Death of a community member January 12, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, online facilitation, UK, cider, listservs , add a commentOn the E-Mint listserv there’s a discussion about what happens after the death of a community member. Should their profile be taken down? Can the next of kin access their email?
My story involves the death of a prominent member, waybackmachine ,
wiki and transfer of websites.
A prominent member of uk cider stopped posting for several months
and people began to inquire after him. Eventually his wife found the
group and explained that he had been in a car accident and was
recovering very slowly. Then we heard that he suddenly died of a heart
attack.
I was approached by a couple of members who were concerned that
Paul’s own website and accumulated content should not be lost to
posterity and they tried writing to his wife as tactfully as possible,
but understandably she had bigger worries at the time.
So I created a wiki page linked from the members page, which contains
tributes written by the group as a reaction to hearing the tragic
news, and links to Paul’s site as archived on the “waybackmachine”
where I assume the content will remain indefinitely, even if the
original site is taken down. It’s the saddest task for a facilitator,
but seemed very necessary.
http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Paul_Gunningham_In_Memorium
Interestingly I later discovered that the domain names and content had
passed on to another small scale web developer in a similar niche. I
don’t know how this was arranged, but I assume it was agreed with the
next of kin.
If somebody dies owning domain names and nobody inherits them, then
they eventually expire and come up for resale. There are then
companies who specialise in auctioning off the means to acquire them.
Community launch from an event September 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, theory, Community, online facilitation, COP, edublog, web2.0 , 5commentsThinking about a community birth process which I’ve just witnessed during August, it seems appropriate to try and generalise and seek further applications. A month long training course, open and free to attend, generates a momentum of interest, good will, and community indicators.
“what are we going to do when it’s all over?”
“I’m really going to miss the daily podcasts”
“I’m a few days behind, will the content still be available?”
“this forum is the best I’ve ever been in”
So then one of the convenors makes the announcement that the thirty day challenge goes on forever, and an ongoing community of practice is born. Of course the momentum built up during an occasional time-delimited event cannot be sustained at the same level, which is just as well, but the chances of enough residual activity continuing to get a self-sustaining community off the ground are probably a lot greater through this method, whether pre-planned or not, compared with the precarious method of trying to build up a critical mass through recruiting ones and twos, adding member by member, month after lonely month.
And yet, often the last days of a temporary online gathering are used to acheive closure, to sum up, and say ‘thanks a lot, and goodbye’. I began to wonder what would happen if…..
What if the conference on Web2.0 in January 2006 had been encouraged to continue onwards in situ?
What if a hotseat event, where people gather to ask questions to an invited guest, were to be left open and made public to generate further discussion amongst the participants and others. Maybe each and every hotseat or conference has a potential to spawn a practice community, to provide a growing public space. Many will dwindle and peter out after a while but maybe some will flourish instead of being shut down and put away.
I’m sure there are a few other examples where an online learning event has spawned a persisitent community, but nowhere near as many as have been conveniently wrapped up and dispersed. It’s not as if anybody would be forced to hang around against their will, or that any measurable resources would be consumed to allow event based learning communities to live on.
Or to put it the other way around, if you are hoping to launch a distributed community of practice then consider starting off by organising a month long conference at a specific time and space, build up a sense of occasion and then take it from there.
eMint evening on legal issues for online communities July 22, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, online facilitation, London , 1 comment so farI’m really glad that David Wilcox blogged the emint seminar on legal issues facing online communities which we attended over a week ago:
Designing for Civil Society: On stealing virtual sex beds, and the risks in Facebook groups
An evening of presentations and discussion on Internet law may not sound gripping, but I’m really glad I went along the other day to an event organised by Lizzie Jackson of e-mint, and lawyers K&L Gates.
The question on my mind during most of the evening was mostly to do with how we can keep the legal questions, and more often just the fear of them, from becoming an obstacle to the free exchange of information and opinion on the internet. It was heartening to hear the legal experts impart that the technology is advancing way too fast for the legislative processes to stand any chance of catching up with it.
Collecting tips for online facilitators and moderators July 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, distributed research, online facilitation, COP, listservs, Wiki , add a commentLike a previous post, ( and this one and this one ), this is another blog post inspired by conversation on a listserv (email discussion group).
The discussion was sparked off originally by a request for advice on dealing with repeated disruption in an online community. The e-Mint community responded with some suggestions, including technological measures. Then I invoked an ethical dimension to the topic and the scope continued to broaden. Participants started to append little notes of congratulation to their contributions, in appreciation of the discussion and then we agreed to capture the main points onto a wiki page which is currently hosted on DARnet, here.
I was going to reproduce my own point of view in this post, since I have some quite clearly differentiated attitudes in comparison with other practitioners, but I think I’ll just post a link to the wiki page which is a collaborative effort and contains a pluralistic approach to the collection of tips and the art of summary.
Tips_on_community_behaviour_issues_for_moderators
If you are a facilitator or moderator then I’d appreciate it if you’d have a look and let us know if this kind of thing is of any use beyond the context within which it arose or not. If it seems worthwhile, then do please bookmark the page, share it, edit it and add in your tuppence worth wherever you like.
