The end of a small hiatus

I took two weeks off some time ago to go home... it was wonderful for the body, mind and soul... but it interrupted all rhythms.... twice.... once on the way out... and then when I had just started to settle in.... trying to regain my original rhythms on return..... 'jet lag' does not quite describe what happens.... for it is more than just the body that is out of kilter..... so it is no surprise then that my blogging juices ran dry... or perhaps it was just procrastination.... maybe writer's blog..... but the mind was buzzing.... in these times how else could it be?... and then I had left a topic that I was writing on incomplete..... so this is an attempt to get back into that rhythm....  

Interesting thing happened the other day and it had to do with blogging.... was researching the topic of blogging..... in the course I kept coming across references to a book ....The Corporate Blogging Book  by Debbie Weil .  I almost considered buying it.... contrary to my normal tendencies....I defer acting for some reason..... that evening I saunter into my favorite used books store.... my last destination is the clearance section... it is amazing how some of the best books end up there..... and what do I find.... 'The Book!"..... it is as if the book was sending me messages not to buy online....Sometimes when you are looking for things.... it is like opening up your mind.... and you start seeing things or noticing them..... has that happened to you... somewhat like when your mind is hooked on buying that PT cruiser and you start seeing it everywhere....  

well... if nothing else it gave me a story that I thought would be interesting to tell... .and got me back to blogging....  

oh yes.... while I am on the research I found something else.... a recent post on the topic of blogging....Irving Wladawsky-Berger on blogging ...

The Architecture of online social systems – Populating the world

My last post related to the Architecture of Online Social Systems (OSS), was about Identity.

OK then! So we have taken the first step in the creation of an OSS. But one person does not make a world, so presumably there are others who will create an identity for themselves as well, and things will start to get interesting when there is at least a third person. Just like the three-body problem in Physics, now we might perhaps start to see some of the messiness that makes social worlds interesting.  

The point of today's post though is somewhat different. What would a world be without objects. In the real world we know what objects mean, and we know how to name them. "Man gave names to all the animals...." said Bob Dylan. Somewhat like that, we name things, and these names have meanings, which tell us something more about them. In the world of OSS though, objects take on a very specific meaning. Not only might they be representations of objects from the real world, but there are now a whole lot of Information and Knowledge objects, things and people who are associated with information or knowledge, and that includes other people. Now, we have dealt with the issue of identifying people.  

Just as in the case of people, therefore, objects, pieces of content, documents, blogs, comments on blogs, a web-site perhaps will need a way to be identified. For us to transact with these objects, we will need to know more about them, we will need a description of what they are, one provided by the creator, and others that get appended over time by people who use these objects. Imagine stones gathering moss over time, in the rivers of information and knowledge, in a nice way.  

Objects not only need an identity, but now that we have brought them in this world, we now need to keep track of them throughout their life cycle. We need to therefore associate with them, their time of creation, who their creator is, and track them till they are no longer active participants in the online world.  

All this information about the object, of course is important for the object to be available to others in this OSS world. There is one more aspect which we need to consider. We need to be able to locate the object somehow, be able to find it and know what class of objects it belongs to, if at all. In the OSS world, links and associations matter a lot. Objects are associated with their creators, and then they are linked to other objects and people in the OSS through various kinds of relationships. Creating a networked world of objects, which are linked in multiple different ways, is what makes the OSS worlds so promising.

 
For example, a blog object, has a creator, it has readers, it has people who comment on it, it is related to other similar blogs, people give it tags that make sense to them and so on. All these add-ons of descriptions and associations make the objects more valuable and interesting over time. Documents, photographs, web-sites, people, music, on-line discussions, blog posts, comments, communities - these are the objects that populate the OSS world. Naming them, describing them, linking them to each other, this is the second major architectural aspect of Online Social Systems.

The Architecture of online social systems - Identity

As an architect, I am constantly on the look out for general principles and frameworks, which can become guides for my work. I am often restless till I have discovered such underlying themes which I can work with. The process of refining these frameworks is rather long, since I have to test them several times before I am convinced of their general applicability and merit.  

