community

Geek curry night in Peterborough…

March 15, 2011 By Dan Thornton

The belated arrangements for the fourth meetup for ‘Digital People in Peterborough‘ have now been announced, and in a change from the pub format, it’s going to be a curry night…

I’m still surprised that something I’d mentioned in passing to my good friend @pjeedai and virtual acquintance (at the time) @joffff has turned into a regular meetup which sees 20+ digital people get together for drinks, food and chatting. All from just deciding a time and a place and seeing if people would turn up.

And it’s continuing to grow. We’re getting a reasonable amount of people checking out the site regularly, more and more people are registering and posting in the forum, the Facebook page has got 34 Likes so far, and the Twitter account has 25 followers.

That might be small if you’re used to reading case studies of global brands and millions spent in marketing, but as a group which met for the first time 5 months ago, and which has come together from nothing, I’m pretty amazed. And particularly as it’s revealed how many talented and skilled people are in the area – as a result, it’s led to the founding of digital design and development company Jodanma, of which I’m a co-founder, for example.

With the ease of communication and organisation, if you’ve ever wondered about starting a community around a cause, shared hobby, idea, dream etc, there really is no excuse not to give it a go. Maybe it’ll become massive in terms of size, or value. And maybe it’ll take a bit of time and work. But there’s no excuse for not giving it a try and finding out who else is interested…

My thoughts on Facebook’s commenting system

March 8, 2011 By Dan Thornton

There’s been a lot of debate around Facebook’s new commenting system, particularly due to the fact it is currently being tested on Techcrunch.

Matthew Ingram does a good job of summarising at GigaOm, although the heart of the debate seems to be in the comments section of Robert Scoble’s post (I pop up a couple of times in the comments!). There are various reasons for allowing a choice of commenting profile, whether or not that includes the facility for anonymity in an easy or more complicated manner – such as creating a fake Facebook account. But I think I can summarise one major flaw in the test and reactions so far.

When UK pubs had a reputation for violence, they’d introduce a dress code requiring shoes. That’d work for a couple of weeks. And then you’d find yourself in fights with the same people, but in slightly smarter clothes.

On a more analytic level, there are a variety of reasons for not using a commenting system which currently rests on the shoulder of one company.

You may want to keep Facebook personal, and use Twitter/LinkedIn/your blog or site as your professional reference.
You may not your Facebook profile to be a mess of comments you’ve left around the web.
You may wish to be anonymous to voice your authentic opinion whilst minimising the repercussions either personally or career wise.
Facebook is blocked by a number of organisations, preventing commenting from people in the workplace.
Whilst I may choose a relatively public online persona, my friends and family haven’t chosen to participate in my online life in the same way. And whilst Facebook has privacy controls, I don’t fancy checking 500-odd people have the right settings in place before I post on Techcrunch. Or want any of them involved if I choose to disagree with something on there and annoy someone.
Blog comments have long been one way of creating community between bloggers, whether or not those comments are seo-friendly ‘do follow’ links or ‘no follow’. If someone posts a great comment on my site, I’d like them to get the small reward of a direct link to their site, if anyone wants to find out more. Not reward Facebook for doing nothing. And judging by the SEOMOz toolbar’s ‘NoFollow’ indicator, the Facebook comments are followed links back to Facebook everytime.
There are viable alternatives already out there – for instance Disqus, as used on this blog. Pick whichever ID you’re comfortable with, and use it!
The comment culture is built by the culture of the site – rather than using technical solutions, perhaps it’s more sensible for the TC team to look at why they generate so many antagonistic or crap anonymous comments. Besides their size and audience, perhaps the fact that they may sometimes stray into tabloid linkbait might contribute? Look at the difference between similar sites in terms of technology e.g. Digg vs Reddit vs Hacker News, for example. All three allow link sharing, but the quality of discussion is better on Reddit and Hacker News in my opinion, because there’s more of a community on both.
Facebook Comments has code in it which would have allowed Google and Twitter logins, but was removed for some reason – and as a company with an immense userbase, they’ve got no vested interest in allowing a wider range of logins.
Following a VRM principle would suggest that the content and data created is mine, and I should be allowed to choose how, when, and why I share it.
And finally, there may be times when I might have a legitimate reason to not share a blog comment, for example, on Facebook. Perhaps I’m enquiring about a present or a recipe as a surprise for my partner (Remember Facebook Beacon?). Perhaps I want to describe a personal experience which may relate to my family. Maybe I’m commenting on a site which I don’t want to necessarily be associated with or advertise because I want to disagree with what they’ve written.

I’m all for quality conversation, but as you’d imagine, I don’t think I’ll be installing Facebook Comments anytime soon… Am I making the right decision?

Social networks don’t make students dumb

July 18, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Apparently using social networks doesn’t cause students to suffer academically, and in fact, can eliminate the different in American GPA scores between students whose parents had differing levels of higher education, and for some demographics it had a positive relationship.

Researchers from Northwestern University have acknowledged that students will distract themselves and waste time but the positive effects outweigh the negativity for some, or at least cancel out for others. (h/t Ars Technica).

Information Hydrant image by Will Lion on Flickr (CC Licence)

There’s been a lot of debate about the effects of the internet, particularly in the debate between Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows – does the internet enable productive spare time, or rewire our brains to skim read without any proper thought (possibly the most lightweight and succinct summation!).

My own thoughts can be summed up in two bullet points:

The internet is the most amazingly comprehensive, searchable and shareable source of information that has ever existed, enabling the largest ever number of people to create, compile, curate and spread information
It’s all about how it’s used in conjunction with the other sources of information available from print to radio to television, and the outcomes it produces.

