John Smith and CoP implication

On a thread started by Hildy Gottlieb over at Com-Prac this week, John Smith returned something that’s both thought-provoking and powerfully put, quoting a very old text:

“[A man must reside in a town] thirty days to become liable for
contributing to the soup kitchen, three months for the charity box,
six months for the clothing fund, nine months for the burial fund, and
twelve months for contributing to the repair of the town walls’

(These categories have intuitive appeal but are at the same time are
somewhat mysterious, I think:
http://www.comeandhear.com/bababathra/bababathra_8.html )

So in community development terms, I think the thing we can do AFTER
welcoming people matters a lot. And that would be: help people to see
a path of successive and successful levels of connection — of taking
responsibility for the goodness they find in the collective life.”

Thoroughly agree. Indeed finding useful channels por the energy of members is probably the most difficult task of facilitators: so many of them want to go beyond building practice and conversations, and yet it’s so difficult to build something useful and motivating with the kind of commitment that most community volunteers can give. A perfect facilitator (or a perfect community) would find tailor-cut engagement opportunities for every member, optimizing growth for the member and the CoP, drawing on their energies without risking burnout…

… now try that with seventy thousand members. But you need to try.

(And one does wonder about John’s reading habits :-)).

Obra común, ignorancia, y el caso del usuario que escondía su nombre

Estos días he tenido el privilegio de ver (ya que no he tomado parte directa) un intercambio de mensajes entre uno de los administradores de Macuarium y un ex usuario. El caso ha sido ilustrativo de varias cosas.

La persona que nos escribía es socio de una PYME española. Como usuario, fue de la variedad “parásito” más desagradable. Hace un año y pico, compró un equipo de Apple que no le funcionó bien. Se dedicó a recorrer foros y páginas poniendo a caer de un burro al fabricante e incluso intentando involucrar a nuestra comunidad en un boicot formal, con recogida de firmas de protesta y otras maniobras. Lo hizo bastante mal, tanto en modos como en técnica (y dejando datos personales por todas partes). No le seguimos la corriente: aquí no hacemos listas negras. Le remitimos a Consumo y a la justicia, o a montarse un blog por su cuenta.

De todo aquello ya no queda mucho en público. Lógicamente, retiramos aquellos mensajes que eran insultantes o difamatorios, y eliminamos sus datos personales puestos en público. Tendemos a cuidar bastante esos detalles. Se borra poco, pero se recoge mucho: todo lo que escribió está bien guardado.

Sin embargo, a día de hoy, el personaje está (dice) intentando negociar con Apple para crear “contenidos para el iPhone”. Y le ha entrado la necesidad de limpiar su expediente, para lo que pretende eliminar de todas las webs los rastros de su campaña de críticas y descrédito. No voy a opinar sobre la misión ni sobre los motivos. Pero lo que pasó a continuación ilustra algunas cosas.

El personaje insistió en la eliminación de todos sus mensajes. Se le dijo que dichos mensajes forman parte de una obra común (conversaciones entre muchas personas, mensajes interdependientes), y que no íbamos a mutilar los temas sin un motivo serio (como infracciones a la ley o a la norma). Además, sus palabras están citadas en decenas de otros mensajes (con su nick incluído) de modo que estaríamos hablando de alterar mensajes de terceros sin una buena razón.

Le dijimos que el modo de hacer las cosas eficazmente no es intentar eliminar la historia, sino completarla (ya que decía que la causa de su enfado había sido corregida). Pero no quiso.

Finalmente, le ofrecimos cambiarle el nick para distanciarle de los comentarios que ha hecho. Algo que no va a separar el nick original (el nombre de su empresa) de los comentarios que quedan publicados en la web, ni los va a quitar de Google.

Cosas curiosas

Lo primero que resulta curioso es que una persona, que aparentemente vive (en parte al menos) de crear páginas web, confunda de esta manera la autoría de un texto aislado (algo que quizá podría reclamar como exclusivamente suyo) con la participación en una conversación pública, que no tiene ningún derecho legal o moral a mutilar. Hay mucha gente que no entiende lo que significa participar en medios sociales, y específicamente en foros.

Por no mencionar la forma de usar el nombre de su empresa como nick en un foro público, o la forma de dejar por todas partes datos personales (que en su día hubo que limpiar). Por desgracia sigue siendo frecuente tener que avisar a alguien de que va dejando información sensible a la vista de todos. Este sujeto, en concreto, sigue teniendo hasta su teléfono en público en otras webs.

O la poca conciencia que tuvo de que lo que se escribe en Internet no se puede eliminar del todo: demasiadas veces sigue flotando, citado o copiado, haga uno lo que haga. Hacer algo online es hacerlo “en público” como nunca antes en la historia, y la importancia de actuar de un modo que se pueda asumir dentro de unos años es mucho mayor de lo que algunos comprenden. Esto no se limita a las gamberradas de Facebook: lo que se publica en blogs y foros tiene la misma capacidad de perseguirnos.

Y lo que más nos sorprendió: la forma en que algunos usuarios, con frecuencia mayores (aunque hay personas mayores más que competentes en este terreno), piensan que los recursos online están puestos por el Ayuntamiento, obligados a servirles y a hacerlo a la velocidad de un buen maître. Teniendo en cuenta la frecuencia con la que estos servicios son recursos gratuitos en los que el soporte o bien es corporativo (y brilla por su ausencia) o es voluntario (y no se puede exigir) llama la atención que la cultura de exigencia siga tan difundida.

En conclusión

En toda esta experiencia, los voluntarios colaboradores de Macuarium han protegido a ese usuario de sus propios errores y temeridades, le han evitado problemas legales, han limpiado sus datos personales del ámbito público, han protegido conversaciones técnicas de la mutilación…

… y su recompensa es saber que han hecho las cosas bien. Porque lo que es ese usuario, evidentemente, no sólo no lo ha agradecido sino que se ha ido echando pestes y amenazas.

Cosas típicas de foros sociales

Bueno, no es precisamente algo sobre gestión del conocimiento, formalización de práctica o motivación de equipos… pero no he podido evitar reirme al reconocer muchas cosas de las que describe Randy aquí. No sé quién es, no tengo tiempo de investigarlo ahora, pero está claro que ha pasado mucho tiempo en el lado social de las comunidades online.

Que dicho sea de paso, es respetable y muy entretenido, e incluso necesario… pero no es toda la historia. Normalmente, detrás de un foro hay algo más que ganas de pasar el rato. Por lo que yo se. Creo. Vamos, supongo.

En cualquier caso, un repaso interesante del lado menos formal de una comunidad… un lado que sin embargo tiene su papel para unir a los miembros y dar pie a esa colaboración que (seguramente, vamos, digo yo) es la cara seria de la misma moneda. Habrá que leer el resto de la serie.

Avoiding spam in online communities: a housework chore, no magic wand

A couple of weeks ago there was an extremely interesting short discussion over at OnFac mailing list. It dealt with techniques to avoid external spamming, especially in online bulletin board systems (forums). Nancy White attempted to capture it, but as yet it’s not been done.

Besides sharing experiences on the effectivenes of email verification (to make sure the person registering at least has a working email and checks it) and CAPTCHA (a non-computer-readable image with a piece of text that must be copied in a form, and thus prevents automated bots from sending messages), the co-listers also talked about the merits of first-message filtering (the first message of any new member goes to a special category, and until approved, the user does not get full rights). I also mentioned the efficacy of message lag (a minimum period between posting messages) in limiting the flooding effect of such bots once inside.

