Learning Alliances

Guy Nadivi of http://www.intronetworks.com made some interesting comments on my post about his company’s software in an email. It’s really messy to take comments out of an email in MS Outlook at put them into a posting in Word Press, but I thought they were so interesting I’d quote them here with his permission. His comments are in red, and my original statements are in black:

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? Yes, in fact we do it all the time. However, there was no registration database to integrate with this time, so attendees were left with no option but to manually input their profile information. And after the conference, is there anyway to carry the profile forward? Yes, but only if the destination you want to carry it forward to is willing to accept the data. And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? If by “rest of the world” you mean other social networks, unfortunately that’s not feasible at this time as there is no“profile standard” everyone adheres to. BTW – the vast majority of our deployments are for private communities where almost everyone would prefer to keep their profile information just that, private. Yours might be the first request we’ve ever gotten for sharing profile data. I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially. Our business model favors deploying as many instances of introNetworks as possible. Whether the data is private or public has no impact on our bottom line.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). Maybe Trillian should have been added during the configuration phase of the deployment. Nevertheless, a Trillian user would still know whether they’re connecting to someone on AOL, Yahoo, or MSN, right? As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement. We appreciate constructive feedback of any type.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. Actually, that is the case. We are providing you with what we call an “ego-centric” perspective of this community. The pins represent a view of that community with you as THE central reference point. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. “Lies” is not only inaccurate, but a bit harsh. Again, we’re showing you an ego-centric perspective of this community as you relate to it, or as it relates to you if you prefer. When someone else logs in, they see the same thing as it pertains to them. We’re not “lying”. We’re simply showing a “you-driven” view of things. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? Please note that the legend in the lower right is “active” and allows you to quickly narrow down to any of the constituencies with one-click. Additionally, the Search, Build Advanced Search, and Filter Search Results panels on the left offer a number of ways to find and show whoever you want to see in the community with the greatest of ease. I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

I’ve been thinking about how the use of technology can change events for a long time. Participating in distributed communities like CPsquare has caused me to travel more than ever before, but the design of events such as conferences and dialogs themselves seems resistant to the use of technology.

Especially since the first two International Communities and Technologies conferences have been mostly innocent of technology (apart from PowerPoint and wi-fi access if you’re willing to hike), it’s great that C&T2007 is using an application like IntroNetworks. Provided that wi-fi access is stable and available throughout the conference space, I think this application can change how you meet and interact with people at a conference. It may be because I am prone to shyness attacks at conferences, but helping people visualize who’s going to be there and actually get in touch before and afterwards helps position a conference as one event in a larger conversation (or at least a longer-term one).

So it’s hard to tell the difference between the platform as designed and the service as provided (e.g., by the conference organizers, who I think put lots of work into using the platform) and the experience at my desktop. (That’s one of the things motivated us to keep working on the Technology for Communities book for the last three years.) So my comments may be “about the software” or about its use or about me. The only way out of that conundrum is to keep observing and writing about it. Let’s see.

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? And after the conference, is there any way to carry the profile forward? And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially.

Part of creating your profile is to choose from a set of tags that are then used for matching you up with other conference participants. The first two sets are “discipline” and “research interests,” reminding us that this conference is aimed at academic researchers. (It’s an accident of history that I keep going to it, I swear.) The third category of tags is called “Services/Sites”. It’s funny to think that whether someone uses Skype or Flickr not says something about them, rather than whether it’s easy to reach them or not.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement

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So the result of all this is a diagram with clickable pins representing people. You can mark them as contacts, send them a message, and look at their profiles. And it does work. Standing right next to me in the diagram is Aldo de Moor, a fellow I met at the Prato Conference last fall. I wrote him. He wrote back with an invitation to submit a book chapter proposal. The conversation has started already.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

Information technologies and a community of practice perspective can change how we design events, making them more productive and more fun. Beverly Trayner and I wrote about earlier projects and holding another dialog in Setúbal was an opportunity to observe, practice and design. For this dialog we had a public blog, a private wiki, weekly planning calls for the organizers, several group phone calls, and lots and lots of email. We didn’t use a web board as much as we had on previous occasions.

Since I spent a day working with Shirley Williams and her students at Reading University, and Shirley was also going to the dialog, we contrived to get on the same plane as Alasdair Honeyman from London to Lisbon. We had a great conversation from the moment we met at Heathrow to the moment our conversation was subsumed in the larger dialog. The conversation brought out what our separate conversations had been, what projects we had going, what books we were reading (Alasdair recommended “Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual” and I see Shirley has already read it), and what we wanted to discuss in Setúbal. So the idea is to start the conversation before the event actually starts. There are many ways to get that to happen, and I find it always pays off.

The second example of a getting there was what we came to call “van planning.” We had received a small grant from a project that was putting on an event in Porto. It was important for us to spend some time, but not too much, designing our part of the event. Since our group required two cars and a van, we set up the seating according to our roles in the project and spent the four hours in the car designing the event. I was in the backseat and Alasdair took notes:

We communicated by phone as elements of our plan emerged and as we thought about how the different elements would interact. And at a rest stop we met to iron out the interactions between the different parts:

Participating in a design process together - on our way to the event - was a little scary but also exhilarating.