Structuring vibrant communities

The numerous problems with pseudo online communities I listed yesterday can be easily eliminated. Taken as individual problems to solve, remedial efforts will only lead to frustration. The underlying structure of the community needs to be revised. Here are four key ingredients to a vibrant underlying structure:

1. Pronounced diversity: Most gatherings are set up as level playing fields to subvert anyone taking control or over-powering the group. This imposed homogeneity keeps exceptional talents, experience or resources from alienating, intimidating or diminishing particular members, . Everyone appears equally incompetent, inexperienced and lacking in resources for the sake of harmony. Nobody knows what anyone else is good for. When differences in talent, experience and resources get brought to light, lots more can get done. It becomes clear to all who to call upon for what, how many problems can be addressed productively and which combinations of members will be the most fruitful. The diversity gets recast as a valuable asset to the community, rather than as a looming threat to its cohesion.
2. Evolving personal profiles: Ordinarily, member profiles serve the purpose of only providing a published directory. The profiles get filled out in a perfunctory frame of mind. These listings get used by newcomers learning about established members, who in turn, learn about the new members. The profiles get looked at only once by any individual because that look-see resolved any questions, dashed any hopes and lowered every expectation for the future. Profiles ought to be revisited often and play into further questions, optimism and goals. This occurs when profiles are regarded as works in progress that reveal more over time. Evolving profiles create expectations that these customized, updated and reconfigured profiles are really worth visiting regularly. This in turn makes the members seem more interesting, worth knowing and potentially valuable for exploring issues together.
3. Standing requests: Most requests of community members are made in passing via email, forums, or blogs. If members don't get to them right away, they don't know if the request still stands, got enough responses or needs more input. There's no reply-by date or closure on the request. All that can be changed by using a wiki-style web page for standing requests. Responses can be added to the page, just like adding comments to a blog post. However, the page will get updates about the status of the request, appreciation for those who have responded and eventually be closed out.
4. Virtuous cycles of feedback: In an atmosphere where members are posturing and pronouncing self-congratulatory positions, feedback becomes adversarial. The follow-up comments may attack the arrogance, downplay the sales pitch and diminish the claims being made. Comments may, alternatively, offer gratuitous praise to the like-minded, collude with a tribe member or validate an underlying conspiracy. These brands of feedback form vicious cycles, deplete community vibrancy and engender a predominance of silence. Virtuous cycles can be formed by a formalizing an added element to the transactions. This added component can be observations about the pattern of interactions, restatements of a particular position, efforts to better understand an individual, work on the relationship between adversaries or the restoration of bilateral feedback. In every instance, the effect is energizing. It pays to give feedback and get feedback in return. The wording becomes constructive in this improved atmosphere. The quality of contributions to the community soars as these virtuous cycles take effect.

When an underlying structure like this gets installed, countless problems disappear. Community members feel understood and well situated to understand others. They experience getting talked with, instead of talked at. They notice they are no longer talking to a wall, but are finding out where they stand, how it's coming across to others and what else needs to be said. Members gain proof that they are making a difference which gives them incentives to contribute in more and better ways. The abundance of value created by the community gives rise to many more voices, ideas, approaches and solutions.

Pseudo online communities

Back in the eighties, Total Quality Management was all the rage. Companies adopted "quality circles" to enable those close to the work to work together on improving quality. There were a few showcase examples, but most were "quality circles" in name only. People showed up for the meetings without making an effort or making a difference. The same pattern occurred with self-directed teams, communities of practice and cross-functional task forces. In the dozen years I taught college, the same dysfunction occurred on the students' "group projects". At the same time, I participated in several online listservs. Now we have more than a million online communities that mostly appear to be communities "in name only". The pattern continues to repeat itself ad infinitum.

Here are some of the telltale signs of falling into pseudo teamwork or community dysfunctionality:

• The predominance of silence filled with only a few loud voices.
• Tired debates over positional stances that avoid collaborative processes for changing, learning, rethinking, problem solving etc.
• Use of the shared space as a dumping ground for personal frustrations, resentments and other forms of baggage.
• Routine experiences of "talking to a wall" and getting deprived of feedback, reactions, responses, and other perspectives.
• Polarizing of members into cliques, mini-tribes or turfs to make enemies of other members and to fortify defensive rationalizations.
• Contributing to mutual misunderstanding, mistrust, escalation of tactics and adoption of superficial stereotypes.
• Expecting others to provide what's missing while abdicating responsibility for contributing to much-needed solutions.