All those techniques are all very well, and indeed heartily reccomended to ward off automated, mass spammers. But they can’t keep human spammers out, nor avoid bots once a human opens the door. The only policy that works, I insisted, is diligent moderator and administrator work to identify and cut off the spam, and to ban the spammers and their servers: active moderation, active use of the software’s pulls and levers.

Well, nothing is perfect all the time (goes a Spanish saying) but today I saw just an example of that, which happened on May 6th while I was looking the other way. At Macuarium CoP system, of course.

7.05 PM. A spammers starts flooding several forums in a bulletin board system with get-rich-quick messages.

7.08 PM. A moderator from a particular forum in the system sees them, tracks them, puts up a warning at a coordination forum (together with links).

7.13 PM. The spamming user is cautionarily suspended by a senior moderator (who can edit any forum), and all messages are moved to the “evidence” forum (pruned from the innocent threads where needed), who reports it in the same coordination thread by him and other mods.

9.32 PM. An administrator bans the user (this procedure keeps the email and IP addresses for security reasons but in every aspect inhabilitates the user profile). And reports it. Starts investigating the spammer. Finds that he’s been using a fixed IP address for his registration and messages.

9.35 PM. The administrator bans the user’s IP. And reports it. This procedure prevents the spammer from ever registering again from the same connection (if it was his home, or his company’s network, it can eliminate the danger of small-fry spammers).

Peace thereafter. And very little work time in total to avoid users having to wade in that trash. Which in turn makes sure trash is so rare that users themselves report in almost as fast as it appears, so reinforcing the vigilance system.

The key is not just a number of clear procedures and effective tools, but a great team of motivated, agile people acting on the spot. This is scarce defense against massive systematic attacks, but it can do away with the main scourge of lists and forums (among other venues): the host of small-time spammers.

No amount of gadgetry can substitute for that, nor guard a community in the web against spammers in the long term. It’s plain (and hopefully smart) housework.

Sunday tag surfing

Before I get down to serious work, here’s a look at the most interesting things caught in the morning’s browsing. WordPress’ tag surfing does add a bit of spice.

The wisdom of clouds: John Millner doing a panegyric of social-tagging folksonomies. Not bad for a sales pitch. And he’s right (Socialtext’s shared tagging got me to find his post, for instance). An interesting blog on learning, too.

The 3 stages of CMS: Boris Mann of Raincity Studios made a presentation on mid-February that just got posted on DigitalAssetManagementOrgUK (lots of nice educational links there, and some tools), and it does set out very clearly some principles and ideas, aimed at independent web developers, that are not just right but (for me) becoming articles of faith. It’s about the evolution of web sites into complex interconnected bits, and how best to make them. Sage, too.

Knowledge energies: Luke Naismith trying to get some sense out of a recent Act-KM mailing list discussion about complexity and chaos. It was way beyond my depth. Luke’s perspective is more understandable and original (he says “eccentric”). Also nice, the couple of links reflected here remembering the link between any technology and some business model.

Explaining KM: Michelle Laurie (first featured here for her on-the-job pictures of African life while doing soft-edged asessments of KM programmes for a big institution) ploughs on as an independent KM consultant up on the mountains. She keeps using simple terms instead of the usual fodder, or so it seems. Inspirational :-).

Make and sell: OK, so it’s not a blog, but after reading about it in Wired I came across it again today… and it’s worth having a look at the operating model. Ponoko builds things to specification (which is innovative), but has also harnessed crowdsourcing to get itself more orders: it acts as a hub for product designs and specifications, so people can either hire or share bits of each other’s designs… and then get them built.

On hiring and attrition. Paul Ritchie’s ongoing series of comments gets especially practical here, IMHO. As I’m right now in the process of renewing (nor just reinforcing) the collaborator team of Macuarium, which is hard to juggle as we need to find, recruit, train and slowly incorporate into the mix a lot of new personalities while balancing a growing work load; and also part of the building of a new business unit at my employer, which is proceeding in fits and starts, I can agree with both his comment: don’t delay, and don’t hope for magical tool solutions. You may not agree on everything but the blog’s a mine for project managers (and most likely a very effective management tool): the most recent favourite on getting bad news out of the way.

A relevant workshop: Luca Servo’s work with a recent “strategic” workshop with rural radio workers from old Congo looks (and reads) just like the good old ones we used to pull for G2E customers. His work for the knowledge management arm of FAO looks impressive (not least because he seems to be actually applying his masters’ dissertation), but - going practical - the blog’s chronicle of the workshop is relevant in itself as a portrait of methodology. Don’t miss previous episodes.

A perspective of KM: Lee Gaddis is getting to grips with KM in his marketing firm. What I like about his view is that he clearly separates the means (technologies) and the skills (education and training) from the will (mindset and motivation). You can put any tools in place, you can design processes and write them down and train people… but unless it makes sense to them (it’s practical, efficient and worth their while), you will get nothing lasting or practical out of the effort. IMHO, while it’s a very superficial view yet, he’s got that part right. Which is more than most do: so many KM efforst prefer to navigate around incentives and recognition and then fail to reap real change.

Action learning and water management: S. McIntosh, N. Leotaud and D. Macqueen published on the KM4Dev journal a piece on an “action learning” project to examine the ways water is used and managed in several Caribbean islands: through hands-on reasearch and the participation of the stakeholders at every level. The piece is interesting. The link with knowledge management, tenuous but still there. Seeing instances where sharing experience is literally vital helps clear the fog. Found it through the WASH Lessons Learned blog.

The book “We think”: Penny Edward’s recounts the experience of listening to the author of a book on the web’s effect on mass creativity, innovation and collaboration. Which is huge, and growing. Her site is more than interesting (mixing wikis, KM and project management). And since her takeaways are ideas I’m curious about (having close experience with them, I want to analyze them better) it seems I might have a new book on the shopping list.

On participation: Brad Hinton’s got a nice piece on the role of mass participation in business decision making. Based on a specific example, he goes on to elaborate how the involvement of workers will not just be requested, but actually inevitable. Not to be a spoilsport, but I think the kind of involvement people enjoy is not the kind that allows for long-term, thoughtful and differentiating management decisions… but it does form a very fertile ground for managers to make them.

The Facebook business model: as explained by themselves in their site (came in looking for something different; I don’t actually like the place). That is what they really, actually offer. A bit of food for thought, if not many news, in there.

Qué es una Comunidad de Práctica: Carlos Merino at the Departament de Justicia of the Generalitat posted this presentation for a meeting in December 2007, in Spanish. The nature and the keys of success. I find a sore lack of involvement and motivation aspects, but the rest of it is worth reading. Jordi Graells posted another interesting presentation (about collective intelligence and “wiki-administration” in government), in Catalan. The rest of the blog is also full of links to more news and presentations from one of the most active “knowledge administrations” I’m aware of (there’s hope for the rest).

More Spanish knowledge blogging at Comunisfera by Daniel Martí. No, there’s no recent pick to show (mostly links to outside resources: Morgan Stanley’s report on Internet trends, PDF here; Universal McCann’s report on social media use and impact here, PDF here; Cristobal Cobo’s presentation about the Knowledge Economy on Issuu, parts in Spanish, look out for the Issuu machinery also; and I think the link to Planeta 2.0 came from here also), but I’ve been enjoying the perusal. Very relevant selection of themes.

Tangentially, there is Foro de Internet 2008, acongress aimed at internet content entrepreneurs next week (on the 10th) in Madrid. I might attend, since there may be useful ideas about traffic monetization floating around. With the hope of a new member of the family, comes the responsibility of feeding it ;-). And even further away is Barcelona’s UrbanLabs, which sounds interesting.