A flock of geese March 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Bird Flu, Long Tail, online facilitation, blogs and community, politics , 6comments
Stephen Downes argues that the following statement is invalid:
“The flock of geese decided to land”
What in fact happened is that each individual goose decided to land. We observed this and interpreted it as the flock deciding to land.
photo under CC licence by glennharvey06
What a wonderfully clear example the flock of geese idea gives us to try and think about this clash of perspectives which has been rumbling along about individuals and groups, blog networks compared to listserves, the illusion of flat hierarchies, left right, north south, hive mind or cooercion and so on. It might just be me, but the geese question seems to point at something which may turn out to be a central and fundamental issue, like the difference between the naturalistic worldview and idealism.
So I will argue that the flock of geese did decide to land. {{ducks}}
Maybe one goose made the first move towards landing, or maybe the trajectory emerged from out of whatever was going on between the flock beforehand, but what happened next is a process which I would call ‘arriving at a group decision’. One or more individual geese began to move towards landing in such a way that the intention to land began to be communicated through the flock. Each individual goose then took a decision to follow the leaders, or ignore them. I’ve observed occasions when this results in a cleaving of the flock, with one part landing and another group splitting away to circle around and land in the next field, for example. Now, some individuals may be motivated by the desire to land, and others by a preference to stay with the group who are landing, that doesn’t matter. Nobody said it has to be one goose one vote in a secret ballot. The decision can be swayed by acts of leadership, by an averaging of cumulative actions, or by random events but a decision is what is arrived at by the flock in just the same way as the various parts of my own brain somehow come to a conclusion as to which shirt I will put on in the morning.
The reason why all of this is important, is because sometimes groups can do things which sums of individuals cannot, like negotiating decent pay and conditions through collective bargaining for example. In that case, the individuals within the syndicate need to be willing to subject themselves to a group discipline in order to take effect action without splitting. There has to be a mechanism to take a group decision which is binding on individuals in order for the individuals involved to benefit from collective action.
That’s why the emphasis on individual networks rather than groups disturbs me, it’s all too reminiscent of Mrs Thatchers’ “There is no such thing as society, there are individuals and there are families”. Networks seem to have the effect of exaggerating inequality as already stronger nodes attract new connections faster than weaker ones. Is that the effect we wish to take an active decision to cultivate or should we make positive choices to nurture alternative patterns with greater long term sustainability?
Well Stephen is a skillful and knowledgable philosopher so I expect he will tear my proposition apart if he ever reads it, but if anything remains it can only help to clarify somebody’s thinking, somewhere - like mine perhaps.
Flickr introduce Moderators March 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr, online facilitation , 1 comment so farFlickr have finally decided to do something about the limited GodKing or Anarchy choice of structures for administering larger groups, so let’s see if they get it right…
FlickrBlog
Introducing the Moderator
We’re sliding a new level of account membership between admins and members — the moderator. A moderator is a middle-ground role designed to help administrators run the group, but doesn’t have full administrative power. A moderator can use the new photo moderation queue, remove or ban members, and moderate group discussions with edit/delete power.
This means that single admins will be more willing to coopt additional moderators without having to entrust them with equal powers. So less danger of rogue admins pressing the nuke button and destroying groups by deleting everything or making them irreversibly private. But more chance of teams of moderators being set up which then start to act as the group within the group.
Nothing in it for people who want to create peer-to-peer type groups without any admins at all. Unless its possible to create a new group and then immediately demote yourself? Nope, doesn’t work.
Wiki Wednesday and Forest Friday February 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, wikiwed, folksonomy, online facilitation, Music, London , add a commentI’ve got two evening appointments to write about this week. London Wiki Wednesday is the first since last March, when I spoke about my online exhibition and barn raising.
It’s at 29/30 Fitzroy Square, in the shadow of the BT Tower - nearest tube Warren Street. The format for the evening is this: lots of speakers get 5 minutes each, a short time for networking and some food and wine. For my turn, I shall be talking about Wiki Facilitation, Taxonomy development from Folksonomy tagging and then introduce the concepts behind pajamanation.
Then on Friday I’m down on the list of performers for the monthly Forest Roots club in Forest Gate, East London.
I’ll probably sing my latest song, “The Wreckers Prayer” and one other. Not Gernika though, that would take up the entire slot by itself and is better saved for April.
The Art of Threading February 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, listservs , add a comment
On a listserv, mailing list or similar, have you ever been accused of hijacking somebody else’s thread and wondered what on earth they are talking about?
One possibility is a side effect of systems which bridge between email and web based forums. Yahoogroups and googlegroups are popular examples but not the only ones. People who use email to read groups will sometimes start a new thread in the same way that they might initiate a new conversation with an old contact - by finding the last message that person sent to them, hitting reply, deleting the old message and composing a new one complete with new subject header. That’s generally a good idea because it vastly reduces the chances of getting their email address wrong.
But if you do this with a threaded discussion list there’s a chance that somebody reading the group via the web interface will wonder why on earth you have suddenly started talking about a completely different subject in “their” thread.