Over the years, I've come up with many explanations for why these patterns reappear so consistently. Here's more than a few:

• Left brain cognition thinks in dichotomies which rejects the nuances and complexities of effective interpersonal relations
• Emotional baggage interferes with authentic relating and our ability to understand others insightfully.
• Doctrinaire approaches to schooling breed passive learners who cannot regard "what's going wrong" as a lesson to learn from.
• Bureaucratic employment enforces a culture of top-down, hierarchical power structures which repudiate power-sharing, bottom-up initiatives and teamwork.
• Scientific objectivity rejects the cyclical, interdependent, reciprocal and self referential dynamics of seeing other people and "their" problems.
• We only relate effectively when we're feeling understood, and otherwise become preoccupied with getting attention or getting even.
• Systems of abuse silence their victims and teach them to feel permanently powerless, dominated and vulnerable to hostilities.
• Outer directed consciousness falls into vicious cycles which drains the participants of their personal motivation, commitment and creativity.
  

In this post I've used my bounty of the patterns I recognize to identify recurring problems. In my next post, I'll explore the solutions inherent in these ways of defining the problems.

Learning like a healthy forest

Forests in Costa Rica are much better learners than forests in Hawaii. Costa Rica is constantly invaded by predators and parasites because it's a land bridge. Hawaii is isolated and devastated by the occasional exotic species making it ashore. As James F. Moore explained in The Death of Competition:

Overall the ecosystems of Costa Rica are much more robust and resilient than their Hawaiian counterparts. Unlike Hawaii's fragile ecosystems, Costa Rica's are notably resistant to disturbances ... (and) better able to restore themselves after an attack. (p. 23)

Biologists have suggested that most mutualisms in nature evolve from antagonistic relationships. .. An important lesson, then, is to create and promote mutualisms. (p. 46)

Costa Rica has developed more ways to grow, learn, change and create because it's ecologies are constantly under siege. The forests are immersed in a "World of Warcraft". The ecosystems are forming mutualisms from the antagonisms. Positional stances evolve into synergies and symbiotic relationships. Enemies become collaborators that realize the best of both intentions. Invaders join the community.

Forty years ago, George Leonard saw schools functioning like the vulnerable forests in Hawaii: keeping out contradictions and defending against incompatible invaders. He promoted the value of a "Rogue as Teacher" in his classic: Education and Ecstasy.

In these endeavors, men are sometimes freed to burst through the restraining barriers of Civilized living and become free-roving hunters again, going "beyond themselves" performing feats of endurance, skill, and clairvoyance they had no reason to anticipate. (p. 91)

Brent sees the same value today of immersion in adversity, forming mutualisms, getting taught by rogues -- in his recommnedation of David Shaffer's book and his post Learning2.0 is Web2.0 + Gaming:

Battlefield management is stressful and you often find yourself taking on a role as guardian of a location while your teammates are running off to battle over securing the next location. This can seem boring until you become assaulted by a pack of 2 or 3 characters from the other team. You battle valiantly while IMing for help. Others on your team abandon their posts to come to your aid. Sure...eventually...you are killed...now you must wait 20 seconds in the graveyard before resurrection and you can get back into the fight.

How have you learned like a Costa Rican forest today?

Blogging as a gift economy

On the surface, blogging does not make much sense. That's one of the reasons I enjoy blogging so much. It's open ended, up for grabs and free to be what I make it into for me. Last month I was fascinated to read the questions Tony got asked about blogging from someone new to it and puzzled by the strangeness. I got asked similar questions in an email from Adele. Since then, Tony has been pondering blogging as a replacement for discussion groups and as in need of a companion forum.

Blogging is not making much sense to me as asynchronous conversations, especially compared to the forums I became so active in nine years ago. Blogging content makes more sense to me (and Jay) as memes evolving as they move around from one blog to the next and as a community with diverse voices getting assimilated. Blogging resembles the open source movement in software development and wiki. Blogging makes the most sense to me as a gift economy.