Reasons to participate in social media. At Groundswell, and also commented at Furilo, there’s a nice useful list. Useful why? Useful because the ends pursued by people when participating in sharing environments are quite more complex (and sometimes much more banal) that some think. If you want participation, look into these. If you’re designing for it, you’d better be creative.

And now, to do some (paying) work.

Mimetic conflict in online communities?

A certain thread initiated by Zbigniew Lukasiak at On-Fac mailing list got my wheels grounding. He’s mentioned the theories of French anthropologist Rene Girard as relevant to the social setting of online communities. While those theories are many and require books to explain, there is a core called “mimetic conflict” positing that the desirability of something comes from imitation of the other, not from the goodness of the thing; that such imitation of desire leads to conflict; that further imitation by others propagates the conflict and its focus, until the object -or possibly the first rival- are destroyed, or beyond.

On the list, Rosanna Tarsiero has made some useful reflections on envy in those communities.

Going back to the concept (as much as one can from reading excerpts) it does seem to play a role, in several ways:

Holier than thou. People who come to cherish the community mores (rules, ways), first helping the moderatores, then pushing further and further and finally attacking the moderators or even seriously damaging the community in order to push the “reformation”. You may remember a case recently described of a forum member (a graphic designer) who manifestly cared about the community but maimed hundreds of threads as a negotiation tactic.

All for the people. In the same vein, people who have been working in furthering the social or face-to-face aspect in coordination with the leadership occasionally see themselves as personifying the “real community” and can protagonize coup d’etat crises or (failing that) split attempts. We’ve had three of those in ten years.

The good of the community. Finally, at times people who have been giving their effort to supporting or helping members of a certain group (”community” in a wider sense, “conversation space” in a more realistic term) within a specific project, strike out on their own to start something with the same goals, usually very similar resources, and strikingly similar ways… thus splitting the community and weakening the original initiative.

All three cismatic processes can be driven by many causes, either personal or practical; they can be fully justified indeed. There are ways to see them coming, to minimize the eventual impact, to manage it when it comes. The striking aspect is that, in my experience, there does seem to be something else involved (and here I’m not just looking at Macuarium, whose ten years give ample scope for most things, but to many other online communities whose evolution I’ve seen or participated in).

For one thing, the “desired object” is the very same than before the split, but now it’s desired for oneself, not for the old group.

But also, there is often a very intense conflict. The new project does not strike out to raise its own tribe: it almost always is cannibalistic, at least to start with. It fights the other for possession of the (perceived) good, which can be the moral high ground but can be much more concrete. And as Gerard predicts, succesive newcomers and others can imitate not just the longing for that good, but also the animosity against the original rivals.

I remember one extreme case, a couple of years ago. A tiny splinter group of “rebotados” (can’t easily translate that -rejected, disillusioned…) ex members of Macuarium had came to roost on an old Macuarium initiative, long since sent to live its own life. Besides turning it into an attempted clone of our forums, they infected it with such paroxistic hatred that they sported mottoes such as “To win or to die” against the “cortijo”. They failed both in driving the initiative and in consolidating an alternative, but (at least in the second aspect) they keep trying. They foam just a bit less at the mouth.

I had usually viewed such things (especially the bile) as just expressions of envy and bad character. Gerard puts them right in with human nature, which is a bit disturbing.

We have tended to deal with this with quiet and work, although any of them is extremely tiring and painful. We assume that most projects in our domain will come from people who know or have participated in ours (you can hardly help that when you reach 80% of your target public). We assume there will be splits. We assume there will be some artificial rivalries (with some bitter words and aggresive behaviours thrown our way) and that many new projects will attempt to feed off our resources and teams. Let’s say we adopt a rather relaxed view to being the “rival” by default. We just hope to regrow the tissue.

That’s not saying we don’t fight back against cannibals (and we do indeed use the “scapegoat mechanism” that Gerard describes). We just don’t play the rivalry game, but rather stick to doing our own work in our own way (in other words, making sure that the object of our desire is not imitative but as original as possible), rebuilding fast, burning the scar closed, getting over it - and occasionally rejoicing when we see them imitate or fail. And seeing how many efforts in our domain have failed, I can’t help thinking that ours is a healthy option. But also, that we’ve been managing by the seat of our pants something that could be done in a more rigorous, systematic way.

Must try to read Gerard :-).

PS - And yes, I can see mimetic conflicts within communities too. But those are a different issue.

Blogs y BBVA

Mientras aprovechaba el 2 de Mayo curioseando por la web del Departament de Justicia catalán (me estoy aficionando, a pesar de la falta de tiempo) he tropezado con una referencia a un “libro colaborativo” sobre blogs empresariales, patrocinado por Telefónica, ya presentado y lamentablemente a día de hoy aún no disponible (o eso dice el popup de su web). Y siguiendo los hilos, me he encontrado con otro curioso invento, que parece una agregación de blogs personales y departamentales de BBVA. Planta 29 tiene buen aspecto. Tengo que enterarme de la historia que hay detrás; la última vez que supe de la gestión del conocimiento del BBVA estaba siendo casi desmantelada.

Y hablando de historia. Una de las que cuenta es la puesta en marcha de una “comunidad de usuarios” inversores (en beta) llamada Actibva. He estado ojeando lo que hacen y lo que van ofreciendo. No sé si se puede llamar “comunidad”, pero desde luego apunta maneras para convertirse en un recurso muy práctico para inversores en general y para los que usan el BBVA en particular: es un buen centralizador de recursos y de feeds, aunque aún le queda bastante. Hace mucho que dejé de seguir la Bolsa, pero me parece que la iniciativa la seguiré de cerca.

Por no mencionar la que hay montada en Canarias para mediados de Mes, y otras parecidas en Barcelona. Está claro que he pasado demasiado tiempo con la vista puesta fuera de España :-). Aquí se mueven cada vez más cosas.

Modelos de negocio Open Source: conversación con John Powell, CEO de Alfresco

Aviso para navegantes: cuando decimos “hablando de Open Source” aquí, me refiero a los modelos de negocio, los pros, los contras, los socios, los competidores, los desarrolladores, y quizá a parte del camino por delante, pero no al código de Alfresco ni a la aplicación en sí. En la Alfresco Community Conference de Barcelona de la semana pasada había un montón de gente interesante, incluyendo a John Newton, Ian Howells, Kevin Cochrane, David Caruana y Nancy Garrity de Alfresco… y tuve que ir y entrevistar a John Powell sobre los aspectos de negocio y gestión de su empresa.

Y estoy muy contento de haberlo hecho. Y muy agradecido por las respuestas. Así que aquí va la traducción de la conversación transcrita.

Miguel Cornejo. Ya llevas tres años usando un modelo de negocio Open Source, dirigiendo una empresa radicalmente distinta de las que conocías. ¿Qué lecciones has aprendido?

John Powell. En general, el modelo de negocio Open Source hace más sencillos todos los aspectos de una empresa de software porque, sin tener que ocultar tu propiedad intelectual, puedes incorporar las grandes ideas de todos los interesados, puedes hacer que te ayuden en el desarrollo, en el control de calidad… y en la propagación de tu producto. Así que desde ese aspecto, lo hace todo realmente fácil.

El reto del modelo Open Source, para una empresa comercial de Open Source, es mantener el equilibrio entre la comunidad y los clientes suscriptores. Porque realmente, el cliente suscriptor sólo se va a suscribir si ve valor en ello, y siempre habrá gente en la comunidad que no se suscribirá nunca. Y tenemos que mantener el equilibrio correcto porque sin los clientes suscriptores no habría empresa y la comunidad perdería entonces el principal motor para el desarrollo de Alfresco.

