Community used to be defined by location, affiliation, or membership. But today, the internet is fostering a giant network of interconnected communitites, most without any central authority. What happens when communities form and no one's in charge? At O'Reilly Etech, Derek Powazek of Technorati challenged our traditional notions of community:
What's the connective tissue that joins us in the virtual world? Powazek believes that it's the technologies that power distributed community - blogs, APIs, referrers, and links. These support multisite, distributed conversations that no one voice owns. Third-party aggregators such as Technorati (of course), or even the Bloggies, serve to focus community.
What's good about this? No one can kick you out of the community; no
one can turn off your megaphone. And since there's no distinction
between where you live and where you socialize (like there is in the
real world), there are fewer bozo actors. Responding to other's blogs on your own site means that instead of
posting "you're dumb!", you'll say "Powazek raised an interesting, but
unsupported, point." As Powazek said, "you don't trash your own house."
What's bad about it? If you can't find the connective tissue, or if there is a bad actor harassing you, there's no help - no authority figure in place that can fix your problem or police behavior.
The modern version of the company town can be seen in common blog-oriented platforms. Flickr, which still has one point of failure, is designed to 'play nice' with its open APIs, tags, and RSS. YouTube is a culture of contribution, and MySpace blends the public and private. TypePad is somewhat distributed, but hosting is shared - so it's more like renting than home ownership.
Decentralized communities are better mirrors of real community, so your own community should reflect real-life community affiliations. (e.g., you grow up in your parents' house, you move out on your own, you buy a house, you move in to your kids' house). These tendencies are measurable. MeasureMap from Adaptive Path, for example, is a statistics tool built upon the social Web. This shows the relationship between (a) here's where I said something, and (b) here's when the people came.
Meme phenomona like Four Things serve as proof of community, as do contests and quizzes. In fact, many of these Web 2.0 chain letters have a 'blog this' link, so that you can incoporate them into your own community. In fact, online community participation is often about making connections to your community hub online, rather than connecting to a new community. Powazek reminds us that we can't "create community" - we can only discover existing communities that will allow us to support them.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys o'reilly etech community technology nonprofit technorati