Blogging looks generous to me. It appears as initiative, volunteerism, and unrewarded contributions. Bloggers are going the extra mile and beyond the call of duty. It does not pay directly or extrinsically. It's the effective practice of giver's gain, enlightened self-interest or community maintenance. The rewards are intrinsic and indirect. This gives me seven ways to make sense of why particular bloggers, blogs and blogging topics disappear or flourish.

1. Initiative is a result of win/win negotiations. Willing cooperation and follow through disappear in a win/lose deal. We take initiative when the benefits are reciprocal and avoid the sacrifice when the deal is lopsided or taking advantage of our generosity.
2. Gift economies emerge from leaderless, decentralized, "starfish" cultures. They disappear when the culture becomes centralized, headed-up and spider-like.
   
3. Generosity and shared creativity flourishes when the tools of production and distribution are democratized and the search portals access "the long tail" of innovations. The outpouring dries up when a pipeline restricts exposure, seeks blockbuster, top ten titles and dismisses the "little guys with small followings".
   
4. Cooperation emerges when participants are getting validated and included in the formulation of a consensus by those who "seek first to understand". Cooperation vanishes amidst exclusion and imposition of a restrictive doctrine by those who "seek first to get understood".
   
5. Organizations thrive on open systems design, permeable boundaries and functioning feedback loops. Organizations die when closed, self-congratulatory and oblivious to environmental changes.
   
6. Students go for extracurricular research and self-motivated exploration when given permission to come to their own conclusions from a guide on the side. Students become passive and bored when told what to think and forced to comply with "one right answer" by a sage on stage.
   
7. Arts communities and cultural creatives flourish in a post modern context of multi-culturalism and empowered diversity. These disintegrate in a modern context of dominant narratives, cultural stereotypes and normative standards.

I found it inside my blog reader!

There's informal learning happening inside my blog readerI All these bloggers I subscribe to appear to be learning without formal instruction. No one is showing signs of rote learning, acquiring books smarts without street smarts, or regurgitating a repository of useless facts. All these bloggers are self directing their own learning proceses, motivating their own progress, synthesizing their own meaning and constructing idiosyncratic mental models.

How did all these bloggers get so resourceful and practiced at learning informally from the blogging they are doing? Was there a workshop or webinar I missed on how grow and change from blogging? Is there a sim where the branched story guides the learner to make the right learning choices? Are all these bloggers learning informally (from reading, writing, linking, subscribing, deleting, quoting and getting quoted) without being taught how to do that? Aren't they (and me) in danger of making costly mistakes to have taught themselves how to learn from blogging?

Are there leaders running this show? It there a design for this community in my blog reader provided by someone else? Maybe there is one of those servant leaders that leads by following, serving and supporting the followers? But I'm thinking I'm the real leader. I decide to subscribe and delete RSS feeds and control the membership and agenda this way. I create new folders and dictate which bloggers go in each. I give the folders names of my choosing, like I'm doing some Web 2.0 folksonomy tagging thing.

This might be an unconference. I don't recall flying to my blog reader, renting a nearby hotel room or signing up for the conference. But the latest postings in my blog reader seem like that whiteboard of potential conference sessions. It's that same process where the agenda cannot be set in advance, but emerges from the collective expertise that is gathered together. Whenever a blogger stays with a topic for several postings, that's like a conference session. When other bloggers join in via comments or links to their own blog, that's like a panel session in my blog reader.

My blog reader is like Nancy White's diagram for a "topic centric" blog community where there are many shifting overlaps between blogs. None of the bloggers are boundaried and ruling out the overlap with my interests. It reminds me (Nancy too perhaps?) so much of the new TV show (Fall 2006 inthe US) called "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip". The flux within the community comes up with a program schedule from scratch each week, abuses a team that writes comedy sketches in the basement while coaltions and stances constantly change among the characters. The show gives a fascinating portrait of an amorphous / structured community in action, just like the amazing show in my blog reader.

All these contributions appear to raise the water level and float all the boats. It's functioning like the open source movement and gift economies. The decentralized, democratized governance nurtures staggering amounts of initiative, creativity, and enterprising spirit among the bloggers in my reader. There are no privitized tax breaks, kickbacks or subsidies for blogging. It's as amazing as the quality of wikipedia entries or the generosity of each Burning Man festival attendee.