MC. El papel de ese motor es una de las cosas que más me interesa comentar contigo. Así que veamos… John Newton (Presidente y CTO) dijo ayer que en torno al 10% del código actual de Alfresco viene de la comunidad.

JP. Sí.

MC. Pero qué parte de… también mencionásteis que la innovación viene de los límites. Así que, ¿qué parte del valor, del valor añadido más allá del núcleo de gestión documental [de Alfresco] se debe a la comunidad?

JP. Pienso que lo que hacen es darnos percepciones sobre un montón de aplicaciones prácticas. Como cualquiera que use software sabrá, cuando recibes software de un proveedor, muchas veces tienes un momento de “¿Porqué diablos pensaron que yo querría trabajar así?”, con el interface o con el flujo de trabajo o con lo que sea… así que pienso que lo que la comunidad nos aporta es mucho mejor feedback del que puede obtenerse jamás con los productos de código cerrado. Es decir, ellos pueden pegarse no sólo con el producto sino con el código, y extenderlo y mostrarte ejemplos concretos.

MC. De modo que podáis hacer “lo que la comunidad ordena” [cita de su charla de unas horas antes].

JP. Sí.

MC. Esto nos lleva a otra pregunta sobre la motivación de esos desarrolladores, porque algunos de ellos están desarrollando ese excelente interfaz de usuario vuestro nuevo sin que nadie les pague nada, sin presupuesto que digamos.

JP. Sí.

MC. Y ¿cómo se llega a implicar a alguien hasta ese punto?

JP. Cualquier proyecto Open Source depende predominantemente en gente con interés, quizá haciendo cosas a tiempo parcial o en su tiempo libre, como algo de investigación, o cualquier cosa útil, que con frecuencia se acaba incorporando. Por ejemplo algunas de las cosas que vimos hoy. Porque esa gente empleado por parners de Alfresco, están haciendo cosas interesantes pero también están mejorando su conocimiento, que luego pueden usar para probar a sus clientes en sus mercados que son realmente expertos, que tienen valor añadido. Así que…

MC. ¿Es una especie de “prueba de capacidad”?

JP. Sí. Así que yo diría, es como… veamos, ¿de qué vale ir al gimnasio para tu trabajo? Bueno, probablemente si estás más despierto, más agudo y más en forma, vas a mejorar sus aptitudes laborales. Como poco, estos desarrolladores de la comunidad pueden mejorar su técnica, pueden hacerse más vendibles, y algunos de ellos pueden producir cosas realmente buenas que entonces pueden aportarse de nuevo a toda la comunidad.

MC. ¿Qué papel tienen entonces fabricantes de código propietario (cerrado) como SAP o Quark en el entorno de Alfresco? (Ambos están colaborando con la empresa en distintos aspectos).

JP. Desde la perspectiva de Alfresco como empresa, hay un importante papel para la colaboración con ese tipo de organizaciones, porque para muchos grandes clientes, ellos demuestran que Alfresco es un jugador a largo plazo y que está aquí para quedarse, y cuando ven a otras grandes empresas, en particular las del mundo de código cerrado, comprometerse con la tecnología de Alfresco y meterse en la cama con Alfresco, les da una buena seguridad. Desde la perspectiva de Alfresco, queremos trabajar con ellos porque reconocemos que tienen unas enormes bases de usuarios y que trabajando con ellos, si sólo una pequeña proporción de esa base de usuarios se interesa por Alfresco, es evidentemente bueno para Alfresco a largo plazo.

MC. Sí. Y acerca de la nueva versión 3.0 dirigida más hacia el ámbito del usuario final… me parece que estáis manteniendo estable el back-end de gestión documental donde se gestiona la artillería pesada, y ahora permitís a la gente persnalizar más la parte en contacto con el usuario final… pero me parece que vuestro competidor, más que Sharepoint, serían FileNet o Documentum.

JP. Sí. Bueno, creo que lo que estamos viendo es que con la versión 3.0 lo que estamos realmente haciendo es añadir una aplicación social a Alfresco. Así que el armazón de la plataforma de Alfresco seguirá ahí, para construir repositorios documentales a gran escala, para gestionar contenidos web a gran escala, o sites para la web. [La versión 3.0] no quita nada de éso, lo que hace es añadir una aplicación social en el centro del entorno, y creo que ésa es una de as principales diferencias que tenemos con Sharepoint. Porque Sharepoint no puede abordar bien el mundo web y no tienen la escalabilidad corporativa para gestionar grandes librerías de documentos. Así que desde nuestra perspectiva, la versión 3.0 pretende igualar el terreno de juego y dar a los clientes la capacidad de lanzarse a Alfresco del mismo modo que están lanzándose a Sharepoint. Pero la ventaja de Alfresco es que, una vez que se han lanzado, pueden ir en cualquier dirección, mientras que con Sharepoint van a estar muy limitados y atados, y obviamente por falta de opciones se van a ver atados a la plataforma Microsoft en el futuro.

MC. Y tanto. Te iba a preguntar más sobre Sharepoint, que como dices es mucho más limitado, pero me temo que tenemos muy poco tiempo (Aquí nos interrumpió un curioso pidiendo permiso para escuchar la conversación). Como iba diciendo, ¿cuáles serían las principales diferencias, más allá de la nueva capa social, respecto al modelo actual de aplicaciones de gestión documental, como FileNet o Documentum?

JP. Creo que la principal diferencia aquí es que venimos del mundo Open Source, y por ello habrá mucha más capacidad para extender y participar en la personalización y soporte con Alfresco que con Documentum o FileNet. Ahora bien, esos sistemas aún tendrán uso, y probablemente haya muchos cientos de años hombre de desarrollo en ellos, pero para la mayor parte de los clientes… no están tan interesados en esa herencia, lo que están buscando es una arquitectura moderna con la que ellos puedan seguir adelante.

MC. Así que ¿la diferencia sería esa flexibilidad y la capacidad de llevarles a donde quieren, cosa que no pasaría con un sistema propietario o “heredado”?

JP. Correcto.

MC. Muy bien. Ahora, pasando a otro tema, sois Open Source pero n seguís el modelo digamos “clásico” basado en una comunidad. Lo vuestro es un esfuerzo Open Source pilotado por una empresa. Esto ¿qué significa?

Evidentemente existe algún tipo de dirección, algún tipo de liderazgo o visión, que habéis estado aportando, no sólo la programación que hacéis en la empresa. Porque aunque la comunidad aporte parte del código, vosotros aportáis muchas cosas a ese esfuerzo. Así que sois Open Source, pero con un modelo diferente…

JP. Sí. Bueno, de hecho creo que tenemos la ventaja de haber podido aprender de otras grandes empresas que fueron pioneras con otras grandes comunidades, que fueron pioneras con el modelo de negocio Open Source. Y pienso que si miras a día de hoy, verás gente como SugarCRM, Alfresco, mySQL…

MC. … OpenBravo… (una empresa de Pamplona que conocemos bastante bien)

JP. OpenBravo, sí, conozco a esa gente. Verás que actuamente, hay algunas diferencias en nuestros modelos, pero verás que el modelo que tiende a emerger es muy similar. Una empresa que emplea probablemente al 90% de los desarrolladores principales, y realmente se compromete con el mantenimiento y soporte de ese producto en el futuro.

MC. Así que ¿lo ves como un modelo viable a largo plazo?

JP. Creo que seguirá habiendo algunos magníficos proyectos puros, hmm…

MC. ¿… “pilotados por la comunidad”?

