Sociocorpus

Last evening a gave a presentation to the NZ Computer Society entitled Web 2.0: Hype or Reality?. Before I had even shut the laptop lid, Michael Sampson had blogged the session. Here’s the (PowerPoint) presentation that I used and [coming soon is] an audio recording of the session.

The main risk that I took was to attempt to isolate three key phenomena of Web 2.0:

1. the read/write Web - the first time since before the agrarian age that humans have had about equal opportunity to contribute to the shared corpus, as we do to access it
2. social computing - it’s about conversations, not content and there is a person inside the computer (there’s a credit missing there - who said that?)
3. decentralised computing - small peices, loosely joined

Of course, it isn’t hard to find 20+ year old technologies that meet these criteria. FidoNet and UseNet, for example. The difference, of course is adoption, and hype.

This Radio NZ interview text like a teen features two teenagers who run a course in texting at their local high school community ed programme. Their students are mainly older folk who, often motivated by wanting to communicate with their grandchildren. They know that letters don’t get replies.

The teenagers describe various classroom challenges that will be familiar to adult educators and they describe their responses with the confidence of the enfranchised.

This morning I attended a CORE session presented by Gina Revill of Ultraversity. Ultraversity provides what they think is the world’s only degree course that is 100% online and 100% research-based. It is a BA (hons) in Learning, Technology and Research targeted towards people who would otherwise not typically participate in tertiary education.

The course has literally zero content and zero face to face. The first cohort are completing their final requirements at present. Amazingly, only 40% of enrollees dropped out, the staff have not burned out, and Ultraversity hasn’t run out of money.

The “researchers” (students), typically mid-career in jobs like Teaching Assistant, participate in communities of practice along with “learning facilitators” and guest subject matter experts. Their “action inquiry” and “critical reflection” processes typically involve activities relating to their work contexts, and peer review in small groups.

It’s pretty cool that this kind of thing is succeeding. While I am excited about enquiry learning, and how similar it is to the learning taking place in organisations, the questions that jumped out for me were about online participation in general.

Firstly, this course has genuinely created engaging social contexts with no face to face. Of course it doesn’t work for all but those who stayed seem to have had a rich experience. The 100% online approach does not seem to have been an impediment to this. In fact, Gina actually suggested that, in some ways, the online environment creates a more intense social experience than face to face. Everything you “say” is recorded, including if you do not respond. You may have more time to respond but the readers have all the time in the world to evaluate your reply.

Secondly, Gina suggests from her experience that the key to successful online participation is facilitation. Now, I know the value of facilitation. We try to make sure that each online group has a Participation Coach and that that person is trained and supported. We also provide an eCampus where 700 post-graduate learners collaborate actively online with no facilitation whatsoever. And I know that, with all the facilitation in the world, an online group with a bad design will not succeed. Where I wonder are the research and conversations about the relative impact of design and facilitation on the participation that takes place? And, under what conditions is it possible to do without (expensive and difficult-to-scale) facilitation? Is it possible, in fact to embed the social principles that underpin facilitation and design in the very software?

As we prepare to launch our own Web 2.0 offering OnlineGroups.Net, I am constantly looking around to get a feel for the space that we are entering. I won’t try to define Web 2.0, but I can point to a couple of the lists that I look at, and imagine being on.

The one I have most fun with is the The Museum of Modern Betas because it keeps changing, blog-style and has such a cool name. Dion Hinchcliffe’s list is a classic (and has logos) and he has now added more. The eConsultant Web 2.0 directory is huge. I’d like to see some Aotearoa (NZ) links pop up on Innovation Map. The listible list (where you can add and rate items) is Web 2.0 itself. And the Web 2.0 Awards illustrate some of the criteria for success. And LOGO2.0 provides a retinally overloading graphical representation.

There is no shortage of lists of Web 2.0 sites. There are even lists of lists.

Now, to see if we can get ourselves added to some of these.

On the first of June, we aim to open the doors for our new subscription-based web application service OnlineGroups.Net. You will be able to create websites with email groups where people can hold conversations and share information.

One of my questions as we do this is “what is the environment that we are starting this business in?”. Now that’s a big question but a quick answer is surprisingly easy.

Some of the alternatives to OnlineGroups.Net have been around for a long time. You could always get a mailman mailing list or a pHpBB web forum or WebCrossing site hosted. You could always get Yahoo! Groups to combine some of the virtues of both email lists and web forums. You could always get CMS tools like Drupal or Plone hosted, or perhaps a blogging tool like WordPress. With sites like wordpress.com, this has got easier.

