DARnet

Hi Andy

Why three groups? I’ve been a member of the onlinefacilitation egroup since forever, its part of my own research and continuing professional development to be a member of a group of fellow professionals and others interested in online facilitation. My own blog started not because of the role you know me in, but from another research project.

I agree that there are 2 perspectives at present here - the more traditional (relatively!) community facilitators and the rise of the bloggers. I wouldn’t yet dismiss the idea of a blog-based community, beacuse as unlikely as it seems there may be an idea in there. Otherwise, why would I be here?

Am I here as a facilitator or a blogger? Since its not part of my job, the answer is as a blogger. However, if the team decided to research the potential of a blogging community, that would be different. And I guess that if I reply in the onfac group, that would be as a professional facilitator.

From Shirley-with-her-blogging-beanie-on

Hi Shirley,
The third perspective is that of the traditional internet newsgroup or listserv. These have been going since before the world wide web was launched or the term community of practise was coined, The idea that an autonomously organised community can coalesce around a prticular topic or theme is taken for granted, and censorship/moderation/facilitation is generally only ever used as a last resort, to defend the community from external attack eg spam. The fact that such communities can happily look after themselves with only the lightest possible touch from a barely visible owner, or in the case of net news none at all since there is no owner, seem to be completely ignored by the new professionals coming along afterwards, who obviously have an interest in finding a role for themselves.

Back to the blogging, I don’t rule out the possibility of both spontaneously arising blogger ‘communities’ and clumsily contrived ones being able to work in a transitory sort of way, but i think we should consider the disadvantages quite carefully as well. It would be a shame if too much emphasis on individual blogging were to dilute the usage of genuinely many-to-many communication such that the latter is starting to be seen as less viable.

As far as these ultraversity researcher and faciliator blogs are concerned, I have been trying to help along with Tom Smith’s approach, which is to try and put the tools into people’s hands and see what they can make with them. The ultrastudents page on blogging seems to be pointing a few people in a vaguely similar direction but where we will end up is anyone’s guess. Even the most compulsive bloggers seem to flag after a period.

Oh, I think I see your 3 groups - I was confused because I thought you’d separated the onfac yahoo group from facilitators, when that is the membership of that particular group. Perhaps I’m not very fond of the indentification of separate groups in this way, as they are not mutually exclusive so it appears to me to create artificial boundaries.

As for facilitation - well, it depends what model of facilitation you have in mind, many communities appear to run themselves because enthusiastic members take on the facilitation role - helping newcomers, being welcoming, responding to others, making the online space lively and interesting.

Blogging versus community - why not both?

Yeah, if you look at what I wrote I mentioned a clash of three viewpoints, or perspectives. The mutually exclusive groups thing was something Shirley added and then knocked down. It’s like cyclists, pedestrians and motorists can have quite different views about how the roads and pavements should be used but many cyclists also own a car and nearly all motorists have to walk occasionally. There is still a conflict in practise. I won’t labour that any further.

Why not both? (blogs and communities) Well maybe, but there is a limited amount of writing that each writer is prepared to do in a given period. So a discussion which takes place here, or in a learning community, or on a newsgroup is quite likely displacing original writing which would have been posted elsewhere in each case. I don’t think you will generate more overall discussion by creating more venues for discussion, and if you want a concentration of good dialogue then it may be wiser to discourage the proliferation of too many new forums. It seems to me that a large number of individual blogs with small audiences might mitigate against the coming together of sufficient numbers of people with a common interest to maintain the necessary critical mass. I’m still hoping that the advantages might outweigh this.

Good point about dilution by having too many places, Andy. I wonder how this relates to jellyos? Although I looked at jellyos, I never used it for work but have come to know quite a bit about it (!). I gather that one of the attractions was the person-centric structure, was that a bit like having a network/community of bloggers?

Yes, there is some similarity between the two structures. JellyOS had the person-centric, leave a comment on each other’s spaces thing, but additionally had main and group discussion areas, which suffered from the dilution as well as technical problems, I felt.
It also had common pages that anybody could edit, which is a WIKI type thing that worked quite well. So from a social software point of view it was very sophisticated, just a shame that the technological implementation was so poor. I’d be interested to know if Africa Books are taking it any further.

I’m finally getting round to coming here to read the blog post and comments — which I appreciate. Andy, I’m really glad you jumped in to the onfac discussion. The results are still echoing.

I have been spending a lot of my thinking time around these questions of “bloggers/discussion forum/mail list” groups. Not a lot is clear, but what has surfaced is that I think people who associate themselves with these groups (or variants) may have very different definitions of facilitation and community. Which is very reflective of the fuzzy nature of both those things.

Because of this, I sense we are the point where we may be a bit better at building walls than bridges. I hope we can move more towards bridges because I am of the belief that

there is no one tool based solution,
that its how we use the tools that matter and, finally,
that tools are designed for groups, but experienced by individuals.

We need to find a way to negotiate, when appropriate, between the individual and group experiences.

Hiya Andy.
This site looks good. I finally got a basic roofing site up and running.
free.uk.tv.bigbrother had 32000 posts last year and is currently getting 1000 posts a day.
…and they said it would fail Hope you and your family are all well.

c ya
–
Keith

Hello Keith the Roof!
Fancy you turning up out of the blue on my blog.
I sometimes wonder about the time we all spent trying to build a movement. It was hilarious at times but also so frustrating. Was it wasted, well in some ways it certainly helped prepare me for this peculiar online degree course I’m doing!
I wonder what happened to Eugene.