is neither home nor work, but some place in between. Domestic satellites seem to fall into this category.

As we look to build out the next version of community software, it would seem to be good to keep an eye on trends in the home space as that impacts how tech, community and the like are manifested in those areas.

(originally published on my beta blog)