Category: Web

Maarten has a post on his Grid Thinking site about starting to work on a Connected Future and by using Yahoo Groups to do this. Instead of giving my reply to him in his comments area, I’m going to place it here because I think this act itself relays what I’m trying to achieve with my Connected Communities approach. Below is my response to him.

Maarten, I would definitely love to collaborate with you on this idea but I want to be able to practice what I preach in doing so. In effect, I’m relaying ideas that talk about decentralized groups of people collaborating together on common goals. Therefore, if I want to practice what I preach and actually be an implementation of what I want to see then whoever I collaborate with needs to work this way to put their beliefs into action as well.

To give you an example of what I’m talking about, check out the 9rules Network if you’ve never been to it before. What you will see there is a collaboration of people, all on different sites, who have a similar attitude and approach with things, so much so that the 9rules Network encompasses their beliefs and approach. However, what this network doesn’t do though is keep things decentralized because you have to go to a parent site to see the latest things that people are talking about. Your approach by using Yahoo Groups does the same thing. It creates a centralized area instead of capitalizing on what is already being said on each decentralized site.

So how do you create this connectedness without a centralized site? Aggregated feeds. Feeds aren’t just useful for getting the latest news but for connecting these communities as well. If you look at the 9rules site you’ll see that their list of latest entries by community members is just an aggregated feed of the last entry item from each member. Therefore, all you need to do to start the journey towards this connected community, connected thinking, and connected future is to embed this aggregated feed inside each site somewhere. I’m thinking maybe near the bottom footer area of the site. And if you remember back to the web rings of yesterday, that idea is somewhat similar to what I would like to do but just taking it to another level (i.e. presenting information better). Even better, it allows each person to format the layout of the community conversations to match their own site style.

What this aggregation does though is link like minded people together. That way, when people visit your site, they can not only read what you are working on but also easily see what others are collectively working on as well and then jump to their site to see what they are writing about. In effect, it creates a centralized community feel with different people talking but it is done through a connected network of decentralized sites.

More importantly, this allows each individual to approach their work the way they want. For example, we may all be talking about the same thing but each of us is describing it in different ways (i.e. I call it connected communites whereas you’re calling it connected future). Instead of arguing over semantics, the decentralized approach allows each individual to take their own direction towards the common goal. And over time, as usually happens, the more people share information this way, the more that commonalities will occur. For example, I’m just using “connected communites” as my description for this idea but that still doesn’t encompass all of my ideas and beliefs. As I just wrote on my site, culture within these connected communities plays a strong part as well, yet some may disagree with including it because they may feel it doesn’t relate to the project from a technological standpoint. Instead of arguing about this and a proper name for the project within a centralized site, people just continue working on their own in their own ways. In the future, maybe we will agree on a name but that shouldn’t stop us from collaborating right now.

Actually the only problem I see with utilizing this connected approach today is finding an online feed aggregator this is reliable and will meet the needs of the community. I was going to use FeedDigest but it doesn’t seem to be working well because it’s not updating my feeds with the current posts from day to day. I mean I’d like to see this connected community aggregated feed updated at least once an hour. If the online feed aggregator can’t do that (even though FeedDigest does say it does this), then it won’t meet the needs of the community. Actually the ideal approach in my opinion is to actually have feed aggregation built into each sites web software itself, so that the connected community is not dependent upon a centralized aggregation service that if it overloads and goes down, then the whole connected community breaks apart. Until all web software (i.e. Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, TextDrive, WordPress, Squarespace, etc) includes feed aggregation though, that kind of approach is unfortunately out of the question.

Saheli has some thoughts on her website about what she would like to see in Recovery 2.0. I’d like to recap some of the overall attributes I’d like to see as well without trying to get into too many specifics.

Centralized vs Decentralized: It should not be a centralized system but instead a decentralized one. Centralized systems can easily get overloaded and collapse. Decentralized systems however can distribute the load so that if one area overloads, other areas can easily take over the work.

Rigid vs Flexible: It should not be a rigid structured system but instead a flexible loose system that can restructure itself on the fly. It is not so much building a perfect system as one that is flexible and scalable enough to adapt to different situations.

Controlled vs Autonomous: There should be no command and control center directing the operations of the people. Instead people make their own decisions based upon the situational awareness information that everyone relays to the system. A decentralized approach where everyone acts as they see fit means elements can react faster to situations without waiting for a central command to relay decisions. A “Shared Mental Model” (read about situational awareness) is critical to this approach though which means that everyone has to be on the same page with regards to how the system works and how best to deal with different situations. A lot of this is achieved through proactive training BEFORE these disasters occur (which means yes we should be doing mock disaster tests with this system to see how it works but more importantly to see how people react). A perfect way to test the system though would be using it for a real situation which is not disaster-related (since if the system is flexible enough, it should be usable for any collective large scale effort which is why for me, the Recovery 2.0 project is really just a subset of my greater Connected Communities project).