What's the effect of all this. It appears highly contagious to me. We're talking "network effects" like every blogger is linked to every other blogger. Changes can move through this system without making it happen. Unlike controlled distribution systems, confining pipelines and hierarchical power structures, this is the long tail of phenomenal numbers of artisans at work. And it's all inside my blog reader right now. Wow!

Technorati tags: community formation, Nancy White, informal learning, unconference, gift economy

Balancing structure and process

When I teach college classes, I announce on the first day that I do not give a grade for class participation. I explain that I did not speak up during class when I was a student. I know from experience that silence can mean someone like myself is thinking deeply, reflecting on what is being said and tying new information into other understandings. In classes with participation grades, I've seen students make comments "just to get a grade". Their contributions are contrived and pressured. With no grade for participation, the students' inputs are valuable, thoughtful and insightful.

In my view, a grade for class participation imposes too much structure. It derails initiative and sets up a system of compliance. The natural process of contributing to the common good is corrupted. Participation deteriorates into compliance and people pleasing. This is a problem in architectural, instructional and community design as well.

A house may be designed with a large formal dining room and a small eating area in the kitchen. This is a good structural design for a family who's dining process involves lots of entertaining and eating out. It's a dysfunctional design for families that routinely eat at home, informally and everywhere but the dining room. The process of the family dining dictates how effectively the design functions, not the designer.

In a blogging community, there are bloggers and commenters who show up on a blog posting page. There are also quoters and linkers who take the ideas further in other blogs. It's the lurkers who go unrecognized or get blamed for failed communities or instructional designs. They don't eat in the dining room "like they're supposed to" according to the structure that overrules their process. Their silence is seen as a problem, rather than a contribution. The structure of instruction or community formation was designed for participation only, not for processes of silent reflection and assimilation.

Self-directed learners naturally balance their own active and passive processes. They have a natural sense to take timeouts to question their thinking, troubleshoot their misconceptions and challenge their assumptions. They do not impose too much structure on their learning process by requiring themselves to disregard their confusion and forge ahead regardless of feeling overwhelmed.

Effective designs for instruction or communities give learners lots to think about, easy ways to discuss it, and time to sort it out on their own. The process of the learner rules. They experience the freedom and support systems to silently absorb the input and contribute when and how it works for them.

Technorati tags: community formation, design methodology

Bloggers come in flavors

I've been reading and rereading Nancy White's profound insights since Sunday. This is the first in many postings that will validate and add to what she is seeing in her white paper/posting: Blogs and Community.

Nancy is using a "strategic lens" to look at blogs as a means to an end of designing online communities. In her words:

By beginning to explore their shape and interaction patterns, we can begin to think about how to intentionally nurture blog based communities for specific purposes. Much like the lessons for forum based communities which emerged in the late 1990s, we are now discovering what works, why, and what might happen next. It is still new. The patterns are not stable. But they suggest ways to think about the role of technology, power, identity and content in designing online communities.

She has discerned three kinds of blogs that Tony Karrer has found useful in his exploration of shifting online identities. Her idea that there are kinds of blogging communities got me thinking further about kinds of bloggers and their differing contributions to blogging communities. I previously wrote about different voices that come together as a community heals itself. Using a "strategic lens" myself, I propose there is a significant difference between bloggers that gets perceived three different ways.

Like the blog communities that are "boundaried", bloggers can be focused on their expertise. Typepad features one blogger like this everyday. These bloggers drill down in their chosen topic and become a deep resource for a community that relies on their expertise. They are valued for sticking to their topic and not getting distracted by comments or getting quouted by other blogs.

Other bloggers are free to shift off their focus. These bloggers tie other blogs together, comparing ideas, connecting voices and developing commonalty. They are valued for nurturing a community, breaking stalemates, softening stances and deepening mutual respect. These bloggers effectively form loose affiliations as the need arises, like the structure of film productions and conferences.

This difference between bloggers can have a polarizing effect on a community. The thinking is dichotomous, judgmental and exclusive. Members take sides and only value their own kind of contribution. The diagram illustrates these stances in black and white. Fears come into play as they do in the first stage of a new collaboration. These communities can break down into "ghost towns".

The difference can also have a unifying effect on a community. The thinking is accepting, grateful and inclusive. Members value the diversity of contributions. The diagram illustrates this stance in green. The seemingly incompatible differences get resolved as it occurs in the third stage of a new collaboration. These communities thrive, evolve and become more valuable over time.

