Several weeks ago I met with Bill Johnston, Randy Farmer and Kaliya Hamlin in preparation forlast week’s  Online Community Unconference, dubbed #ocu2009 this time around. I have loved the series of gatherings convened by Forum One, (and their powerful and practical affilated group, the Online Community Research Network), and for me they have always been a loose circle of respected social tools designers, subversive online community trend-steerers, researchers, and other online community specialists and practitioners.

Randy posed the big questions. He used the term “tribe” in the sense Seth Godin uses it. Are we — the people who attend and follow those events — a tribe? If so, do we exist outside of those structures? What do we need for our community of people who tend to the many needs of online communities?

It was a juicy idea. People have been trying to figure out the format for loose connections among “the community sector” for some time, and we are getting to where that makes some logical sense to take action. On the other hand, people have tried to create gathering places before. We mentioned some interesting groups like Social Media Club, Community Roundtable (an East Coast originated initiative unrelated to Bill Johnston’s similarlly named events), Bill Johnston’s invitational Online Community Roundtable meetups, and other groups that have formed around people such as Nancy White and Jerry Michalski who are part of the loose Online Community Unconference orbit. Was there something that we could do that built upon the Forum One events and their research projects, but expanded it and made a non-centralized continuing focus?

Problem was, Randy couldn’t attend the Unconference. I offered to pose the question, however, and to get a co-convener for that session. Scott Moore was the one I had in mind, and I spoke to him the evening before.

Scott suggested that perhaps the umbrella is already being created as the peer network called the Community Roundtable. They have a gorgeous peer support site and are as close to a Professional Organization as we have so far.

Still, there is room for other levels of organizational complexity or lack thereof, something that does not compete with membership organizations but might extend beyond them.

The proposal I floated was for a monthly call to blog, write an essay, make a video, or otherwise do something in longer form than a tweetup. Free and expand upon some of the rich material that comes from these events. Surface themes and concerns. Take the opportunity to be considered and thoughtful.

These kinds of calls for commentary have been called “circus” or “carnival” calls for content on a theme before. There are various centralized approaches to them. Here’s an account of making that model work.

If somebody wants to play with that I’d enjoy hearing about it. But I have something more lightweight in mind, if we can make it fly. There are two parts.

First, let’s use #octribe as a tag for short and one-off communiques. Wherever we want to use it. You are invited. If this, or something like it, comes into being we have a way to be an open movement that can encompass other organizations and events that are of interest to our broader tribe.

Second, I want to propose an Online Community Tribal “open invitational.” The name is to be imagined.  The action is a second Tuesday call to write something on a theme, in a monthly exchange of blog or forum posts, wiki articles, white papers, slide shows or other longer-form contemplations on issues and opportunities in the online community sector (hey, I like “tribe” more and more!)

Here is an extension of one of the questions that was posed at one session I attended at OCU2009, and a them for the first OCTribe monthly post:

What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”? (Define community any way you please — a group of peers, customers, people with similar interests, people using a communications platform, etc. Define “do for” as you wish — support, create a tool, inspire, learn more about, etc.) Why top three instead of top ten? so we can talk about each in a little more depth. What if I can’t think of three? Write about one, or two.

Deadline: The idea here is to have time to reflect and get something that is longer and richer than a tweet, and to read similar and contrasting ideas. Once a month is a good pace, and it’s easiest to choose the Nth weekday of some sort. Provisionally I’d like to call Second Tuesday for this, but all of this is open to evolutionary forces. For July and August, let’s set July 8 and August 12. Posts, articles, etc are to go up on that calendar day where you are.

Can this be done without a centralized index? I know it can.  There is a model in the craft brewing community called “The Session”. Here are a few pages that show The Session in action:

Announcing a session about holiday beers.

The round-up when all the session posts go up about a month later

That community of craft beer connoisseur bloggers is a passionate niche community, and they are able to self-organize. Somebody eventually compiled an index, but the structure is loose, and the community does not submit through a form or site.

So if you want to play in the tag game, just use #octribe for as an umbrella tag for our community.  You can also pair it with a conference or meeting hash tag once or twice, to clue people in that you are at a conference that is related to the interests of this tribe.

If you want to participate in the longer form on the second Tuesday, the first question for you to explore is What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”?