JP. … pilotados por la comunidad, sí, pero creo que en algunas áreas particulares, especialmente donde la persistencia de los datos es muy muy importante para una empresa, entonces este matrimonio de la cultura comercial de empresa con el Open Source, es la solución ideal.

MC. Desde luego (…).

JP. Sabes, cualquier empresa, en un momento dado, quiere hacer negocios con otra empresa, y es difícil satisfacer éso con una difusa comunidad de desarrolladores. Ahora, para algunas aplicaciones que pueden no tener que ver con la persistencia de los datos clave de la empresa… hemos visto aquí presentaciones de clientes que quieren guardar contenidos durante mil años. Mil años está más allá de la imaginación de cualquier sistema actual, da igual lo que nadie diga (…). Pero sabes, creo que un modelo híbrido de hecho, donde estamos tratando de combinar lo mejor de ambos mundos, una organización comercial, contractual, con la que los clientes pueden sentirse seguros, con el soporte de una comunidad vibrante que evita el riesgo de quedar atados, como en el viejo modelo de los proveedores. Alfresco no puede secuestrar a su comunidad.

MC. Perfecto. Ahora, otro cambio de tema… al adentraros en la web 2.0 y la colaboración con esta capa de comunidad en la que estáis trabajando ahora, he visto que os habéis interesado mucho por cosas como la integración con Facebook pero hasta hoy no había visto mención a un componente de foros…

JP. De acuerdo. Necesitamos hacer más cosas sobre éso. Pero ésa siempre ha sido un área donde nos hemos dicho, no queremos inventar todas las formas de consumir y generar contenido, así que no estamos escribiendo un wiki, no estamos escribiendo un blog… queremos integrar esas capacidades. Lo que hemos estado construyendo hasta ahora es realmente la fontanería para hacer éso. Y creo que lo que tenemos que hacer ahora es conseguir más ejemplos de dónde la hemos llevado a la superficie… Si ves el site de Alfresco, el wiki que usamos, que es MediaWiki, está embebido dentro de Alfresco, de modo que el contenido es versionado y gestionado dentro de Alfresco.

MC. ¿Y se gestionan los usuarios y las skins también? Eso es lo que esperaba ver en cuanto a los foros. Sigo pensando que la mayor parte de la información no estructurada no está contenida en documentos, sino en conversaciones informales… de modo que si no las puedes gestionar, no estás gestionando el conocimiento de la empresa.

JP. Cierto.

MC. Así que ¿podemos decir que estáis trabajando en ello?

JP. Sí.

MC. Entonces… estas han sido más o menos las preguntas que quería hacerte.

JP. De acuerdo. Gracias.

MC. Gracias a tí.

La versión inglesa del documento ha sido verificada por el Sr Powell.

Si queréis leer más sobre modelos de negocio basados en código abierto, haced una búsqueda en este blog, porque es un tema recurrente… y me alegro de decir que la conversación con John Powell ha servido para reforzar mis ideas al respecto, aunque también haya aportado algunas sorpresas interesantes.

Rethinking social networks (II): the community core

This is the continuation of an article on the nature of online social networking services and their likely evolution (the result of too much time spent analysing them and designing one). In the previous article, I was forward enough to propose a definition of them as:

“permission-based mutual awareness and communication services. They allow us to build “white-lists” to filter out people, and keep only those we trust and appreciate enough to share delicate (or personal) information with, or to allow to intrude upon our time.

That is a social network, redux. The rest is incidental to the focus of the network: it can be social, creative, or professional in varying degrees, and will thus offer filter-associated services to further those ends.

In other words, a social network service is an utility, not a content provider.”

But that is hardly the complete picture. Because, at its core, online social networking services are not just about the networking, but about the community-generated content.

Community within

The filtering mechanism in a social network’s “friend of a friend” system fulfils exactly the same role than any (healthy) online community: finding like-minded people whom you can trust. An online community provides not just a list of like minded people but also a reputation gauge (you can observe their long-term activity and some often some more immediate signs of trustworthyness).

Also, a community emerges around conversations and shared items (links at Digg, articles at Wikipedia, photos at Flickr, videos at YouTube, job offers at LinkedIn, cracked software at MacSerialJunkie, solutions to common problems at communities of practice). Most often those items coalesce around “seeded” or editorial content: user-generated content emerges in answer to original, resource-generated content. And at online social networking services, these communities are fostered as the best way to expand the immediate personal network through finding other peers (Facebook groups are a prime example).

In other words, online social networking services are often (if not always) a symbiont of online communities. The bare network goes nowhere.

Network effects in the community and the network

The social networks add specific services that rely on the “white-listing” of specific people (not every community member is a friend you would trust or reccomend or wish to play with). Some are as silly as Facebook’s Vampire-and-zombie games. Some are as practical as LinkedIn’s endorsement requests. Some are oriented to other network users, some are visible to all. What they all rely on is the ability to give different sets of people different access to your data and your time (or inbox).

Most communities have to deal with a similar problem. At Macuarium, buy-and-sell activity (sort of classifieds) is limited to certain users whose trajectory is well known.

But there is something less intuitive here: whereas a community (and especially a community of practice) benefits from network effects, increasing in value as more and more people become members… a social network balances on a different wire: if too many people join a person’s specific network, it becomes useless. If it’s too easy to contact someone, it degenerates into spam (see Facebook).

The reason is self-evident: the type of information you share on an online community is not as sensitive as what you share with your social network (or at least it shouldn’t). You can rather safely publish your contact details in your CV at LinkedIn, but you really shouldn’t post them in a web forum. Or to coin another definition: The value of a network is not given only by its potential size, but also by the user’s ability to restrict its actual size.

All in all, they are quite different animals.

Is there a synergy for Communities of Practice?

Many online community tools are starting to provide some basic “networking”. Invision Board software has long offered the possibility to not just blacklist specific community members, but also to mark others as friends… and also, to exhibit some more personal information in your user profile (pictures, visitors, gender). One of Joomla’s most popular components is CommunityBuilder, which happens to be a social network builder.

Indeed, just as social networking thrives around communities, networks can add a dimension to communities. Whether or not that dimension fits in with the community’s goals is another matter: if you’re designing a community of practice, fostering closed groups of friends looks rather counter-productive. But it can be turned to good, or so our early research seems to indicate.

Planning for social networking as a purely social, casual “friending” tool for self-expression could be an option, but seems to add little to a CoP beyond entertainment value. Since pages served are sometimes useful (advertising-financed communities), this is not irrelevant.

On the other hand, tapping into the implicit (or even explicit) endorsement quality of those “friending” actions can add serious value to a CoP’s own services where they rely on reputation, and open business opportunities through the use of connections.

The catch is that those services that benefit most from a network are essentially those that are not exactly part of the community, but rather add-ons that feed on them. Examples are the classifieds section, or the job board, or the freelancer market… or indeed, the business introduction service (even inside a firm, finding the right person can be a problem). Most of them lately seem in the company of social network business models, but almost useless without a wider community pool.

Even niche marketing (staple of social networks’ monetisation theory) relies less on narrow networks than in wider, affinity communities. Convergence is unavoidable.

And we will be there :-).

Rethinking social networks (I): essence and evolution

This week, the topic of social networks is all over the place; indeed it even stars on The Economist (once and twice). Just like when a shoeshine boy starts talking stock tips, that means the topic has gone definitely mainstream. Only this time it’s not a completely bad thing.