Ever since I worked on a large project with an education agency last year, to build an integrated knowledge and collaboration system, I have been thinking about the architecture of online social systems. Elsewhere on my blogs, I have written about how I see online social systems as concerned with 'moving sociality online". It is that idea that has guided me in the process of discovering and developing this framework.  

I will outline this framework and develop it further in separate posts over the next several weeks. It would be wonderful to think of this as a living document, so that I could refine these ideas over time with our conversation, so that we could make this robust.
In this post I will discuss the first and perhaps most crucial element - 'Identity'.  

Identity:
In order to operate in this online social world, one of the most important elements is the need for a participant/citizen to have an identity. At its most basic level it involves, defining a persona for this virtual world - a name, contact information and so on.  

In the real world people get to know us in several ways. We perform multiple roles in our professional and private lives. Within these domains, there are several facets to our personalities. People who are involved with us in any of these professional and personal relationships, are exposed to these facets, through the various encounters that they have. We also provide them with several other clues to who we are - some explicit and others perhaps not so. There are aspects of our character which are revealed over time, and perhaps they become parts of stories people tell of us and of the things we do. While the depth to which people get to know us varies, however, there is a certain amount of knowledge they must have for them to engage with us, depending on the nature of the interaction.  

We need to think about creating such personas in the online world as well. These personas need to provide enough information so that the people we wish to transact with and relate to can obtain a rich and nuanced picture of who we are and whether they can expect a meaningful interaction. If they have come to us through indirect paths, they might want to know about our credibility and they need to be able to obtain such information too. In fact we need to go beyond what we do in the real world, in terms of providing information about ourselves, since in the online world, what people can see about us is only a partial representation. After all, my picture would not tell you about my predilection for drawing on whiteboards.

 
Now, this online identity only needs to be adequate to serve your purpose in a given environment. In a games environment or in Second Life, this persona might have no relation to your real life self at all, or rather little. However, in the case of a professional environment, building credibility and trust are contingent on providing accurate and pertinent information. Till people develop trust in you, they might look for other indicators.  

My real life persona is complex and multi-faceted, (which is indeed true for all of us). What you know of me depends on the context in which we have met and related. I expect the same to be the case in the online world. More than what we say about ourselves, what we do, in the forms of our various interactions in this virtual environment and what others have to say about us, all contribute to the believability and richness of one's incarnation in this other world - one's avatar!
We can thus identify the elements we need to provide for in the construction of online identities - from basic personal information, usually obtained from formal organizational systems, to richer and nuanced descriptions we ourselves provide , to indirectly derived profiles enriched with information mined from various sources which show our relationships to the rest of the online and real world, our networks, our credibility and our value to the community.

 
In my next post, I will write about the need for dealing with people and objects in the virtual world - content of various kinds, artifacts, and even people-based objects, and what we need to do to create a place and identity for them in this online world.

On Discovering vs... Imposing Order on Social Groups

There is a post on a discussion list I am a member of today. To paraphrase it - there is a client, a small bank which seems to have grown so far with an entrepreneurial decentralized structure, but is perhaps now facing issues with further growth and cost efficiencies. The fundamental question seems to be - how do we now put some structure into this organization and redesign it to reduce costs and obtain greater efficiencies.

I think this is a very fascinating challenge. I know how we might traditionally approach such a challenge, an approach which is valid in its own right. But there is a maverick in me, which would like to understand how a contrarian might approach this challenge.

Entrepreneurial cultures, have deliberately loose structures, since there is much ambiguity that an organization has to deal with in its initial stages. There are too many different problems to solve in its own local context, and the best approach is often something that emerges out of trial and error. People take on rather than being assigned responsibilities. There are stories of what worked and what did not that guide them. These become a part of the organizational culture, its definition of success and failure, its heroes, its definitions of traps and things to watch out for.

If things go well, the organization grows, and comes to a point, when some of this 'seat-of-the-pants' logic does not seem to work. The organization develops an appetite for growth and  loses its appetite for experimentation, and risk. It desires predictability. The new people joining the group, cannot make sense of how the organization deals with its challenges. They are difficult to absorb into its ways. The time it takes for organic growth, seems too long.