On the 2nd Tuesday, come back to this very page and post your link to your piece in the comments.  Then on the following day I will get to do a roundup post commenting on all the linked pieces,. That post would have the link to the next call to action, for the next month, on the site of another member of the tribe.  (Feel free to volunteer and select a month to host, right here in the comments notes.)  Let’s see what the tribe can inspire in one another.

(A loose-knit beer community gets together at events like The Bistro’s Double IPA Festival 08, picture originally uploaded by me on flickr as fotogail.)

Dots connecting, worlds colliding

I’ve always been fond of walls, doors and other useful boundaries for conversation. It’s nice to have the ability to make subgroups of the populace, and to stay more or less on a topic as you choose.

That limitation pays off when it gives you some idea of who else is “in the room,” for context and shared vocabulary. Last year at the Online Community Unconference I was discussing Twitter with some social networking geeks and gurus who asked me why I was not using the now-famous microblogging site more. I said, “I recently took an exam to become a beer judge, and I want to talk with my new expert brewing and beer-tasting friends about things like flavors in relation to strains of yeast. I don’t want to drop that kind of geeky obscurity into the stream for my pals from The WELL community, for my professional colleagues like you guys, for people I care about who don’t drink or for my obsessed photography geek buddies with their own specialized lingo.”

Sadly, there’s not a ton of general interest in the strains of Bretanomyces and other “wild” yeasts except on a beer networking site, nor about how to reduce visual “noise” in long digital exposures except for places photographers hang out, such as the Photo conference within The WELL or in groups and photostreams on Flickr. These are not communication-technology preferences, they are context preferences, to reduce the chance of boring or annoying anybody.

Frankly, I think older pre-web social software did some of these things better than Twitter and Facebook do now, and that some of the best ideas and mashups to come will look familiar to some online pioneers.

However, today I am connecting a lot of the dots and tossing them into the mixed-metaphor stream. Hopefully happy chaos!

I met Brian Yeager, an enthusiastic craft-beer blogger and author of Red, White and Brew, at least a few times before and during the delightfully ad hoc and vibrant beer-community-driven SF Beer Week 2009. That week he did a reading for my pals in the Mad Zymurgists homebrew club, who I’ve collaborated with in producing beer tasting and evaluation events.

One of the things that we do at The WELL, the classic old-skool online community where I’ve worked for seventeen years now, is two-week author “interview” conversations that (unlike most of the site) can be read by anybody. These leisurely asynchronous talks feature authors who are active WELL members, as well as some invited by community members. I seldom suggest authors to the team of hosts who put the events together, but hearing good things about Red, White and Brew, I decided this could be a good time to mix channels!

So Brian started his Inkwell conversation today! His book is wonderfully readable, about brewers and brewing families in the midst of this gentle and delicious revolution, and it is an interesting picture of America whether or not the beer renaissance matters to you at all.  The permanent archive will live here:   Brian Yaeger’s Red-White-and-Brew discussion, on The WELL

Reminders are sprinkled around The WELL, I’m tweeting and facebooking, posting at Open Salon, etc.   So I am repeating myself in the eyes of anybody who actually reads a lot of my stuff.  That can’t be good.  There are real complexities of mixing too many of your specific interests in general feeds or contexts. I’ll give this a try during May 2009, and see if it is a better approach.  If not, I’ll move (most) all of the beer conversation back to BeerbyBART.com again. (Be sure to tell me if I bore you to tears — don’t just forget me!)

a sonoma evening photo from another year, originally uploaded by fotogail.

Four years ago I photographed these waves of birds at OCS 2004… and now I’m back for 2008. The morning session is non-profits and social software for good… currently Joshua Gay of the Free Software Foundation and Lisa Petrides of ISKME are leading a discussion about education and open source.

In 2004 we had a powerful IRC backchannel discussion. Powerfully distracting too! At the last few Forum One events I’ve attended there has been a shift to Twitter. So I’ll be delving back into twitterworld.

My gripe about twitter is that it does not support groups and subgroups within my stream.