Still, the Economist has fallen on this year’s truism: they repeat the oft-heard arguments about people wanting to either connect with people who are not registered in their walled garden of choice, or wanting to move their whole profile and friend list to another service. They are both false, IMHO. And the solutions touted (independently managed personal profiles, open ID management) are tangential to the issue.

Social networking services are essentially (let’s coin a definition) permission-based mutual awareness and communication services. They allow us to build “white-lists” to filter out people, and keep only those we trust and appreciate enough to share delicate (or personal) information with, or to allow to intrude upon our time.

That is a social network, redux. The rest is incidental to the focus of the network: it can be social, creative, or professional in varying degrees, and will thus offer filter-associated services to further those ends.

In other words, a social network service is an utility, not a content provider. It’s closer to an operating system than to a web portal. The differences are serious, as we will see.

What the journalists talk about

The shoe… sorry, the article authors criticize the (apparently constraining) need to visit each network’s home page to make use of their services. This is not a universal truth: witness Linkedin’s plugins for several of their services. It is simply a consequence of some of the network’s revenue generation models… and of the technology they use, to a lesser extent. There is nothing in the essence of a network that requires the visit - even if it’s often the most convenient way to access it - and the evolution towards distributed access is already marching on.

Something else The Economist comments as news is mostly old-hat too. Most existing online services are already drawing heavily on the primary networking tool, the email: contact lists are routinely exploited to find people you want to add to your network, if not to grade the type of information that is shown to them.

That’s where the Economist hits a real bugbear of social network users: they often wish they could (discreetly so as not to give offence) rate the type of “friend” that someone is, in order to allow them more (or less) restricted access to their information and their inbox. This is currently in its early infancy, but the need grows larger as the main networks lose their original specialised character and attempt to mix contacts from several spheres (social, business, family, casual). As far as I’m aware, nobody’s yet offering a non-offensive, effective grading system.

The false bugbears

Now let’s see the truisms, because they’re rather important.

First, it’s been stated that users would like networks to be transparent (be a member of one, freely access members of others). Even if each network’s services were the same, I don’t think it’s true. You use a network because you like the way it handles the filter, and because the people you want to allow in are mostly using that service. You don’t go about putting profiles just anywhere (unless you’re a compulsive networker or a total newbie), and making your profile acessable from anywhere would be just the same. Imagine your sister’s friends in Facebook asking for contact to your LinkedIn data. Or viceversa.

The second (jump network with your full friend list) is scarier still. Imagine the shock of finding yourself in your friend’s new network service, accesible to another (and possibly totally different) sphere of his contacts, subject to different access filtering rules. No way.

Garden walls are there for a reason

What the users (we) want is a way to handle profiles in a coherent way. Interconnection, but definitely not transparency. Allow your preferred network to “encapsulate” and handle your data (or maybe just part of it, to make it more complicated) but also allow it to speak to other systems so you can add a contact whose data is not housed in the “home” network; your network should only be allowed to access and present the data that your friend has allowed for that kind of connection (i.e. the brief resumé, or the Flickr feed, or the blog feed, or whatever). And viceversa: once you have connected two profiles (put them in each others’ white-lists) it would be nice to be able to message from one to the other.

But that does not require transparency. That requires standards (for cross-identification and access to data)… and a very coherent and strong way to filter and grade access. The standards are easy to build on today’s technology (Mugshot already allows members to see an aggregation of your friends’ activities on other networks, Facebook communicates with any external email account, Google is pushing common building blocks). The filters are not here yet, as already mentioned. With that in place, things like Flickr feeds or LinkedIn miniresumés (already available to the masses) could get their versions for “friends in other networks”.

OpenID, or any unified login system that allows a person to have a single set of data for identifying themselves in several services, is a reasonably good idea (whatever the security risks of a single point of entry for so much data). It would help to build those Mugshot-type aggregations.

All in all, the walls are more important than the gates: the value of the network is in the quality of the filter. If the services it allows are relevant for your goals, your people will happily join. But if you can’t restrict access to your data, you can’t publish it safely, and the network loses its point.

The future?

As far as I can see, it looks like we’ll either see services that are able to coherently aggregate other, specialised services (the way Mugshot is very slowly going), or generalist services that allow much more precise and efficient filtering of information and access according to “friend profiles”, thus becoming completely different environments depending on the use they’re given.

The first way (integrating outside data) is urgently demanded, if imperfectly supported. The second is just as urgently demanded, as the large network services swell beyond usefulness into spam-generation machines.

And of course, there is the actual services offered on top of those white-lists of contacts and contacts of contacts. There needs to be a lot of innovation in that field if the social network companies hope to become really serious businesses in their own sake. Because they mostly aren’t, yet… and some bubbles will eventually burst. That’s one point The Economist got right.

Two million messages

Yep, you heard well. This afternoon the Macuarium CoP system gathered its two-millionth message :-). This is being a very significant month (and there’s more news coming).

Still, I’m not especially impressed by the number of posts. It’s not an essential metric. We do have a high participation rate and all that, much higher than average… but what I’m rather proud of is the “signal-to-noise” ratio. We’ve reached that milestone while beating the drum of “use your searches, no repeat threads” and the “keep offtopics off the topics”. We have one of the most to-the-point, moderated methodologies out there.

And it’s worked well enough to fuel continuous, increasing message and membership growth. Up to two million messages, and beyond :-). All of them, all those stories and solutions, available online.
Did I say I’m immensely proud of our team? And our members, too.

Ejemplo de moderación online

Me van a permitir ustedes que señale un ejemplo de moderación efectiva, y abuse de su paciencia explicando porqué lo es :-).

Aquí tenemos un tema aparentemente anodino en un foro dedicado a los aspectos artísticos del diseño (la historia completa es para otro día con más calma). Véase el desarrollo del diálogo:

- Usuario recién registrado presenta una petición de ayuda manifiestamente aprovechada y fuera de lugar.

- Profesionales del ramo le saltan al cuello, afeándole la actitud y la pregunta.

- El moderador (Trazas, otro profesional del diseño y la maquetación) interviene en el tema.

- Cesan los ataques y la única otra actividad es positiva.

Obsérvese que no lo cierra, no edita nada, no sanciona a nadie. Desde el punto de vista de “gestión de conflictos”, apela a los valores de la comunidad para que los usuarios agresivos dejen de serlo, avergonzándose de su actitud.

Pero no se queda ahí: cita, y explica, las normas de la casa de una forma que apoya lo que está diciendo, y las cita asumiéndolas no como una limitación sino como una ayuda para los fines comunes del foro.

Y aún más: remata predicando con el ejemplo, dedicando tiempo y buen sentido a responder al usuario inicial… de un modo en el que le ayuda, sin darle nada inapropiado. Es difícil pensar en una respuesta más constructiva a esa pregunta.

Todo ello con un tono tranquilo, sin imponer ni avasallar, invocando como fuente de autoridad los valores con los que los propios usuarios se identifican y en los que quieren verse reflejados (orgullo por el trabajo, ayuda). Sin personalizar el conflicto con nadie, de forma que se evitan enconamientos. Sin presentar las normas como imposiciones externas. Sin levantar la voz.

Tengo el gusto de ver muchos ejemplos magníficos de moderación todos los días. Este (por la claridad del diálogo) quizá no sea el mejor del año… pero probablemente es el mejor ejemplo de técnicas aplicadas de moderación que he visto en un buen rato.

También es un ejemplo de porqué no vale cualquiera para moderar, y porqué siempre apuesto por voluntarios. Trazas no ha hecho esas cosas sólo porque sepa que funcionan (que lo sabe, lleva moderando años y conoce la técnica de primera mano). Las ha hecho así porque su carácter es así. Le gusta ayudar, le gusta tratar a la gente con consideración, y es un profesional como la copa de un pino con suficiente confianza en sí mismo para decir lo que ha dicho.

