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September 1, 2009

[OLR] Exercise 4.2 Hosting good conversations: House Rules!

a) Discuss three ways of providing users with more control in an online community

  1. Begin by giving users the option to 'hold back' on the personal disclosure - much like Facebook does. This is really important as it allows users to begin small and grow as a member of a community - disclosing as they go and building up an awareness of who they are / are not sharing information with.
  2. Provide a 'virtual sandpit' like LC MOO does or as Wikipedia or any number of wiki sites do. In other words a sort of virtual playground to let you know how the system works. Control of the system is a big issue for potential users. I know that I held off of facebook for years really because I was afraid of joining up and being inundated with unwanted social interactions. The closed nature of the facebook interface (either you're a member and can see something or your not) also had me holding off until I had to for this course :-). Being able to look and play without committing one's virtual ID is a big factor, I would argue, to getting people into virtual communities.
  3. Make it easy for users to update or modify their identity / status and accessibility. Gmail's chat function is a good example of being able to go offline in an unobtrusive manner when you don't want to talk to someone but you still want to access other tools. The benefits of this are more obvious in a forum that might well have many years of relevant information - but you don't want people to see you looking at - because perhaps you're busy / working / whatever. I found LC_MOO a bit too old school and arcane in its use of text commands. I ended up wandering out of my room accidently and found it hard to get back in. Literally blundering around in a virtual world.

b) Howard Rheingold wrote the The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online in 1998. What three rules or tips did you find interesting or have experienced so far in your online meetings or interaction?

  1. A spirit of group creativity, experimentation, exploration, good will. This is key for me. Without these elements I find the online community experience rather barren. With something like LC_MOO or a forum we rely our words to create our world.
  2. Pose questions for the group to consider. I think that this what it's all about. Real questions. Questions that will bring out a range of opinions and perspectives to help people build their knowledge and understandings. I find a lot of the off-topic chatter about drinks etc a bit confusing in our weekly chats. I really like the idea of talking about the subject at hand as proposed by the host or the host via the agenda.
  3. Communities don't just happen automatically when you provide communication tools: under the right conditions, online communities grow. They are gardened. For example in a synchronous community people are going to need to be heard out and feel as if they are being addressed / replied to. A community where people are always being drowned out isn't a community and won't grow.
c) Read the ISPG policy for user behaviour in a MOO at http://ispg.csu.edu.au/subjects/cscw/moo/moo-policy.doc and compare it with the Community Guidelines at http://digg.com/guidelines. Why do collaborative social software systems with synchronous and asynchronous communications need to develop a set of “rules of engagement"? Is the need the same or less when using a document sharing systems only?

At a glance - what a profound difference. The MOO document reminds me of the classic free software movement document. Long and well principled and very much about your freedom, the nature of that freedom and how that freedom should not impact on the freedoms of others - all wrapped up in pages of 'how-to' that makes sense. The Digg guidelines were much more short, sharp, shiny and to the point - in a conversational style. Ultimately though they both do the same job: tell you how you should behave - although much of this should be common sense. The MOO document seems to be necessarily more complex because it covers both people viewing / people creating documents.

Rules for engagement (and post engagement) are important - especially so in a digital world where it's easy to duplicate and replicate at little or no cost / perceived risk. To me, a document sharing system implies a level of permanence and attribution rights that needs to be considered. Authorship. In the case of synchronous and asynchronous communications - i.e. conversations - there is, to my mind a need to protect conversations that might be seen as being more transient given that text (and audio) logs can be kept of transient, ephemeral chats and this raises the need to include certain rights - such as the right not be taken out of context. This also raises the question of ownership. If I say it online in a community - do I own my words or does the community? A creative commons license might come to the fore here. At any rate I don't want to remain accountable for the rest of my days for something that I said online, once, somewhere ....



1 comment:

  1. Interesting point about how Facebook allows you to hold back on personal disclosure - I completely agree. Interaction designers refer to this as the Lazy registration design pattern (http://ui-patterns.com/pattern/LazyRegistration.

    It wasn't the that long ago that marketers were demanding your mother's maiden name and blood type up front before you could do anything on a site! It seems that these sites have been out-performed by a new generation of smarter sites that have been properly designed for growth.

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