So this will be odd. My Online Community pro pals talking platforms and social strategies, my craft beer pals at GABF talking beer competition, my photo pals talking lenses and curves and printing papers, political pals talking local and national election, oh, and my own YouTube political satire collaboration… all the different conversations ridiculously poured into one. Here goes, back into the narrows:

http://twitter.com/fotogail

The best get-togethers for online community professionals are hosted by Forum One. Their sold-out summer 2008 Online Community Unconference was just held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This year the demand was huge, and the percentage of participants from major institutions was up, too. I didn’t present at this one. I wanted to soak it all in.  I dropped in on some great sessions and sorely wished I ‘d gotten around to others, such as Jake McKee’s sections.

I’m interested in best practices, all kinds of group behavior and tool-design patterns and also in pitfalls and worst case scenarios. I jumped in to session on what happens when things go terribly wrong from Heather Champ of Flickr and Derek Powazek of the edgy and elegant magazine, Fray. The discussion led to a list of things to remember in the midst of conflict. The items on this big list vary in applicability, based on the culture of a community … and can that ever be different!

My suggestion for the list was to try to let all parties have a way to save face in a dispute. This is one of the ways to do what Derek had advised: avoid creating motivated super-villains. Or noble martyrs, as they may feel if they do not think they were very villainous. I think that in most cases respect and the ritual conveyance of respect through good manners are key in resolving these matters. Even if expulsion is the resolution, there are advantages to having the exiled member accept that they won’t continue to have access to the gathering place for the group. While being all casual with peers works just fine in the good times, courtesy becomes bizarrely important when relations are stressed. That’s just one reminder I sometimes need!

I wouldn’t even begin to define the term “community” for this crowd, by the way. The ambiguity was probably all for the best. Some were thinking of a loosely interconnected group that may use an assortment of tools and modes of communication (including good old face to face talking) to stay in touch and identified. Others were thinking of the audience and interactive users of a particular site. Some were thinking of a larger “target audience” sense of people out there in the world who should be aware of one another. Listening to the use of the term from one person to the next was very interesting for that reason. Randy Farmer made the point that this group of people interested in these issues is now blossoming into something more than a clique who all know one another, into an extended community itself.

Randy Farmer is an opinionated, empassioned, seasoned online community pro,. His experience goes back to the founding of Habitat, the first graphical virtual community. The news: He left Yahoo earlier this spring and is working on a book about design choices in interactive multiuser contexts. His talk on context and tool/features patterns is shaping up too. Catch it if you can, both to learn and to give feedback that can make such a book more useful to us all when completed.

Mashups for the greater good. Net Squared, year three: Nonprofit web innovators congregate.

Last month I was honored honored to be able to convene a Net Squared session on how to do community building using Flickr. My interest is in how people can build community and passion for their cause using the photo sharing site with or without integrating Flickr image feeds into an external site. The smart people in the room during the Flickr session had plenty of interesting challenges, questions and suggestions. It was fun and totally impressive.

To recap my own primary simple suggestion: If you want to get quality attention to your images (for their subject matter or their artistry or out of loyalty) try to give quality attention to other relevant image makers within Flickr. If you don’t you can stiil use the powerful toolset as an image (and short video) presentation platform, but you miss out on the even more amazing community-building aspects of Flickr, which is designed to be one of the great online social settings.

Net Squared is a project of the long-running CompuMentor organization, which originally got me online in 1990 when I was doing community outreach and donor relations work for a non-profit theater company that needed database help. CompuMentor got me a volunteer consultant who gave me a modem to make assisting me easier, and an email address back in that pre-web, all-dialup era. I became fascinated with the richness of the culture of The WELL which led me into a new world as well as a new career. They are responsible for Net Squared and Tech Soup, an ongoing support system thousands of non-profit organizations turn to for advice, free or inexpensive software and networking.

Check out the amazing projects — not just the winners of the grant prizes, but the whole array of finalists.

Watch for next year’s mashup challenge — the entries are getting better and better: http://www.netsquared.org/

I’m writing up my notes incredibly late for this event, primarily because I ended up with a free evening and some thoughts on the gathering. One thing that is obvious after going to multiple events organized by Forum One is the nature of the ongoing community around these small conferences. Any successful run of conferences tends to create a community of regulars, and in this case they are regulars who know and care about how online community works. I’ve been fortunate to be on quite a run of attending Forum one events. The chicken and the egg of course is that I really enjoy the people who come back, as well as the new voices and thinkers who turn up.