"...the lesson from biological evolution is quite clear and direct. The time required for the evolution of a complex form from simple elements depends critically on the numbers and distribution of potential intermediate stable forms". (Herbert Simon - the Science of the artificial - Pg 190)

Perhaps the organization has not put in place the intermediate stable forms that it needs for the next stage of growth to happen quickly enough.

One of the reasons for the organization's current dissatisfaction with its attempt to grow, might just be failed attempts at imposing order. There perhaps are now two camps of people - those who yearn for the good old days, even if it meant burning the midnight oil, and those who could care less for the old stories. Hopefully, it is in an early stage of its development, where the imbalance between the two camps is not profound. It could also be, that the new power structure belongs to the new school, in which case, the organization has to rapidly learn some new stories from the outside world.

The question then is - to what extent is it necessary to impose order and in what form? Will a sudden imposition of order create more pathologies? Will it lose its capacity for innovation in exchange for what it gains in efficiency? Is it possible that there is order today, but just not apparent. It is this second possibility that I would like to explore.

Order exists even in the entrepreneurial organization, it is just in a different form, latent and not explicit. Social Network analysis can discover this order. I think, if one were to analyze their stories, we would discover what they already know - the archetypes of success, who their heroes are and why, what they believe are the attributes of excellence, what is the nature of their market and so on. They perhaps also know why someone is more of a hero than another. I think the trick to helping this organization lies in discovering these structures first.

The plan for growth then needs to develop group and individual identities, and formal roles around these intermediate building blocks. It needs to reveal their own practices - both the good and the bad ones, and keep the knowledge environment intact. If it needs to share services, they need to be non-critical to the functioning of these groups, so that they can become utilities.

I know, we perhaps will not be able to do something like this, but it is so tempting to think, that one might come across and opportunity to try something different. The maverick in me drools at that thought.

The six blind men of Hindostan - The original folksonomists

A couple of days ago there was a blog post, which expressed dissatisfaction with the tag of "Nuremberg" associated with photographs on flickr, which I had commented on. For some other reason, I was also thinking of elephants. And then the two came together to trigger this post.

Everyone I presume knows the story of the six blind men of Hindostan, and how they tried to describe an elephant. Everyone in the story 'tagged' the elephant according to their own partial knowledge. The tags they used included, tree, rope, pillar, wall, and so on. I am not sure what the tags were, but you get the point.

On a facetious note, it occurred to me, that these six blind men, could not have foreseen (pun intended), that their invention would be revolutionary at some future point of time. Frustrated as they must have been with the effort of mentally trying to assemble these 'tags' into a coherent whole that made sense, I doubt if they gave much thought to their contribution to posterity.

On a more serious note, imagine someone who saw those tags in a tag-cloud, (what kind of tag-clouds would they have had those days!) all associated with this nameless object, which was clearly known to be an animal. Do you think, they would have been able to put those tags together and conjured the synthesized image of an elephant? Imagine scouring through that cloud, thinking that buried somewhere under that 'wordle' mess, was an elephant.

I have my own thoughts on the purpose and utility of folksonomies. Like in most other cases, I believe in understanding the boundaries of their utility, rather than give in to an 'irrational exuberance'.

Working on a large project with an Education agency some time ago, I was part of a vigorous debate on the merits of taxonomies vs.. folksonomies. The client interestingly wanted fairly sophisticated versions of both. Rather coincidentally, I later found another educational institution in Australia, which too had used similar mixed concepts. I was convinced then, that the client's arguments had merit.

In fact, I am now of the opinion, that particularly in organizational contexts, where structure is an essential aspect of its way of being, information architectures must provide for a mix of taxonomies and folksonomies. The folksonomies can put the flesh on the skeletal structure of the taxonomy, but the two must coexist, or the elephant will never come together. Maybe in that spirit, we need a new name for the combination of taxonomies and folksonomies - 'jumbonomies'.

Wonder what your experience has been in reconstructing elephants, or sheep for that matter.

On Channeling the Surplus!

Ever since the days of the Internet boom, when the 'e' prefix became ubiquitous, people have been talking about latent surpluses and the coming liquidity which would release new value. A lot of that promise has indeed come true, as value chains within and between organizations, became transparent and inter-connected. The world continued to become 'flat' in the intervening years, and just when it seemed like we had reached a point where practicing this elimination of waste and release of value was a given, something that everybody understood as good practice, we discovered a new latent surplus - in people.

