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 :-)).

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.

I wish I could comment with a bit more depth, but these days are as awkward as usual of late (I’m down with a bit of a fever on top of the usual excess wordkload). Still I don’t want to miss commenting this: http://www.socialtext.com/products/features/Socialtext-People.php is a webcast explaining the latest beta of collaboration software maker (it’s already gone well beyond wikis) Socialtext. And yes, it’s a people directory, with many social networking trimmings (groups, subscriptions of the doings of friends), but in fact it’s actually just a very nice and efficient way of tracking the people behind the wikis (and blogs) and adding a “team” or “group” dimension to a large collaboration platform.

It’s not the only news they have (”Dashboard” is the other) on the way to Socialtext 3.0. It’s getting more and more interesting.

By the way, I suppose you know Socialtext is not the only one going “social” in this way. Alfresco’s new “social networking” layer is quite akin, but I don’t know if it’s able to track contributions from all the third-party software it integrates (blogs, forums, wikis), besides the document management part.

The point (if this post has one) is that people directories that enable users to see both ways (finding the author from the content, finding all the content by the author) are a great working tool that can actually be useful in sourcing expertise; indeed they should work much better than the usually current “official expert” directories present in most companies. If you throw in some nice team- and group-support features, so much the better.

Way to go. I’m lookimg forward to a more in-depth look… and maybe a customer demo.

It’s been a long while since I last posted about the old KnowledgeBoard (I should have a longer look one of these days if I can stick my head out long enough). But the fact is they’ve gone and published Helen’s translation of a very sensible document about setting up a working network, based on the Mikronet experience. Helen knows all about that, and has been a charter member of the H-SIG at KnowledgeBoard too, so I can attest she knows what she’s talking about.

Besides, the piece is short and to the point. Less “internet-enabled” than some would like, but down to earth and based on practice: just the way I like it. You can read it here.

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.

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.

El último boletín de McKinsey tenía mucha más miga de lo acostumbrado. Y entre ella, una entrevista (no muy reciente) al director subversivo de Pixar, Brad Bird en la que se examinan los ingredientes de gestión que respaldan la cultura innovadora y los resultados de la empresa.

El texto se merecía un repaso y un poco de análisis. Por aquello de que tiene que ver con lo que pasa en Apple, lo he publicado en Macuarium.com. Podéis leerlo aquí. El artículo incluye links al contenido original, que (para los más interesados) abarca también extractos de la grabación de la entrevista. Una gozada.

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.

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.

Esto fue un artículo para Macuarium.com que se fue extendiendo y extendiendo y poniendo progresivamente más metafísico :-). Ahora es demasiado largo para salir como artículo y tendrá que salir como serie… pero mientras tanto, si alguien quiere leer una opinión sobre hacia dónde nos lleva la penúltima evolución de la tecnología y sus modos de uso, puede ver el PDF aquí.

La tesis esencial es sencilla: poco a poco, se están rompiendo las barreras de la informática corporativa. Cada vez es menos necesario estar “dentro de la red” para operar, y cada vez se usan más cosas de “fuera de la red”. Los departamentos de IT se resisten todo lo que pueden (aduciendo razones de seguridad), pero la evolución tecnológica está favoreciendo ese cambio y los usuarios les están buscando las vueltas. Poco a poco, la utilidad de estar encerrado en un mismo espacio físico para realizar tareas que no dependen de la proximidad física a nadie ni del acceso a unas aplicaciones ancladas a la red local, va desapareciendo.

Así como la Blackberry significó el despegue de directivos y comerciales (es decir, les despegó del asiento y del horario), el iPhone y tecnologías asociadas (widgets, interconexión Outlook, navegación web seria, interfaz usable y agradable, funciones lúdicas integradas) van a hacer despegar a mucha más gente.

Eso sí, el despegue real, el nomadismo, requiere más cosas que la capacidad de trabajar desde cualquier parte. Requiere unas “cualquier partes” adecuadas a las necesidades del trabajo. Entornos que se parecen más a cafés que a oficinas, o que al despacho en casa. Sitios que ofrecen la posibilidad de trabajar con gente cerca pero sin jerarquías… porque no se trabaja para la misma empresa.

Todo eso, y algunas cosas más, en ese PDF :-). Se aprecian opiniones.

Después de ésto, espero volver a mis raíces y dedicar el tiempo “de emekaeme” a la gestión de comunidades de práctica. Que ya va siendo hora :-).