From an enterprise point of view, you could always implement a portal. Now this is called ECM (enterprise content management).

There is new upsurge of applications that enable people to occupy and create shared spaces on the Web. Social networking sites where you can create your own profile have been around for a few years. Some of these, like MySpace have expanded into entire communities. Others are more focused on specific tasks like del.icio.us, the business-oriented foldera and BaseCamp and there are general and multi-purpose tools like Backpack and (Andreessen’s) Ning. All of these can easily be integrated using loose links like RSS/Atom. Some tools like netvibes create private personal portals. Others, like flickr, create private/public spaces located in wide-ranging communities where others can interact with you and your content.
ECM is getting more an more like the Web. Portal interfaces are becoming more personalisable. People are expecting Web 2.0 functionality on their intranets.

This is the writeable, integrated Web where everyone and every group can have their own place.

IOPEN and GroupSense have been working together for three years to develop GroupServer. We are launching a new brand OnlineGroups.Net to market services associated with GroupServer. GroupServer is open source. You can download it right now for free. You can modify the source, release or even sell the resulting software as long as you keep the licence intact.

Why do we do this?

We developed GroupServer for our client Advanced Business Education Ltd (ABEL). GroupServer is built from open source tools and components and is, itself open source.

Building GroupServer using open source components enabled us to deliver significant functionality very quickly and with minimal initial cost and development effort. The Zope web application framework, Apache web server and Postfix mail server all provide vital functionality to GroupServer. GroupServer also uses an open source email group component called Mailboxer. This enabled us to integrate email groups into a sophisticated web framework very quickly.

I can’t quantify how much slower or faster the development process might have been had we used proprietary components. It is likely, however that there would have been significant costs associated with obtaining them.

There were also significant benefits to the client in releasing the software we built for them as open source. When this was first negotiated, the client was willing to agree as there was no particular cost to them in releasing the software. The software does not provide any competitive advantage to them that could be compromised by its release.

The advantages, however became clear as soon as other customers of ours began to fund features. Those features appeared on the original client’s site, either for free or for the only the cost of implementing them.

Using open source rather than proprietary software also reduces the risk to our clients of being stuck with software that can not be maintained. Even if we are not available to maintain the source code, the client at least has the source code and can engage another vendor to maintain it. As the development community grows around the software, the risk to our clients of losing the business relationship with us will also reduce. There will be other people and teams around the world who will have experience working with the same software.

For more on what we have done for ABEL, see Chartered Cyber Course.

We are developing open source software for commercial reasons, not out of goodwill. Naturally, we, like any vendor, value goodwill in business relationships. We also enjoy being in the collaboration software business and working collaboratively together and with other companies. These things, however do not themselves put food on the table.

We are building open source software because we believe that, in the long term, this is the most commercially sustainable business model for generic software like ours. As the development community grows, it has the potential to develop a greater capacity than individual company to maintain the software. Even if this does not occur with our software, if it occurs with its competitors, then charging a licence fee would be a significant barrier to market uptake.

Software licensing is a small component of total cost of ownership. Whether software is free or not, organisations still invest in putting it in and then keeping it going. Once software becomes necessary to the business, there is significant value in support and maintenance.

The business opportunities in open source software are for services: consulting, integration, customisation, maintenance and support.

Some of this thinking, and comments from some of my Effusion Group buddies was recently quoted in a Computerworld open source feature that included these articles:

• Who uses open source?
• Back to the future: open source everything
• Slow to arrive, but here to stay
• How secure is open source?
• Fear and loathing: is open source a developer’s dream or business nightmare?

Last weekend, I was privileged to participate in a weekend Symposium in Waiheke. It was convened by Lisa Galarneau and John Eyles of the EON Foundation to further the Neosophy notion that they have been exploring. It was a delightful and stimulating experience. The venue, setting and food were wonderful and the participants were diverse, stimulating and lively.

The question that we explored was the relevance of the digital age to the five competencies that have been cooked up by the OECD and are being adopted into the NZ curriculum.

Here are some things that I learned on this weekend…

Not everyone is as optimistic about the online world as I am. To some people, the idea of deep human contact occurring online just doesn’t make sense. To them, the idea of people substituting online relationships for physical ones is appalling. Collaboration in MMORPGs seems like people “ganging up and killing things”.

