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Reflections on a decade of activity in online communities May 29, 2011

I started to use the Internet for collaborative online working in 2000, and have been involved in various kinds of online groups ever since. These reflections were prompted by a COTW discussion triggered by Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network . I started to think about different purposes and types of online community experience, and noted the ones that came most immediately to mind:

Need for communication

I needed to maintain communication with a few people who I needed to collaborate with, but was not able to meet often face-to-face. As we worked together so the network grew. (This means that I knew a few people first, and there was a shared purpose, and the online network grew around shared purpose and interests and gradually people-who-knew-people brought others into the online group.) Some of these networks were just groups of people using a variety of tools to communicate online. Others used specific working-spaces-for-groups like yahoo groups or google groups.

Need for information

I needed to gain information, which I initially found through websites. I then discovered related discussion groups online. As I went to these groups I found people whose views I respected. Often the same people turned up in more than one of the discussion groups. Sometimes  we would a discussion off-list as it was not central to the interests of the rest of the group. As Skype became more available the typed exchanges of information one-to-one were sometimes augmented by skype voice chats. Now and again such people would be passing through London and we would get a chance to meet face-to-face. Now Skype voice sometimes becomes skype video as well.

Social networking sites

I got pulled into social networking sites by people in my networks. I got into Facebook because someone I knew kept sending me interesting files, but I could only open his files if I registered with Facebook. I resented that, but finally succumbed. I then explored FB, checked out his friends and was interested to find people I already knew, and that I knew some of their friends etc. I got interested in FB and how social networking sites worked - but then it started to get very noisy ( with unknown friends of friends of friends and pokes and groups and other stuff) and I became a very reluctant visitor. (To me it was too many connections and not enough content and purpose).  LinkIn was similar. Various people invited me to connect with them there. I think there was another one I joined before LinkedIn - Rhyze or something, I don't know what happened to that. (I realise I could make better use of the netwroking opportunites in these networks if I wanted to - but my heart isn't in it)

Ning groups

Then there were all the Ning groups (until the payment system came in ). There were  so many sites seeming to want to make everyone into part of a group - but without much of interest really happening. (I realise I could probably make better use of the networking opportunities in the groups I still belong to - but, again, my heart isn't really in it)

Minciu Sodas

MInciu Sodas was the most amazing and enriching online social network. I think it was so rich because, on the whole, people who joined were invited personally by Andrius Kulikauskas. He is a great traveller with an unusual and very focussed personality and a one-to-one approach that short-circuits small talk with strangers and gets straight down to the things that really interest individual people. While he was managing MInciu Sodas and cross-fertilising ideas and discussions of different parallel interest groups it was an exceptional online community. Its spontaneous response to the plight of people in its network during the post-election violence in Kenya is something that deserves to be much more widely known and studied. 

Re-inventing the local through networking online.

Meet-ups seem to me to be a very interesting development. They are a flip-over into re-inventing "the local" through networking online. Twitter serves a similar function (among many others). It is now so much easier to pick up news about interesting face-to-face events that are happening locally with people whose interests or outlook you share.

Friends

I hate the devaluing of the word "friends" to include online contacts - especially ones who are hardly more than names. "Contact" doesn't sound sufficiently human. "Colleague" suggests some kind of paid-work overlap. We need some new words. You can be "friendly" with people online - and some online contacts are very special and deserve a word to describe that - but true friendship? That is a very special category. I feel true friendship seems to need some connection with being physically close enough to help each other out in practical ways when life goes a bit pear-shaped. Even if later you can only connect at a distance it seems important to at least have been close enough in the past to give practicall help to each other. I'm not certain about this. Often the most practical thing a friend can do is to offer a listening ear - which of course can be done at a distance. 

Connecting theory and practice (and the power of peer-to-peer networking)

For me, the best aspects of the internet relate to opportunities to explore ideas with others, despite great geographic distance - knowledge sharing and informed-decision making through peer-to-peer networks. When you are struggling with some new challenges it is a great help to step back and analyse your situation with someone else who really understands the issues you are facing (or at least is genuinely interested in them). Even if people come to a shared interest from widely different perspectives the discussion can be fruitful, and can generate new knowledge and understanding. There are huge opportunities  to connect theory and practice. We are able to compare one local initiative with another local initiative, where the local initiatives may be near by or thousands of miles apart. We can look at local and global in new ways - each informing the other. There are new opportunities for thinking together and the end of isolation for the rural intellectual.

Social networks

To me the word "social" carries implications of informality, equality, and choosing-to-belong (or leave). The social dynamics are nothing like the ones where people are simple  "adding new information technologies to traditional top-down structures" (and perhaps having some kind of "bottom up" information flows as well). It's about equality of respect and flows of information that go back and forth - not up and down. It's also about trust networks, and quality rather than quantity of connections.

What do others think?