You're Doing That Wrong! Rule of Thumb

A link to a Web 2.0 report led me  to post on the concept of 'collabuary' raised in the report, which prompted Stephen Downes to comment in reply, trying to distinguish between folksonomies and collabuaries (which he thinks isn't a useful term; it just means 'vocabulary' or 'taxonomy').  Some others disagree.

When I received Stephen's comment I was in the middle thinking about this issue as it relates to tagging communities from the perspective of online behaviors that encourage group collaboration or individual action.  Since Downes is an expert on this topic and works in a different discipline than NPtech, I sent  an email in reply, which I later refined in this post, describing the NPtech tagging community and how it is partially group collaboration, but partially individual action.  Stephen's reply:

So where does the line between group and network apply here? Good question - it contains elements of both. I guess I would say, as a rule of thumb, that you pass from 'network' (autonomous action, folksonomy) to 'group' (collaborative action, vocabulary or taxonomy) when somebody says, "You're doing that wrong."

My colleague, Nancy White, another expert in online community, responded:

Why does "you are doing that wrong" act as a trigger. Why not "hey, that was useful, lets do more of it together" be a group forming trigger. Or "hey, you are doing that differently than I am, let me learn from you?"  The values that aggregate us are surely not neutral, but they are also not only negative!

I really need to get this podcast of Nancy and Lee's Session:

Online communities have come a long way. When I started working on them around 1999-2000, commmunity was still communitiy, but the software was limited and the rules were different. These days new technologies, ideas and websites have pushed the community envelope in new directions. The old rules don't always apply and I'm interested in talking about the new rules for the new communities.

Resources included in the wiki with podcast

Beware the online collective - link and a short piece in Time by Jaron Lanier
summarizes a longer article called Digital Maoism
Several Responses to the article.  - link

Nancy have you diagrammed what the new rules are?

What does social design look like in these new communities?  Can you even design it?

Update:  Not two seconds after I blog this, Mike Seyfang from Austraila skypes me about his TALO pipe and we chat.  TALO stands for teaching and learning online and is a global event based out of Austraila!
He will be contributing some his shared work around creative commons and maybe collabularies.

Comments

[Nancy White]

Beth, no I have not diagrammed the new rules, because I'm not sure they are rules (patterns? ) and I think the concept of rules is also challenged by our diffuse meaning of community and that very interesting space between community and network. Where things coalesce in a network, but may not come to a fully formed community stage.

If find this place of changing boundaries challenges my past knowledge and assumption about "rules" and patterns. I think it is a new territory. Lots to learn.

I do know I have seen the "you are doing it wrong" pattern, but it is not the only trigger for group formation.

We can project our past experiences, and preferences into our descriptions of the patterns we see.

That's why we CAN'T do it alone. We need the wisdom of the crowd in this one, because I don't think most of us can really see the forest for the trees on our own.

I think you are writing about something really critical here, and I wish I had some free head space to write and think about it more.

Tonight online with the TALO folks we are going to talk about network facilitation. When asked if I'd present, I said, pshaw, we don't really understand it yet. Lets just talk about it!

[David Wilcox]

Beth - this is making me ask: how do I explain this stuff to the sorts of communities I work with (of varying degrees of experience). Maybe writing that script, doing that diagram, would help us see how far we have got.

[Beth Kanter]

David and Nancy, maybe when we have some headspace we can try that collaborative diagramming tool and explore this.

Nancy, I'm gonna try to get to TALO - maybe the 8:30 session?