Achieving this unifying effect (the green stance) depends on the process of the participants. How are the members growing in, changing amidst, learning from and creating their community experience? Those processes are the theme of this blog.

Technorati tags: blogger, community formation, Nancy White

Democratizing elearning

What if workplace learning became democratized. The needs of the learners would rule. The learners would have the right to learn what they needed when they needed it in a way that served their level of understanding. There would be a safety net to catch those that fell short of the performance outcomes. There would be support systems to nurture damaged learners back to being self-motivated, curious, reflective practitioners.

Democratization of workplace learning would over-rule the imposition of most mandatory training requirements. There would be a decline of compliance training driven by policies or fear of competitive rivals. Informal, social, and distributed learning would provide the learners with freedoms, not further accountability pressures. Blogging would enhance workplace learning, (as Dave Lee promotes) rather than increasing the monitoring of blogs by "thought police".

Democratization is part of a natural cycle of governance. It follows a phase of piracy. When the democratizing of citizens, employees, students or patients becomes an established thing -- the closure brings about the next phase. Democracies become bureaucracies. Protecting the rights of the citizens then calls for layers of management, mountains of paperwork, countless committees and oodles of budget overruns.

The staggering costs, inefficiencies and stagnation provokes a privatization phase. An aristocracy takes control, consolidates power, imposes standards, and adds short-sighted incentives. This phase takes away rights of the citizens and expands the ranks of the abused, over-ruled and exploited peasants. This launches a counter-offensive of piracy, Robin Hood tactics, and guerilla warfare. The aristocratic controls are dismantled and democratizing comes back around.

Thus democratizing is on the rise whenever piracy dismantles the aristocracy. Most of the current corporate cultures appear aristocratic to me. Companies have become lean, mean revenue machines with drones making Powerpoint presentations. Needs of the learners are "off-radar". Demands of the manager are "front and center". (as Geetha Krishnan mentioned in his reply to the December Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog)

Piracy has broken up the consolidated control of the music and film production and distribution aristocracies. Are you seeing any signs of corporations losing their control of: workplace learning, "staying on message" and conformity of employees?

Technorati tags: elearning, Web 3.0, governance, democratization

After blogging - collaboration

Recently, Tony Karrer wrote about Web 3.0 and asking better questions. He previously blogged about collaboration here and here. This morning I realized how all three topics tie together.

Web 1.0 was about reading, surfing, searching, shopping, bookmarking, and changing passwords. Web 2.0 is about writing, contributing, expressing, commenting, tagging, feeding, pinging, subscribing, and linking. Web 3.0 is likely to be about relating, collaborating, co-creating and synergizing.

When collaborating reaches its full potential, there is so much to appreciate. Communication is open, honest and trusting. Learning is significant, disruptive and deep. Coordination is handled impressively and negotiated intelligently. Cooperation is healthy and respectful of boundaries. The process is open ended, surprising and fruitful. The result is inspired, 2+2=5, and better than originally conceived.

Collaborations can also be contrived and realize none of those potentials. Communication can be superficial, defensive and controlling. Learning will reinforce justifications, opinions and labels. Coordination will give each the feeling of getting ambushed, compromised and betrayed. Cooperation will degenerate into people-pleasing to avoid conflict. The process will be predictable, mechanized and barren. The result will fall short of expectations and fit a story of "I told you so".

Realizing the full potential of a collaboration involves the evolution of the questions being asked. When we are desperately seeking a collaboration, any collaborator will do. We are questioning whether a collaboration will every happen and whether we are qualified or worthy enough. Our questions arise from a basis of powerlessness and survival.

We then change to a consideration of power, control and quality issues. We question how much the collaborator brings to the table and whether there is enough to produce a quality product.

These questions then evolve into wondering if we are doing enough to reach out, cultivate the rapport, understand the other and take responsibility for the atmosphere. Our latest questions arise from a basis of compassion, reciprocation and service.

When we realize the full potential of a collaboration, we wonder what will come of this synergy and how to trust the process more. Our questions arise from a sense of mystery, appreciation and fascination. When the technologies of Web 2.0 become second nature, it's likely the occurrences of highly evolved collaborations will be commonplace.