( As an aside, I remember in the past such complainants being mocked for some time afterwards by being referred to as “Oh Threadmaster”, but that’s probably a different set of circumstances )
There’s a pertinent problem here of how best to deal with this potential conflict between two slightly different sets of users of the same discussion group - the email list users and the web forum readers.
This is how I decided to tackle it when a mild complaint was raised on one of the groups I facilitate:
I noted your comment about threads earlier, and it might be worth trying to clear up some possible misunderstandings about the way the
discussions are presented to people when we read this group.
I believe a lot of people, probably most and including myself are
reading the messages as they arrive in our email inboxes. In this
case, it all depends what kind of email reading software or webmail
sevice you are using, and how it is set up , as to how the topics and
messages are displayed. Many will simply sort by message subject or by
date. There is also the option of reading the group directly from the
archives at eg http://groups.google.com where it appears a bit like a
web forum. I’ve just looked and it is true that the new subjects can appear as
continuations of older topics where people have simply hit the reply
button in their email and then changed the subject.I’m not saying that we need to have any specific rules or even
guidelines necessarily about how to post or start new subjects, just
to try and be aware that other people may have a different experience
or view of the concept of what is a thread and where it starts.If you wanted to be sure of starting a new thread by email, compose a
new mail rather than a reply. Set the To: or recipient to
somegroup@yagoogroups.com ( you should be able to get that pasted in
from your address book ) and type in a new subject and message.If in doubt, it’s nearly always better to send in any information,
questions, ideas or opinions in any old way you can rather than not
bother.
How I would like to use SecondLife February 12, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, online facilitation, tools , 2commentsI don’t know how the marketing of SecondLife works exactly, but the buzz is not going away, it’s building. At present there are educator orientated communities bumping into each other as they clamour to organise tours of the 3d graphical world and attempt to analyse how it might be utilised to support educational community purposes. I’ve endeavoured to tag along myself a few times, albeit hindered by technical and timezone problems. The sheer number of people who want to book their place on the tourbus is proof in itself of some kind of excitement being generated, even if it’s only by the prospect of some free tuition in an unknown environment with free registration. But these organised large groups have proved problematic, while providing some individuals with worthwhile learning experiences.
* There’s the communication problem. In-world text chat takes up screen space and includes anybody within a certain distance while skype conferences can leave a bunch of zombie avatars doing nothing, with their owners just talking about it from afar.
* Then there’s the problem of bandwidth lags, freezing action and waiting for the scenery to refresh, which to my understanding logically seem to get worse when increasing numbers of dynamic objects, avatars, are gathered in one area.
* Different operational skill levels make it hard to orchestrate a learning session, with new arrivals asking questions which are time consuming to resolve whilst relative veterans get bored.
* There’s a strong sense that all of this is missing the point!
Perhaps the immersive 3d environment is designed to be explored and experienced by individuals, encountering others tangentially to interacting with the environment itself. In our working lives, we tend to meet people whilst we are doing other things, or because we have a purpose. We don’t just stand in a room and start demanding to be told who is supposed to be the tour leader, well not unless we are on a package holiday to China.
So some people are coming to early conclusions that while Secondlife can provide an exciting and possibly addictive experience for some, it doesn’t have much to offer for groups or leaders who wish to use it as a tool for supplementing their community building communications channels. And they may be right.
But what can it offer over and above the normal asynchronous social software tools such as listserves and web conferences? Personally I think I’ve had the best experiences through encountering small groups of two or three people in one location where I will return on the rare occasions these days that I launch the SL application. But there can be long gaps equivalent to watching the paint dry in between times. If there’s nobody else at all on that particular island, I’ll mooch about for a while then maybe try somewhere else or give up. The places with more than a handful of avatars present always seem to increase the probability of trouble though.
I’m reminded of one of the four dichotomies which emerged from my research into current thinking about distributed communities of practice last year.
Technology as tools for communities to use - as opposed to technology as environments in which new communities may evolve.
Secondlife seems to me to lend itself much more to the environment end of the spectrum.
So my ideal scenario would be to be able to drop in to a regular hanging out spot, and have a reasonable chance of meeting somebody I know, or a friend of a friend, and then most usefully random people who are attracted to the in world geographical location through having common interests, facilitated by the various related communities which used that location as a starting off point. The place in question is called Boracay Island, perhaps I’ll catch you online there sometime.
( “photo” by Nick Noakes )
Meanwhile, here’s a quote which I think begins to give an idea of the type of casual
encounter which I think points towards the unique advantage which 3d graphical environments may eventually offer.
From Cool News:
Sure, you can shop on Amazon but you have no idea how many other people are there, shopping with you. “There’s no way to notice if you and another shopper are looking at the same product, and start up a conversation about it.” What Second Life might do is provide an alternative, browser-free entry point to the Amazon store, and enable you to interact with shoppers and clerks.
One more thing. Is it just me being a bloke or is a lot of the appeal really just about dressing up and shopping?
How the internet brings us together February 6, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation , 1 comment so far
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