Actualizado para corregir un link que daba a la zona de colaboración. Gracias por el aviso :-).

Windows into communities: conversations and the “dynamic community” concept

I’m up to the ears in work these days and posting a bit slowly, but I don’t want to forget about this piece. Eric Hoffer has come, from a semantic web perspective, to an interesting issue. Or two.

The first is technology. He outlines a vision where he can gather the threads of relevant conversations from different communities (board- or list-supported conversations) as well as those running at (and across) blogs. All filtered according to domain and person interests (i.e. just the issues and the people he chooses to follow).

This is in fact quite closer  than one might think. Most blogs are efficently tagged according to domain, and track links quite well; a better-built RSS reader with appropriate filters could enable the blog part of his vision. Tagging forum posts and threads is not as widespread but it’s already started (pushed by search engine optimization, to be fair) and most are already quite proficient at generating RSS feeds; again, filtering well-tagged feeds for interesting domains and authors should not be impossible (whenever tagging becomes widespread).

So his vision of a personal, “virtual”, tailored community is not impossible. Indeed, there may be a business model not far from the surface, there.

The second issue he raises is a social one, but he raises it only implicitly.

OK, let’s assume the reader works, and that it’s viable to participate in those conversations (registration issues, participation interfaces… at a basic level, there doesn’t need to be any integration). The user can sit in the middle of his virtual “dynamic community” and follow any conversation, and even dip into them at will.

The question is, is that really a community?

Yes, it’s a window into a “conversation space”. Yes, it’s a domain. It can be a community in a wide, lax sense (as in “the worldwide coal-mining community”). I’ve heard it called a “domain community”. But I don’t think it’s really any sort of community.

In as much as a community is a social construct, with some shared procedures, goals and culture, and some personal affinity stemming from all of those, and not just a set of streams of information, it’s not.

Participation is not everything it takes to belong to a community. Remember the “honourable lurker” concept? And there’s participation without belonging, both legitimate and parasitic.

Eric’s reader would give us a window into many communities, into many disparate societies and their conversations. But it would only gives us fragments (the bits and pieces that we state we’re interested in). We would get all the domain context, but we would miss most of the social contex. We could be universal lurkers (and sometime participants) but not members.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I want Eric’s viewer as soon as someone builds it :-). It’ll save me a lot of time for staying abreast of what’s going on.

I’m just stressing that a community is more than nodes and information streams. It just doesn’t fit in the reader.

Author vs community (II): Hostage taking and reaction

Some of you may have read a previous post about a user who was erasing messages on the Macuarium boards, and the debate that arose among facilitators. Indeed, some of the comments were prescient. Here is the story of what happened afterwards. Long, twisty and debatable, as it is a raw account and not a use case.

To show a more complete picture, let’s add that the user was in the list of candidates of our yearly prize to the user with the most valued contributions. He was appreciated mostly by patrons of the social (off-topic) forum, where he spent most of his time in the last few years, and many votes were popularity-based rather than contribution-based, but you can hardly help that in an online poll. Also, he was a recognized active and long-time user, with several thousand messages to his name (about 6000 in total, some 3000 in technical forums).

To cap it all, this time last year we were considering asking him to step up to be a facilitator. We didn’t, because at the yearly gathering all of us had the same impression: face to face, he didn’t have it. He was not the right material for such a job, the way we do it. Too happy to have met himself, to put it mildly.

And when I repeatedly say “we”, I mean the consensus of facilitators and admins.

About the time when you and I were discussing here what could be learnt and done, another Macuarium admin, and a facilitator that was a friend of the mentioned user, sent separare private (backchannel) messages to the deleter, asking about the matter. We were aware of some disconfort on his part, which we though due to his perception that we were not enforcing political correctness in the forums (and we aren’t) whereas we enforced rules that he didn’t like (like avoiding duplicate messages and offtopics in technical forums). As I said, he was known to be a bit on the narcissistic side, although we appreciated his contributions. We didn’t think there was any serious problem with him.

He answered his friend with a vague and angry letter (apparently she had expressed her displeasure at having a particular thread mutilated) and the administrator with a vague and polite one (she’d been kind, as usual) in which he gave no specific quarrel. While we were commenting both answers, we found that he’d started a thread in the social forums to express his “protest and disagreement”… in a completely vague way (i.e. not mentioning the specific actions or people that had caused his protest, or the actions he wanted implemented).

We were quite surprised. In Macuarium, it is customary to avoid those public threads because they become unseemly brawls, with a dozen people championing different issues and everyone playing to the gallery instead of finding common ground. We stress the use of backchannel conversations to solve whatever issue, with the admins acting as “last resort” when there is a disagreement with a facilitator that can’t be solved.

This thread promply went the way of others. We initially let it proceed and asked for specific issues that were a problem and could be corrected, but didn’t get any (meaningful) answer. At the same time, we found out that the user had edited the last of his messages, which sort of rattled a bit (we were trying to understand the problem and he kept raising the stakes with his other hand while answering messages as if nothing happened). After getting no answers in the thread, and reading a particularly painful message from a user with a different axe to grind, the thread was closed and frozen (we have a “frozen storage” area for threads that are deemed “records”, and took it there).

The facilitator team was a bit confused, to put it mildly. What we all agreed is that the user needed to be prevented from destroying further threads, and thus removed that right from him.

As far as I could see the issue then, we had a case of a user who was exercising his control on his messages to force the community managers to change policies (the fact that we could not understand what he wanted changed was a different issue). It was worse than blackmail. He had deleted his messages, which in my mind was a direct assault on hundreds of threads. So while we kept asking him for a clear explanation of his problem, I decided to cut him out of the above-mentioned poll to select the most appreciated contributor.

Of course, I explained the decision in the poll’s thread. That led to a public debate of whether that was right or not. Most people approved heartily, but we got sharp rebukes from three sides: two friends of the deleter, two people with different axes to grind (their appearance was constructive, since they were writing under new nicks, pretending to be different users… unveiling them and their private quarrels destroyed their credibility and helped ours), and several nicks registered by the deleter (pretending to be different people: unfortunately for him, forum management does give some useful tracking tools).

The friends subsided, the interlopers slunk away (having earned a new e-speak name, “zombies”), and the false nicks were banned. Indeed by that time the issue was preposterous: 24 hours later, no coherent complaint or proposal had emerged, either in public (where the deleter was given a channel to write through a “neutral” user) or in private.

We were quite fed up by then. I said so and stated that we would not continue listening by noon that day. At 14,04 I received a private message where the deleter showed very constructive engagement and rejected every interpretation of his behaviour that was other than positive. At 14,15, while writing a constructive answer, I was made aware that he had not, in fact, erased his messages.

He had substituted the texts with a link to a transparent image, hosted on his server. We found out when he changed the image to a different, protesting one.

I felt that he had been playing (again) with us, and let free rein to the facilitator team. Every single “showpiece” of the deleter was made invisible, over 6000 messages, by hand, in some 12 hours of coordinated, night-shift-including work by several people (by which time, the deleter had changed the image into a “manifesto” that stated that the original texts were “not deleted, but safely kept, and would have been soon restored to the community” had we not reacted so badly to his “constructive complaint”.

That incensed the whole team. First, we did not believe it for a minute. Second, it changed the situation from an angry user taking his content with him by deleting it (something bad, but arguably legitimate in the end) into a hostage situation. He was saying he had withdrawn them as part of the protest, to reinforce the message.