Small vs Big: The fundamental concept of the system should be small groups working on a small local scale instead of massive groups working at a global scale. By focusing just on their sphere of control and abilities, each element of the system is not overloaded by the entire collective effort but is instead able to focus on just their immediate efforts. The end result is that each independent local action connected with each other creates a collective swarm effort that accomplishes much larger goals than they ever could on their own.

Again a lot of the thinking above mirrors how the Internet works. And actually if you start looking at some of the more successful applications that are used by people on the Internet right now (i.e. BitTorrent) and how they work (i.e. small pieces working collectively in a swarm to achieve a massive collective effort) then you’ll see which direction I’m going in. Also another great source for how the Internet works is Chapter Five of The Cluetrain Manifesto which is entitled The Hyperlinked Organization.

Things change, constantly. Because of this fact, what you may know as correct today may be wrong tomorrow. Taking that thought in mind, I’ve been pondering a question that relates to my Collective Thinking post where I said that instead of arguing over a point, people should just each pursue the path that they believe is correct. If multiple people choose the same path, then they can swarm together and work collectively to do so if they wish.

Here’s my conundrum. I’d like to take this same approach with anything I’m currently working on, yet I’m not sure how best to approach this. For example, if I’m looking for information that relates to what I’m working on and I notice a site’s author has viewpoints that differ from mine, what should I do? Should I give them my viewpoint and maybe they might realize something from it or should I just shut up so that I don’t distract them from their work. I know where their work is and if I point to them as an interesting site, then they will know where they can find my work as well. In other words, we can learn from each other if we wish to do so but we aren’t interrupting each other and telling the other how to think. Remember, as I said above, I want to avoid “giving orders” to people which means I want avoid telling them that my way is right (and they should think that way). All that I want to do at most is just relay my situational awareness of what stage I am at in my work.

As I said, I’m perplexed on how to take this approach. Right now, I think the best way for me to do this is to not comment on people’s sites but instead just put down my thoughts on my own site with just a link to their site. That way I can record my own observations based upon their work but without interrupting their work. If they want to read my observations then they can always refer back to me and see what my thoughts were on their work. In this way, it is their choice to read my thoughts without me “invading” their space. The most important thing here though is that we both be aware of each other so that if we wish to review each others work, we can.

While visiting Maarten Visser’s Grid Thinking website yesterday, a couldn’t help but realize how similar my thoughts were to a lot of what he said there. Of particular interest, was a post about collective intelligence. Now why I found this interesting is because while discussing the Recovery 2.0 project, I indicated that whoever worked on the ideas for it should openly and continually relay their research discoveries and findings. By doing so, the collective minds of everyone on the project could come to bear so that if one group got stuck at a point, another group could take over with ideas that the first group hadn’t thought about it. In effect, what you create is a leap frog process for evolution and problem solving with multiple minds collectively working on a single goal, all ready to help push the development forward if it falters at a point.

The potential downside to this approach that I’ve seen in the past, however, is that people often have a difficult time agreeing on the best approach to take. Thus they sit around and argue instead of progressing forward. Well what if you agreed that there would be no arguments in the first place. What if instead you said that whatever approaches are determined ALL would be followed. Every person involved in the process would decide upon which approach they want to go with and then diverse variations in the development would be made and continued upon. Therefore, what you get is a multiprocessing effort that is working on a common goal in many different ways. As the development continues, each variation on the approach continues until it hits a roadblock which leaves the remaining variations to go forward by natural selection. And yet the beauty of sharing is that each variation can learn and utilize the knowledge of other variations even though that other variation didn’t fully succeed. In effect, you get a collective mind that allows each variation to learn and grow collectively from the mistakes of other variations.

As Jeff Jarvis indicated the other day, this creates a swarm effect that shrinks and grows based upon the obstacles before the collective group. Thinking from a natural viewpoint, imagine water flowing down a street. If it reaches an obstacle, it immediately spreads out looking for alternate ways around the obstacle. Even more so, multiple ways could be found around it but once passed the water swarms back together to collectively carry on its way. Therefore, both its diversity and its collectiveness are it’s greatest strengths. The irony here is that this strength can only be utilized because of its ability to break into smaller pieces. If it didn’t have this ability, if it could only act as a whole piece to move forward, then it would continually be blocked by obstacles. Only by working in smaller groups does progress occur. Therefore, small is allowing the collective swarm to act in a very big way.

