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May 26, 2004
Communities Tied to One Technology
Posted by Seb Paquet
For the most part, members of online communities usually rely on one dominant communication channel - be it a mailing list, a forum, weblogs, a wiki, or IRC - even when alternate channels would be helpful for certain purposes. Communities like open source development networks and the international, never-sleeping
Joi Ito posse, who use multiple modes, are the exception rather than the norm.
I've been wondering about the factors that somehow work to inhibit or facilitate the use of multiple communication channels, and the interplay between those channels. Now there's a discussion underway on that topic over at the lively Community Wiki, on the page
Community Tied to One Technology. Among the potential explanations that are brought up for sticking to one channel: inertia, lack of technical acumen, the fragmentation/critical mass problem, and the lack of integration between modes.
My hunch is that as the
"software that does less, well" pattern and the concomitant "mix and match tools" user philosophy that we've seen develop in social software become dominant, we'll see multiple modes become relatively widespread relatively quickly.
(I should point out that the incredibly prolific Dave Pollard
touched upon this topic a while ago.)
Comments (4)
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1. Zbigniew Lukasiak on May 26, 2004 11:27 AM writes...
The alternative is that there would be tools uniting more communicative modes. For example on the Crao Wiki tries to integrate wiki with instant messaging. On my wiki at: http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/kwiki.cgi?UseTheWholeSpectrum I try to list all needed communication modes.
Permalink to Comment2. LionKimbro on May 26, 2004 7:27 PM writes...
In CommunityWiki, we also have WhatCommunicationSoftwareToUse (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/WhatCommunicationSoftwareToUse) and ElementsOfCommunicationChannels. (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/ElementsOfCommunicationChannels )
The OneBigSoup effort (http://onebigsoup.taoriver.net/ http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/OneBigSoup) should probably combine, or at least coordinate, with some of these other efforts.
We need to find each other and federate.
Permalink to Comment3. xian on May 27, 2004 1:14 PM writes...
The pull of inertia is strong, but we're all familiar with Usenet groups developing FAQ pages for the Web (and before that for Gopher, archie, FTP) and groups that convene is one forum finding the need to create their own mailing lists, so it does seem that the need to change or add tools to the community's toolkit is best driven by the community's own needs, even if objectively one might be able to say "with that YahooGroup, you are missing out on all the benefits of having a wiki," or what have you.
Permalink to Comment4. Seb on May 27, 2004 3:25 PM writes...
xian: Yes, the needs best define what tools should be used, but groups are often only fuzzily aware of their communication needs and of the available offerings that may satisfy them.
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