I got to thinking about the notion of positive feedback received from a computer (say in a single player game) being somehow as nourishing as that received from people. It seems slightly shocking, even to me. What about the self-esteem building that can occur shooting baskets in the yard or hitting a fence-post with a stone? Of course, the inanimate objects are simply mediating social phenomena. Stone-throwing was once (and in many places still is) a highly valued survival skill. Shooting baskets can provide entry to the good team which then gangs up to try to beat the others.

Have you ever noticed how cut-throat sport is? Sure there’s collaboration within each team but there is no second prize at the end of the game. It often horrifies me how even kids’ teams will keep racking up goals when they are obviously mismatched with their opponents. And it horrifies me, the callousness with which players sacrifice pawns and even bishops in the abstraction of war on the chessboard.

To me, the gore of killing monsters in a computer game is actually less shocking than some of those things.

I am not an unqualified optimist, however. I know that psyberspace is a boundaryless and uncertain place. I know that inhumanity can occur here as much as humanity can. One area that particularly concerns me is the shortage of public space on the Web. OK, I can blog here and you can come and go. This is pretty close to public. My photos, however are on flickr and I don’t know that I could get them out. OK, I’ve got copies but not of my tags. My daughter spends lost of time on MSN where she has photos, blog posts and message archives (though I don’t think she can access those). To her it’s all free and just works. What is the price that she pays?

I want to use our software to build public spaces, a commons on the Web. I want it to be as easy to take your content out as it is to put it in. I want people to stay because they want to and not because they are locked in.

OK, there are ideas for some other posts here but this is what I have returned from the Symposium thinking.

After sitting inside groupsense.net for a year and a half, Sociocorpus now has its own domain. It makes sense to me to have a home for this blog because, although it is relevant to my company, it is my voice that’s heard here. To add to that, I am allowing the GroupSense brand to fade in favour of OnlineGroups.Net.

The other big change you’ll notice is that Sociocorpus now runs on WordPress. A large Thank You to Phillip Pearson for getting this all going for me. A large Thanks also to Richard Waid of OnlineGroups.Net and IOPEN, for helping me out with the old Sociocorpus site. That ran on COREBlog which I notice has just spawned COREBlog2 as a Plone product - nice! This is not a move away from COREBlog. I like it and it was good using a Zope product when we do so much else with it. I chose WordPress because it’s one of the big open source blogging tools and has a lot of third party development for things like structured blogging.

If you’ve been following this blog, linking to it or using its web feeds, you shouldn’t have to do anything different. All the old uris are redirected to the new ones.

The field of Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been developing rapidly in recent years. The emergence of social networking sites on the Web has both fuelled and been fuelled by this: the Web is such a linky place. KM practitioners have also spotted the value of investigating and mapping social networks in organisations and there are some mature technologies for turning the data into graphics.

Why do we do this? Simply investigating a social system can itself be a powerful intervention, both in intended and unintended ways. If the resulting data is visible to the participants, they themselves will experience impulses to interact with each other in new ways. These could be responses to wishes or fears. It is also possible to make further interventions to develop social networks in particular ways, based on the results of analysis.

Of course SNA is not a new field. Physical and social scientists and mathematicians have been studying it for decades. The recent convergence between these fields has contributed to its rapid development.

But I am not trying to rewrite the Wikipedia entry on Social Networks. If I did, however, I’d probably mention JL Moreno, the founder of Psychodrama and Sociometry.

Sociometry is an approach to working with social systems to reveal and develop the informal relationships. It is often conducted in the here and now (f2f) using, among other things, action sociograms. The action continuum, often used in group sessions, is the classic example of this.

The art in Sociometry is to work with the particular culture and social processes that are prominent in the group at each moment. The Sociometrist is constantly applying their analysis in using the techniques and at the same time is conscious of their own social position and functioning in the group and is relating with the group and its members in a human and present way.

I am an associate member of the Australian and NZ Psychodrama Association. One of the executive of ANZPA is Diana Jones, a Sociometrist and organisational development practitioner. Diana has just launched a new website at http://www.sociometry.co.nz that provides excellent explanations and illustrations of Sociometric concepts and practice.

Yahoo! Answers allows participants to ask and answer questions and to rate the answers, contributing to the reputation of the answerers.

It has categories but why not tags?

Would this work inside an organisation? Will it work here?

A lot of the questions look more like discussion-starters than Q&A candidates, to me. How does this do more than a good conversation medium with rich metadata?

Should I be asking these questions at Yahoo! Answers?