I had thought I might be out of town this summer for another in the series, but last minute changes made it possible to sign up for the next one, the Online Community Unconference, next week. Last year’s unconf was terrific, and I can’t wait for this one. An unconference has the advantage of being almost utterly flexible, allowing all kinds of formats. Visionary presentations given to a handful or a crowd of other event-goers. Open round-robin discussions or brainstorms of any size addressing specific issues. Little breakout conversations that are the conference, and that others may wander into. An unconference will not be terribly interesting if there is not a lot of experience, enthusiasm and intelligence in the room at the start, and that’s why the community that has formed around all the Forum One conferences (including the more formal and the informal unconferences) leads to such satisfying events. It’s all about all the interesting and interested people there.  So what did we talk about?

There was a lot to enjoy at OCBF Santa Fe, aside from the gorgeous exotic desert quality of the place itself:

The presentations were full of fascinating examples of the commerce side of providing homes to people to play, learn and otherwise congregate. Here, for a flavor, is one slide about virtual gifts:

Scott Moore and I co-led a session that started by asking for problems from community practitioners, then called for various answers from the group. This was the kind of session that could continue for hours, and the knowledge and questions in the room were truly remarkable. Do I have good notes of what came up? No, but I was soaking it all in. And it’s just what I’m looking forward to at the Unconference. If you’ll be there let me know.

Noam Cohen wrote a New York Times story, The Global Sympathetic Audience in the Fashion and Style section, about caring for strangers over the net. (By the way, online sociology and psychology is fashion now? Hmmm. Still an orphan subject.) “Audience” not “community,” you’ll note, which was accurate and to the point in that context. I enjoyed the article for some noteworthy Twitter support stories, after it started off with a weird reference that is close to home.

Weird to read, because as a long time member of The WELL it is freaky to see Blair’s – or would that be Mr. Newman’s – suicide cited in the Times so many years later, without any details about the impact on the then emerging community at The WELL, or his peculiar role there.

As a newbie on The WELL at the time, I was shocked by the diverse set of reactions to Blair’s initial destruction of so much conversational content. The anger was the eye-opener. The violent disapproval quite few members expressed at his “vandalism” of hundreds of his own posts – not seen as a “suicide” until later at Blair’s death – confused and startled me at the time. What was only later seen as a “virtual suicide” pissed people off to a degree that presents a stark contrast to the Twitter support dynamics cited in the article.

People will likely tell a stranger not to commit suicide. However, if the “cry for help” is less obvious, people are sometimes judgmental, sometimes supportive. Your own global audience may be sympathetic to a specific action you describe, or they may be inappropriately harsh and critical because the stakes and the context is not clear or not universally agreed upon.

Howard Rheingold’s classic account of Blair’s death gives some of the context from up close (scroll to the bottom of that section). Guilt and blame fueled widespread rage. Newer members like myself were astonished at all the hidden subtexts and alliances that emerged. As Howard said, “the feelings ran just as high during the virtual part of the grieving rituals as they did during the face-to-face part — indeed, with many of the social constraints of proper funeral behavior removed, the online version was the occasion for venting of anger that would have been inappropriate in a face-to-face gathering.”

There are many stories from The WELL where people were sympathetic and deeply kind to strangers. There have been others where the kindness was not timely or well-distributed, and this was one of those. It’s a famous example, here in the times it was boiled down until all the humanity and insight was removed.

I’m thinking about the man’s family too — how odd years later to have a son or brother famous only as a suicide who deleted first. And my posting this may only make that dynamic a little worse, I know. I am sorry for extending any pain.

Our power to be kind is clearly equaled by our power to be cruel, using any technology we invent. It’s odd to see this complex, troubling example used in conjunction with the global kindness of strangers, but with a little context, it reveals the other side of the problem of seeking support from distant friends and kindred strangers.

The eyes of the blogosphere are on Burma… will this mean anything?

I recommend this site: http://burmamyanmargenocide.blogspot.com/

Their use of a simple webpage opinion pole about what the international response should be is brilliant, naive or a bit of both. Some of the eyewitness accounts there have been stunning.