To cut a long story short, we were not having that. We are proud to hold no favouritism: rules are the same for all, appreciated contributor or newbie. Trying to push us through that content was like adding insult to injury.

We refused to play ball, completely. Now, he’s been banned thoroughly, his messages invisible and to remain so, even his PDF guides to be deleted. He roams out there badmouthing us :-).

We have to thank him for a lot of lessons learned, though, about user content management and even early conflict management. We have also to thank him for the inmensely satisfactory experience of feeling the backing of the community along all this issue.

In these nine years, there have been clashes with users and groups of users, but few where we could so clearly pinpoint so few people trying to coerce so many to do as they wanted… and where we could prove that they were actually that few, and that contrary to the shared ethos of the community.

I dare say that without the content mutilation, he’d have got some backing: he was popular, he was appreciated, he might have had some real grievance (I still can’t say) and there’s other people with bruised toes. But by proving that he didn’t care about the damage wrought to all, he confirmed what we concluded in the previous post of this story.

Community content is sacred to the community. Even if it is still property of the author.

Normas vivas para una comunidad de práctica

En un tema en el que se están debatiendo propuestas de mejora para el sistema de comunidades de Macuarium, los usuarios están trabajando en una versión sintetizada de las normas (algo que tiene mérito porque tenemos decenas de páginas al respecto). Es algo no solamente fundamental, sino también muy interesante porque resalta tanto los puntos “críticos” (aquellos en los que con más frecuencia es necesaria una orientación) como los objetivos de la comunidad. Vamos a incorporar y utilizar la sugerencia.

Un usuario, Fer76, ha sacado tiempo también para poner esas nuevas FAQs (reglas) en tono de humor. No será el que figure en la versión definitiva, pero estoy seguro de que transmite muy bien las ideas esenciales de la filosofía de la casa:

1. Hablarás de asuntos técnicos sobre todas las cosas.
2. No hablarás de política o religión.
3. No darás soporte a la piratería.
4. No comprarás ni venderás fuera de ‘El Zoco’.
5. No repetirás temas en vano, y usarás las búsquedas previamente.
6. Escribirás correctamente, con tranquilidad y sentido común.
7. No dejarás de leer las FAQs completas.

Y como él dice, aún faltan tres ;-).

[Actualizado para añadir las aportaciones de los lectores de emekaeme y colisteros de com-prac]

8. De vez en cuando contribuirás un resumen corto de lo que has entendido (John D Smith, CPSquare).

9. Buscarás y participarás en proyectos que beneficien a la comunidad (Shawn Callaghan, Anecdote).

10. Siempre asumirás buena intención por parte de los demás, y no te tomarás a tí mismo demasiado en serio. (Nancy White, Full Circle Associate)

Estas FAQs se resumen en dos:

Compartirás el chocolate con los otros niños, (Nancy White, Full Circle Associate) y…

Reporting: collected community managers interviews

There is this itch: I sometimes feel that living in Spain instead of some more densely-populated haunt of online community practitioners (say London or the US West Coast), not to mention working for a [censored] employer, might possibly be depriving me of the opportunity to talk and share ideas with some  interesting people.

Not that I complain, usually: the Macuarium environment gives ample occasion for debate and learning on the practical side, and thanks to com-prac, the KB and other initiatives I do correspond with lots of extremely interesting people, some of them friends. There is the occasional chance of a beer. Year on year, some sort of network (both local and far-flung) does emerge.

And then you see the meetings that some people organise, and the topics, and the interviews that Bill Johnston has collected.

We should have held on to California…

Authors rights and common work: an ethical conundrum

Here’s a practical question for those of you who know or manage communities, especially those that actually produce “knowledge objects” worth mentioning.

Picture this. A conversation starts (a forum thread). Several dozen people participate. The result is a hugely interesting and professionally valuable piece of text, tens of pages long, written during months of exchange.

Life goes on in the community, and several such threads are produced. Then, one of the members decides to pull out every single one of her messages.

Regardless of the specific rights set in the terms of use, do you believe she has a moral right to do so?

As far as I can see, there are two possible answers:

1. The libertarian or “Wellsian” answer. “You own your own words”, as the old The Well community believed, and you can take them back whenever it suits you, regardless of reasons or results.

2. The communitarian or “common work” answer. “A message is not a complete work” about sums it up. Since a message is just a part of a conversation (depends on it for its start and its context and its meaning) it doesn’t give the author of the message a right to maul the resulting thread.

It may not surprise you, but as a “serial author” I’ve always subscribed to the first point of view. The Macuarium terms of use are built on its implications, even if they consecrate some management discretion.

And yet… this week we’ve been talking at our facilitator forum. We’ve been thinking about the solution to the occasional user who actually does pack up and erase her messages… and in the process gouges knowledge objects worth keeping. Because we don’t have a policy, and sometimes we let them rip, and sometimes we stop them. And talking it over, the emerging consensus (not unanimity) is edging closer and closer to the “communitarian” philosophy. Which worries me. A bit.

In short, it seems that the facilitators would prefer allowing full edition rights to everybody… except when someone is manifestly on a rip, and susceptible to cause damage (a rare and detectable event). Then, they condone blocking the edition rights. Sounds practical and simple, but the implications are serious.

What do you think about this? Any experiences or opinions?

Network and community: related but not the same

A short while ago I was quoting Valdis Krebs’ piece on the SNA-derived picture of a community (the highly networked core, the isolated periphery). As I said, it highlighted a lot of things and helped to tell parts of the story… but it was not the whole story.

The reason is simple: as the very pictures show, networks and communities are different beasts. You can map networks in a community, but not use them to describe them fully.

Networks are nets of node-to-node links. Each node holds a “directory” of its individual contacts, and expands them through direct, usually voluntary contact. Whereas a community has a shared directory, and is an entity on its own right. This can be described in two ways at least:

• Community as network aggregation. A community is a different entity: a different player in the relationship network, one that links to every member. This introduces a node-to-whole type of conversation in the picture. A member of an online community can address “the community”, not any specific member, and get a response from “the community” (any number of members, probably few of which had any previous direct contact with the initiator). Equally, it enables to speak appropriately of “community product” or “community opinion” or “community practice”.
• Community as channel and memory. As an alternative model, we can think of the community as just a communication channel among individuals, with a core and the ability to provide direct connections between users. The core broadcasts any conversation to every user, so everyone can listen and participate (yes, I’m ignoring backchannel tools). This enables direct member-to-member communication, but it’s by nature public. It also enables member-to-all, many-to-member, many-to-many, and all manner of streams of meaning. It also introduces an asynchronous element, since that core enables anybody, at anytime, to participate in a conversation whose originators may be long gone.

There may be other ways to picture it, all of them reasonable. The point I want to make with those two is that, while networks exist inside communities (and thus SNA can help explain the working of communities) and across them, a community is not a network.

It’s a slightly more complex beast.

Tag surfing for KM

Every once in a while I can find the time to use WordPress’ excellent tag surfing system, that showcases the latests posts in WordPress blogs for selected tags. I’m sorry to admit that I hardly do RSS reading, for my peace of mind :-). Too many angles to track.

So today I went fishing for the first time since mid December, and there was a really interesting catch:

- The Giraffe. I found this multi-authored, development-oriented KM blog thanks to their announcement about Lucie Lamoreux. She does impressive work, and the the blog begins to look impressive too. Even more relevant are the posts about the end of Bellanet, one of the larger and older references in that corner of knowledge management and a precursor of many other efforts. I didn’t know it was closing at the end of December (that will give