Now the point of all this rambling is that this is a problem that I’m seeing out there right now. We have a bunch of small groups taking different approachs to solving a problem but they aren’t collectively sharing their knowledge. To me it is almost like a whole bunch of pieces to a puzzle are handed out to different people. They each hold that fragment of the puzzle but unless they work together, sharing the knowledge that they have, then the puzzle will never be solved. Therefore, what can be done to allow people to work on each their own independent approaches or variations, and yet still allow them to share their discoveries and setbacks so that everyone collectively can learn from them? If a way is discovered then hopefully this will allow each group in turn to lay down the small pieces of the puzzle until it is completed and solved. Yes, wikis and blogs are an approach but as David Weinberger apologized to his friends a few weeks past, he doesn’t have the time to visit all of their blogs. We need a way to collectively summarize the research and development of many into very small snippets of rich information so that everyone can scan the collective development but they only need to dig into a specific snippet if it relates to their current development. What could be utilized? A collective RSS/Feed streamlined to only relay the most crucial details of each groups development might work. But whatever solution is taken the obvious trick will be to relay the knowledge without overloading the collective mind.

I was just going to do a small bit of restructuring today but when I thought about it, I realized I had to shut down everything to do a complete restructuring of the entire site to rebuild its foundation for the new direction I’d like to go with. What direction is that? Well, that is the problem. I have all the building blocks of this new foundation but I just can’t seem to figure out how best to lay them together to form this foundation. Here’s what I’m talking about.

The Web is the Culture of the World – The Cluetrain gang have already implied this within the Cluetrain Manifesto and David Weinberger has already went into more depth in his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. The Web is what we care about and what we believe to be important. It is our culture that we are defining on a daily basis. Most importantly of all, its culture is defining us back in return.

A Business with a Web Culture – So if the Web as a culture is defining us, how is it doing it? I starting thinking about what would happen if a business took on the same cultural values as the Web. Interestingly enough, I think there are already companies and organizations out there who are already thinking this way (i.e. small startups and open source organizations are perfect examples of this).

Feeling Connected – While technology can definitely connect us electronically, I kept feeling like something was missing. Every time I got offline and went outside in nature I felt more connected to the entire world than when I was online with millions of people. Why? I realized it was because I didn’t “feel” connected. Feelings relate to our emotions. People always say that the Web is about conversations about what people care about. True but go deeper than that. Yes, people are having conversations and telling stories online about what they care about but it is the emotions that they feel when those stories are told that makes them feel connected. If you tell me you went to the corner store to get some milk today, I could care less. If you told me you lost your dog, narrowly avoided a fatal accident, or can’t take your job anymore than I’m going to connect with you more. That’s because one story is factual (i.e. getting milk) while the others are more emotional. This is why I feel so empty on the Web today because there is a lot of factual information on it but very little emotional information (although the recent Hurricane Katrina disaster changed that quickly).

Cultivating Technology – Therefore, if our emotions make us feel connected to the world then we need to instill that emotion into our technology so that it will in turn not just connect us but make us “feel” connected. How do you go about this though? Do you have to plug wires into your nervous system? No, I don’t think so. I think all we need to do is look at the culture aspects of what makes the Web work and then ensure that same culture is instilled in the technology we create (i.e. connected, open, sharing, reliable, etc) just as I believe that culture should be instilled in our organizations and businesses.

Using Technology To Help The World – With the horrors of the Hurricane Katrina disaster still not over, I kept feeling more than anything frustrated and helpless because I was finding that our current technology, which everyone raves about as being so great, was and still is actually quite pathetic and useless during this crisis. Yes, certain blogs were spreading the word of what was going on down there and others were raising awareness to get donations going but that didn’t help the people in immediate need down there. Tons of people were posting information such as “needing to find a person” to “needing help to get picked up from my home in New Orleans”. And yet the information was spread out everywhere and there was no way to easily aggregate it all for easy viewing. In other words, we had all this amazing technology yet people still had to manually gather the information to make is usable and useful. It’s crazy and we need to find a better way. Thankfully Jeff Jarvis has spearheaded a new project called Recovery 2.0 which matches my own thoughts and will hopefully bring more awareness to this issue and get people working together so that the next time this happens the technology (i.e. Web 2.0) will be there for us to use.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined – Finally I kept coming back again and again to David Weinberger’s book title. To me those four words have so much meaning to them, it is really quite amazing, as they can be applied to so many things in our world today. For example, nature is a perfect example of small pieces loosely joined. No one system controls everything, yet all of them are equally important. Instead it is a collaboration of separate systems that all work together to create something amazing. I have this very strange feeling that small pieces loosely joined is also a perfect example of how the world can collaborate together and even more so how businesses, organizations, and even countries should be run, as many of them are getting too big and getting disconnected from what is happening on a local level. Smaller is better because it allows us to work more effectively on larger projects or goals.

Anyways, those are the building blocks of what I would like to do. As I said, I now have to figure out how they go together, so I’m looking for a single thread that somehow interconnects them all.