Clay Shirky, called this surplus a "Cognitive Surplus" in one of this speeches. I am not sure if it is only 'cognitive', since the phenomenon we are seeing develop at such an accelerated pace, seems to release a lot of latent potential and energies other than just cognitive. I do understand his intent though, to capture an idea which expresses the ability of people to participate actively, using their cognitive powers and forms a critical part of the emergence of new social and economic possibilities.

There are several examples in the literature of how this phenomenon has manifested. We have examples such as the Wikipedia, collective software development and Linux, The Gutenberg Project, and forms of social involvement and participation which have been enabled by the new social technologies. Clearly, new avenues and opportunities for participation and creating value are opening up every day. A tremendous amount of a formerly latent surplus is being channeled to creative and productive expression, when open, free-form interaction is enabled outside the enterprise.

So, when we deploy these technologies within the enterprise, how do we deal with the release of latent surpluses. After all, we are supposed to have no latent surpluses inside organizations - it would imply an ineffective use of resources and a need for optimization and reallocation.

Social technologies at a very basic level contribute to improved productivity. Individuals can find resources easily, people can work with each other more effectively, and reach out to other people in an ad-hoc manner when necessary and it all leads to a better utilization of our human resources.

But, does the concept of releasing latent surpluses apply within an organization? And, if there is such a surplus, and we release it, how do we consciously and deliberately, harness this new energy, in a form that parallels what we see outside the organization. Or, are there just different forms for ad-hoc collaboration and peer-production within the enterprise than there are outside?

Here is what I believe. The fact that there is a latent surplus within all organizations is indeed true. Improvements in productivity, create an opportunity for tapping this new surplus. Innovation is one of the biggest opportunities, as we create these new and expanded spaces. However, this surplus begs to be free of the older forms of creating value within narrowly defined spaces. It's promise lies in the ability of people to make ad-hoc connections outside conventional boundaries.

So, as we help with improving productivity and creating collaborative environments, we might need to also guide people to consider new forms of governance in order to fully reap the unused potential that will inevitably be released, forms of governance which are in alignment with the porous boundaries these technologies create, both within and outside their organizations.

If however, those expanding spaces are constrained or not opened enough, my guess is that the potential will go latent again.

Keystones in the Hive

(The mind is always making connections between disparate things... by the time I have arrived at a certain idea... I forget its trajectory... these days I have to take time off every now and then to find out which memes my mind has become receptive too... .the subconscious has suddenly gained prominence as I am inundated with ideas from all over my expanded world... Perhaps we all need to be our own analysts..)

That was just the prelude!

I have been thinking about how Social Technologies impact our social lives, a phenomenon I like to use the world "Sociality" for. I am not sure of the appropriateness of its usage, but it captures for me the essence of the multitudinous facets of the phenomenon we are all trying to make sense of.

Sometime back I wrote about 'Communities of Passion'. Then, as I was reading something about the use of Social Technologies for addressing customer complaints or improving customer service, it occurred to me, there might be a whole bunch more of "Communities of Pain" then there are those of 'Passion'. Well perhaps they are in the same number, that is not in itself important. However, it leads the systems thinker in me on the quest for an underlying theme, something more universal than the two archetypes of Passion and Pain.

They are both emotions, and therefore maybe we are talking about 'Communities of Emotion' in general. But yet again, that leaves out a lot of other things that the mind is individually and collectively involved in.

It then occurred to me, in these expanded social spaces, we are actually dealing with Ecosystems of minds, with all their thoughts and emotions and aspects I might not know. And, in those ecosystems are all these attractors, of Passion and Pain, and milder things like interests and so on. Passion and Pain are just the two types of plateaus on this landscape. There are thousands more which we could occupy.

That leads to the thought of 'keystones', and how influencing the ecosystem, is essentially about either being a keystone yourself, or influencing a well formed keystone in some way.

So there you are - "Keystones in the Collective Hive".

The systems thinker breathes a sigh of relief. For the moment, here then is one of the levers for the Social Universe that Archimedes would have looked for.