Kim Baine after the session at Online Community Summit

I was pleased to attend Forum One’s Online Community Summit again this October. It’s not the wine country setting but the intoxicating ideas that bring me back for another year. For me some of the most exciting ideas on design and group behavior came out of the “Recent Research in Online Community” session.

Paul Resnick of the University of Michigan presented on design and group behaviors. He is starting a project to build an open design handbook on the web, based on actually testing and quantifying the gut design choices we make when designing for interactive groups.

Fundamental findings so far:

• The ease of discarding identities does matter to the quality of discourse. (We all know in our gut that this degrades interactions, he designed a test and confirmed it.)

• A “can’t trust newcomers” attitude grows if sockpuppets, reincarnation with another persistent identity and driveby posting are too easy.

Solutions and useful approaches include:

Ways to reduce disposable identity problems:

• Make barriers to entry or to full entry,

• No voting/ranking allowed until proving oneself to be reliable or at least a real and unique person.

Examples of high barrier to entry include http://www.sermo.com/ — Social networking for doctors: Trusted by physicians because they look up your license to admit you to hang around with other doctors. (That’s way tougher than The WELL!)

• Research on collaboration implies designers should assign challenging specific goals!

This was tested at the research project at the Movie Lens site. The site’s goal was to get lots of user-rated movies.

• Don’t just ask to “please rate as many as you can” but ask people for specific targets: please rate 10 this week was compared to please rate 30; 90; 120. PROVEN: a specific goal is preferable, and a higher goal works even better so long as it is doable. (A drop off in contributions was seen when they asked for 120 movie ratings in a week. Most likely this was seen as impossible. Researchers expected a softer goal to keep the group happier and performing better, but saw the higher but not impossible goal of 90 yielded the best outcome.)

An audience question was asked about aggregate goals for group (Moveon, etc) From research on NPR fundraising, etc. aggregate goals DO help. Tell what others are donating or accomplishing … but tell about the 90th percentile, not top 10% of donors.

• Speculation from the researchers anticipated that people will shirk work that is assigned collectively to a group but the opposite effect was seen. An arbitrary group membership was announced to users. The other group members were unseen, there was no feedback or ability to observe the group’s work independently. Still, in this arbitrary group members showed loyalty to making the group succeed, and did better compared to those not told they were in a group.

• If you’ve got some kind of karma rating, when you show people at the bottom how they compare to median they will move up. (unless it looks impossible)

• If you tell top producers that they are excellent they will do less. (But they may do something different and even more special if challenged to do that.)

(He shared the amusing tidbit that Psych research (where deception is required in almost any test) and Economics research (where there is no deception allowed) were the two study types merged for this study. The solution: Selective truth. No lies used, but no whole truth was told to various sample groups.)

On welcoming newcomers:

• What happens in response to a first post or any initial contribution matters

• Getting a human response makes a 12% difference in retention.

• The tone of the response does not matter! Fights, praise, whatever!

• Accuracy of information in the response does not matter either! Response creates stickiness.

The Hawthorn effect is a problem in studying this stuff, too. (That’s from an old AT&T study in the 20s. More lighting = better productivity; then less lighting also = more productivity! One might cite the Hawthorn effect as a reason for redesigns, actually.)

Neel Sundareson, in-house EBAY scientific researcher – had some good info about reputation and behavior too.

Interestingly enough, classic academic auction theory is not a good fit with Ebay. In addition, people do not behave as they say they do if you ask them about their buying and selling. Hence they needed a serious academic research initiative inhouse to better their reputation systems.

• Ebay has an implicit desirability index: Search relevance has to be adjusted according to supplies of items available, so a market is not pure search. People search a lot for what is not for sale. What do you show them? Fascinating challenge.

• He noted there is a lot of community spirit out in the long tail of transactions with specific groups of collectors, etc.

• Items get sold, bought and then resold up the trusted seller reputation chain on EBay, for better prices.

He’s got gorgeous charts to show these things and more. It was cool seeing that level of research and analysis.

TALK TO ME: Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/pubweb/arguello-chi.pdf (includes the welcoming effect)

Paul Resnick’s Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/cscw04/ (includes group identity and contribution dynamics, and a link to the ongoing research home for this work, and his upcoming Handbook Project where he will be calling for case studies of group behavior effects seen in response to changing interfaces or services in communities of users.)