Technorati tags: collaboration, Web 3.0, synergy, teamwork

Collaborations with Web 3.0

Four forecasted transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 appear likely to make online collaborations more fruitful, easy and rewarding.

1. Getting to know you: Recent successes with mobile content delivery and subscriptions to feed readers suggests that content on the web will be transformed. Perhaps there will be no more web sites -- only databases of XML that can be searched and read anywhere. Advances with Google Desktop searches and caches of all text, tagged media, PDF and HTML on PC hard drives offers the possibility of that content will continue to be produced in a variety of formats, but accessed uniformly. In either case, it will be easier to learn quickly about a new collaborator by searching for his/her previous digital explorations and creations. Out of this, mutual trust, respect, and better questions will emerge faster.

2. Working harmoniously: Advances in software development toward dashboards and widgets offer another benefit to collaborations. The goal is to put the user's workflow front and center, and line up the numerous applications in service of that process. This is a similar transition to the redesign of formal instruction to be learner centered. Some predict there will be no more discrete software programs to open and close. All functionality will be as accessible as the pull-down menu items within current software packages. As this becomes realized. the workflow of an online collaboration will be supported and enhanced as well.

3. Walk with me - talk with me: Real time conversations via phone, Skype and chat give collaborators a deeper sense of engagement and empathy than asynchronous communication like blogs and email. The democratization of world and game building tools by Second Life and Metaverse suggest that collaborations in Web 3.0 will be between avatars. The benefits of synchronous communication will expand to include a sense of companionship. The feeling of walking together, exploring as a team and taking time outs from movement - could all heighten the emotional dimensions of the collaboration.

4. It's only a movie: The extensive piracy of digital content suggests that future collaborations will become less concerned with producing products together. The explosion of desktop audio and video production also changes the inclinations of many consumers. The experiences of collaboration will lend themselves to being shared as interviews, films and stories. The sense of "an unfolding narrative in working together" will lend itself to public disclosures of plot, tensions and character arcs. It's likely there will be a shift from "what we came up with" to "how we are working together".

Web 3.0 is a moving target that will no doubt change as we get closer to it. In the meantime, it helps identify trends in the more immediate changes and ways we may benefit from those developments.

Technorati tags: collaboration, Web 3.0, synergy, teamwork

Community healing

One way to comprehend the possibility of "working in a healing way" is to watch healing occur in online communities. Those of us with subscriptions to the RSS feeds of many blogs are situated in the diverse voices of several communities. Reading the variety and interactions of these voices reveals a kind of healing that can also occur in workplaces.

Communities usually take shape with an exclusive, narrow focus. The educators in Second Life appear to be supporting each other in finding resources and building basic elements (prims) for their students. Their narrow focus in on the tools themselves -- necessitated by the steep learning curve to function inside Second Life. The community exploring the use of Web 2.0 tools in instructional design appears to be focused on numerous processes that use those tools. The frequent mention in blogs of informal learning, social learning and distributed learning indicates a community focus on how to use the tools more than on the tools themselves.

The successful formation of a community results in exclusivity and conformity pressures. Deviance from the focus is ruled out. Dissent gets experienced as disruptive if it invades the community of legitimized voices. The invaders appear to wound the community and the community's focus invalidates the "off-mission" voices. The community moves from "forming" to "storming".

Communities fizzle out if they fortress themselves and silence dissent. This dysfunctional posture maintains pleasantries, superficial compatibility and a luggage room full of unresolved issues. Communities only thrive if they move from "storming" to "norming" by integrating the adjacent and tangential voices. Expanding the focus heals the previous divisiveness. Including the dissenting voices restores the authentic functions of the community. Changing the rules for "getting respected" has a transformational effect on all the members.

This morning, I imagined a diagram that pictures this healing in the community using Web 2.0 tools in instructional design.

One dividing line separates voices with a short term, tangible focus from voices with a long range, unsubstantiated focus. The other dividing line polarizes analytical, categorizing thought processes from exploratory, synthesizing cognitive patterns. These lines create four camps that are coming together into a vibrant, balanced, fruitful and energizing community of diverse contributors. Watching this coalescing take shape will give you a picture of "working in a healing way".

Technorati tags: instructional design, community formation, Web 2.0 tools, healing