Group-forming

Sébastien Paquet is part of a group that’s creating a group to discuss group-forming, or how to develop and foster online (or virtual) communities. Looks like it ought to be an interesting discussion.

I’ve joined up, and to set my interests, here’s the introduction I sent to the group

I should probably pop in and wave at everyone…

I’ve been involved in online groups since the late 70′s. I was writing BBS systems by 1980, got involved in USENET very early on, and have been involved with mailing lists for a long time, also. These days, I get paid to build e-mail systems, although as I like to point out, the system I’m currently architecting has about 20,000 lines of code, and the piece that actually sends email is 200 lines of perl.

Which is sort of my attitude today. For historical purposes, we’ve thought of “usenet postings” or “mailing lists” or whatever. If all you use is a hammer, everything is a nail, and I think defining content by the transport layer is a false solution, so for the last few years, I’ve been whining about (and researching) information convergence. Content is content — let the user decide how they want to access it. That means tying all of these distribution mediums together, let users decide how to use them, and keep it all coordinated, so users get what they want how they want.

the reality is, mail lists are a horrible distribution system for a lot of stuff. It’s a push technology, and much of what we push shouldn’t be. So users start building filters to shunt stuff into folders for later, and build other defensive techniques to keep this pushed data from overwhelming their “real” in-box. so why are we pushing it? Because we do mail lists, not information delivery. Pure “pull” systems fail in other ways, though, because if you depend on a user to come to your site to interact, you’ll lose all but the most motivated/interested. You need some way to remind them to visit and give them reasons to want to – without screaming in their ear all the time…

This is crucial in group forming (or virtual communities, or however you want to define it) because it’s the primary interaction between a user and the group. If it’s annoying or inconvenient, it’s going to ruin the experience for the user.

For me, this is a bi-fold issue. Technically, how do you build a system that is flexible enough to cover the needs of all of the users (given that they’re all different, with different facets of interest and different levels of motivation to get involved, not to mention different limits to the hassle factor of dealing wtih the content), and socially, on how do groups form and aggregate, and how do you keep them living and breathing — there’s a fine line between stagnation and dissolution and growing and vibrant. One of the great struggles I have with communities is how to trade off bringing in fresh blood to stave off stagnation and exclusionary cliquishenss with trying to force a community’s personality in directions it doesn’t want to go…

Be fascinated to see how other people are dealing with these issues…

You might also want to read:

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2. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy Clay Shirky is at it again. Go read the whole thing, it’s awesome. Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: n the Seventies —...
3. Evaporative cooling of group beliefs Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: Over on Overcoming Bias there was a great post called “Evaporative cooling of group beliefs” where the author talks about...
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5. Thoughts on ‘A group is it’s own worst enemy’ If you haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s A Group is its own Worst Enemy, please do so. It’s a wonderful examination of the social aspects...