What if all human relationships were mapped, and if all your connections were always seamlessly available to you for some form of remote information sharing and communication? A good plan? This concept has been bouncing around more and more this year. Brad Fitzpatrick offers an enthusiastic overview of the idea in his hugely-viewed post “Thoughts on the Social Graph.”

I’m thinking about the patterns humans have made while socializing in other times and spaces. People have evolved with social and physical walls, borders, and segmented places where people can behave differently or be in different group contexts. We carry this desire to extend, block and retract our connections into our online interactions, so we create filtering, privacy controls and the ability to convene a new group and invite or exclude people.

Perhaps the most socially powerful online social context is the “Third Place” (as in the classic description of The WELL by Howard Rheingold.) We’ve all experienced some of that kind of scene at various times. It’s not home or work. It’s an interactive setting. It’s relatively open to newcomers. It’s informal. It’s not a confessional or a therapy session. It might not work for you if you dragged your boss, therapist, priest or parent in via an underlying grid of all your social relationships. It works because it is not universal or enduring, and parts of your graph are dark to people in other parts of it.

Historically, that great good pub in the village, while beloved and important, was not a place for blanket confidentiality. However, it was a place where there were certain understandings, and where the things you had talked about once you might not be talking about now because of who’s here or who you might have had a falling out with. It was easier to adjust with a smaller number of connections, face to face in real time. Those adjustments are still needed.

Groups of people have mixed degrees of cluefulness about what to gossip about, and when to be silent.

In fact, when individuals in an online site that functions as their third place decide such a spot is totally safe and secret, their choice carries a tiny but real chance of putting them and the people they talk about at risk by trusting the apparent context too much, socially and technically. A good privacy agreement may remind them, if they read it. Trust is risk-taking by definition, and gossip is a very old concern for human society. The third place and informal social information circulation also provides the chance of accidentally revealing things that make some corner of the world better. Those ideas or tidbits of social information want to be spread, so any confidentiality rule is usually unspoken, informal and situational.In a text world with archived interactions that presents a new set of social and design challenges. Modern culture is stumbling through the shards of broken learning curves, working out these dynamics.

So now let’s imagine that universal graphing of relationships fed into databases and extended out. It’s easy to grasp that each human could be seen to be at the hub of a number of lines representing relationships, and those connect to others in a classic simple sociogram. The hard thing to “graph” or design in an application is that not all lines are reciprocal and not all the people involved have the same information-sharing understandings. Also, as we all know, the trust and information-sharing understandings shift over time. People do or say things some people must not know about, and even if you are willing to be utterly transparent, that doesn’t mean you want to force the others in your invisible web of connections to be betrayed to third parties. You also may have no reason for secrets now, but in the future the laws, the government, your activities, your work and other factors may change radically in ways you can’t imagine. Your friend may flee an abusive relationship while you keep both in your address book. You may not stay in touch with someone you worked long ago, and may know they are now an agressively evangelical cult member who wants to recruit all your contacts. Contexts change, only partly because we want them too.

So network migration tools have to allow extremely thoughtful opting in, or people will have to abandon them at intervals, zeroing out their participation in that corner of the universal graph.

Maybe more modest goals are valuable. I have a few short term wishes:

- Make it easier to import information and to minimize spamming of your friends if one moves elsewhere and wants to replicate the network, without exposing their existence to one another in a new place or context. I think this is the problem people are experiencing, but I am not sure a universal mapping is needed to address it. This would mean designing for more elegant overlay of affiliation from multiple sites, with an intentional partially overlapping venn diagram outcome, rather than one grid to rule them all.

- Make it possible to preview new third-party disclosures that arise as a side effect of expanding a network. In other words, click on “see who will have new information about people other than you because of this action.”

- Raise awareness that the person you trust today may not be the person you trust (or even remember!) tomorrow, so perhaps we can start to both design and tailor our own user behaviors for shifts in affiliation and connections that age out unless renewed. (Some popular social network platforms are currently very bad at this!) Better to understand that than to see people discard one platform for another when too many contacts get stale or tainted by context changes.

I found a very informative post while I was musing about this issue, from microsoft research sociologist Marc Smith on Bill Johnston’s blog.