The internet is not inherently anything, despite the fact it was based on openness and sharing, or the fact it can be used for misinformation, criminal activity or censorship.

Until computers and networks become completely sentient, then it’s the human interaction with the internet which shapes what it can do, and what it becomes.

And as long as individuals, groups and companies continue to provide useful and valuable information for use by others, the net effects for those who learn the skills to use the internet effectively will be positive – social networking is an ever-more important part of that as it encompasses interaction, organisation and knowledge-sharing.

The importance of experiencing your community

June 28, 2010 By Dan Thornton

When talking about community-building or social media, it’s easy to suggest you should be part of it. And that’s not too hard to do if the community in question is something you already identify with.

The chance to go and just be a normal fan on Friday when Pearl Jam played Hyde Park reminded me exactly how much I’ve identified with music and bands throughout my life, and how much of a social experience it is, even when you lose your group of friends in your quest to get to the front of the crowd (In my defence, I’ve liked Pearl Jam for almost 20 years, and hadn’t seen them live until now!).

It was just as easy when I worked in motorcycling and cars – I can thank my father for that one, with some of our earliest family outings to car shows and Rallycross. And that was followed by lifts from school on the back of his motorcycle.

But it’s important to occasionally have normal fan experiences, even if it’s a subject you’ve got a close affinity to. Because otherwise you forget the priviledged experienc eyou have as a member of the media, for example.

And it’s even more important if you’re working with communities you’re not familiar with. If you’re working with an unfamiliar subject matter, it’s time to search through friends and family and find some people who might share that interest. And it’s also important to find some members of any existing community to talk with.

It’s not because you can’t find out a lot by using online monitoring tools, research papers, blogs, etc.

It’s because there’s still nothing like seeing the look on someone’s face or their eyes light up when they’re discussing a subject they’re passionate about – and that’ll infect the work you do and give you a far better respect for that subject than anything else you’ll do. And if you don’t love the subject yourself, the best you can hope is to immerse yourself in their love for it.

Open discourse on Open Source surfaces familiar problem

April 8, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I’m just on my way home after a great evening at the BT Centre for ‘An evening of open discourse’, which was an open self organising evening of discourse around open source, open data and open APIs.

There was a great panel initiating the discussion and debate, with Doc Searls, Karim Lakhani, Blaine Cook, Kevin Marks, Jeremy Ruston and Lars Kurth. A good enough panel for me to overcome the fact I was by far the least code-aware person in the auditorium by a factor of almost infinity. And then some. But given the fact I blog about microblogging exclusively on www.140char.com, the chance to listen to a former lead developer at Twitter and the principle co-author of OAuth was particularly of interest, even amongst one of the more accomplished panels I’ve seen.

Luckily, although I’m not an Open Source coder, I’m very much a believer in the opportunities it brings, and interested in the history of it’s continued evolution, and the human elements and personalities involved – and I knew enough to follow all the technical references, which was nice.

But problem the most reassuring thing for me was that it seemed the main two elements of the debate were two non-technology issues:

How do commercial and Open Source interests co-exist either alongside each other or in a hybrid model?
How you can assemble, motivate and integrate a community.

Those are two areas where I’m less ashamed of the fact I use Open Source tools, but I’ve never built even the smallest part of one!

And obviously the community model is of huge interest, and it was surprising in some ways to hear that there’s still a widespread admission of a lack of understanding about how communities might work in the Open Source developer world, which has been around for decades longer than the current assumed knowledge of a large group of marketing people in the social networking world.

Which probably shows the difference between people who deal with code, and those who might deal more in packaging and branding.

But it’s also clear that there’s still a huge learning for a lot of people around the fact that starting Open Source/crowd-sourcing/social networking/user generated content isn’t something that unleashes the ‘magic internet pixies’ who come and provided free coordinated, organised and harmonious free labour. One reason colleagues can manage to stay civil on many occasions is the fact they’re getting paid to be there!

The biggest challenge definitely seems to come for those businesses, such as Symbian, Sun or Linden Labs who have attempted to open up what was formerly a closed system, and then how those changes have sometimes struggled to be integrated into the rest of the business, and to motivate the open community in the way that was correctly, or incorrectly envisaged by the business originally.

Much the same as magazines sometimes suggested that when they unleashed ‘Commerce, Content, Community’ (the revised ordering of importance), that the content and community elements would take care of themselves.

Hence why communities don’t have hierarchies, shared beliefs, infighting, rules, standards, laws etc.

Oh wait.

I’ll try and expand more on communities across technology/networks and on and offline in the future.

There were also some really interesting insights, such as the power distribution of open source projects, in that, as expected a very small percentage of people do a lot of the work. But the perhaps surprising insight is that all of the new/novel ideas about the project came from the Long Tail, who might turn up, contribute one novel aspect from a different viewpoint, and then disappear – but their ideas make the project.

Kevin Marks did a good job of separating out the two principles of having open code which everyone might use, and having open standards which would allow different code to interoperate, and that the key sign of the gold standard is when two people can interoperate without even knowing the other exists.

And Blaine provided some really good insight into the early days of Twitter when it was more like 5 employees than 150 – such as the conscious decision not to develop an official Twitter client, and his introduction of the Twitter API as the push towards opening everything up.

It was definitely a great event, and I’ve got a lot of appreciation for the efforts of the organisers. Plus BT Centre look kinda cool from what I saw of it…