networks – Climb to the Stars

Blogging Tribe: A Social and Blogging Experiment Looking for Volunteers [en]

[fr] Recherche de volontaires motivés pour une expérience socio-blogueuse.

Here’s the idea: form a group of bloggers, who agree to blog regularly for a certain amount of time, and read each other.

Scale? A dozen bloggers or so. From a dozen posts a month to one a day on average. For three months (or six? or six weeks?).

Why?

One of the things I understood while reading Here Comes Everybody, and which was missing from my global thinking about the connected world we live in, is the question of scale. That with more, comes different. Small group dynamics are not the same as large group dynamics. Small networks do not behave the same as big ones. At one point power laws kick in, and large groups or networks become fundamentally “unbalanced”.

Clay talks about the early blogging communities in his book, and I’ve understood what we feel we have “lost”, we bloggers of old: we’ve lost the small group dynamics, where we all read each other and there was a ball in the air that we all kept in movement.

I’ve seen that feeling reappear during the two “Back to Blogging” challenges I threw at fellow bloggers. For the ten days the challenge lasted, we started reading each other again, responding to each other in comments and even in blog posts.

So, I’d like to do this on a slightly larger scale. Larger not by the number of people, but larger as far as the dynamics are concerned. “Back to Blogging” has made a little foam appear in the egg whites we were beating — I want to try and turn the jug that holds them upside down.

Unlike Back to Blogging where I set the rules and dived in with what amounts to “qui m’aime me suive”, I’d like us to hash out the precise details together.

If you’re interested in this experiment and contemplating taking part, please get in touch with me. I’ll set up a quick mailing-list or Facebook book so we can all discuss the specifics and get the ball rolling.

Lift09 — James Gillies — How the Web awas Born: Stories from a scribe [en]

Was in the right place at the right time to write the story, says he.

1995: “we must write the story before everyone forgets…”

James expected it to be a dull boring story. Big surprise! You can’t just tell the story of the Web, because you have to tell the story of hypertext, and the story of computing networks, personal computing… it’s all linked.

Back to July 1945: Vannevar Bush, calculating machine. Was frustrated with the way human mind associated things, randomly. Machines might be able to select by association… “As we may think”. Hypertext.

Doug Engelbart. Screenshot! 60’s, personal computing.

1960’s: packet switching, ARPANET (world’s first LAN).

Other things need to happen before somebody could build the web on top of them.

Louis Pouzin, 70s. Network + network + network = network. That was in fact the definition of an internet.

Sam Fedida. 80s: Viewdata — Prestel, CEEFAX, Minitel. (Historical dead-en.)

Big impact in France through the Minitel. Surrounding countries got the drift. The web, however, took some time to pick up in France, because it had to displace the Minitel. First e-mail sent by a head of state, Queen of England.

Where does the CERN fit in?

70s: CERNET; 80s: the Internet.

A place established to bring people together. TCP/IP. To communicate with the american government, had to network with them in the way they wanted (=>TCP/IP).

Magic ingredient: a consultant noticed there was a lot of information on lots of computers which weren’t talking to each other. The idea of the web is to try to emulate the way we think with a computer platform.

TBL (Tim Berners-Lee): 1989-1991, from vague to less vague, but always exciting.

Web 1.0 or Web 2.0? First browser was a browser/editor.

Next step: get it noticed out there. Students. Nicola Pellow: Web 1.1. Then around the world. 90s.

1993: the web is put in the public domain. The single thing that explains that we are using “world web” today.

Not an accident!

We Need Structured Portable Social Networks (SPSN) [en]

[fr] Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux que l'on peut importer/exporter d'un outil/service à l'autre. Nous avons également besoin de pouvoir structurer ces réseaux sociaux qui contiennent souvent un nombre important de personnes. Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux portables structurés.

Christophe Ducamp s'est lancé dans une traduction de cet article. Allez donner un coup de main ou bien en profiter, selon vos compétences! Je n'ai pas lu cette traduction, mais je suis certaine qu'elle est utile. Merci Christophe!

Scrolling through my “trash” e-mail address to report spam, I spotted (quite by chance, I have to say) a nice e-mail from Barney, who works at Lijit. Barney asked me if I had any feedback, which I’ll give in my next post, because I need to digress a bit here.

Lijit is a really fun and smart search tool which allows to search through a person’s complete online presence, a remedy, in a way, to the increasing fragmentation of online identity that’s bothering me so much these days. Actually, it was already bothering me quite a few months ago, when I wrote Please Make Holes in My Buckets:

So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (”OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. Plaxo is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think coComment and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

One thing the 2.0 world needs urgently is a way to abstract (to some extent) the social network users create for themselves from the particular service it is linked to. We need portable social networks. More than that, actually, we need structured portable social networks (SPSNs). I’ve already written that being able to give one’s “contact list” a structure (through “contact groups” or “buddy groups”) is vital if we want to manage privacy efficiently (in my horrendously long but — from my point of view of course — really important post “Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter.“):

I personally think that it is also the key to managing many privacy issues intelligently. How do I organise the people in my world? Well, of course, it’s fuzzy, shifting, changing. But if I look at my IM buddy list, I might notice that I have classified the people on it to some point: I might have “close friends”, “co-workers”, “blog friends”, “offline friends”, “IRC friends”, “girlfriends”, “ex-clients”, “boring stalkers”, “other people”, “tech support”… I might not want to make public which groups my buddies belong to, or worse, let them know (especially if I’ve put them in “boring stalkers” or “tech support” and suspect that they might have placed me in “best friends” or “love interests”… yes, human relationships can be complicated…)

Flickr offers a half-baked version of this. […]

A more useful way to let a user organise his contacts is simply to let him tag them. Xing does that. Unfortunately, it does not allow one to do much with the contact groups thus defined, besides displaying contacts by tag […].

In fact, we need structured social networks not only to deal with privacy issues, but also (and it’s related, if you think of it) to deal with social network fatigue that seems to be hitting many of us. I actually have been holding off writing a rather detailed post in response to danah‘s post explaining that Facebook is loosing its context for her — something that, in my words, I would describe as “Facebook is becoming impossible to manage in a way that makes sense with my life and relationships.” Here’s what she says:

Le sigh. I lost control over my Facebook tonight. Or rather, the context got destroyed. For months, I’ve been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a “friend”? Where’s the line? For Facebook, I had been only accepting friend requests from people that I went to school with and folks who have socialized at my house. But what about people that I enjoy talking with at conferences? What about people who so kindly read and comment on this blog? What about people I respect? What about people who appreciate my research but whom I have not yet met? I started feeling guilty as people poked me and emailed me to ask why I hadn’t accepted their friend request. My personal boundaries didn’t matter – my act of ignorance was deemed rude by those that didn’t share my social expectations.

danah boyd, loss of context for me on Facebook

I think that what danah is expressing here is one possible explanation to why people are first really excited about new social networking sites/services/tools/whatevers (YASNs) and then abandon them: at one point, or “contact list” becomes unmanageable. At the beginning, not everybody is on the YASN: just us geeky early adopters — and at the beginning, just a few of us. We have a dozen contacts or so. Then it grows: 30, 50, 60… We’re highly connected people. Like danah, many of us are somewhat public figures. From “friends of our heart”, we start getting requests from people who are part of our network but don’t fit in segment we want to reserve this YASN to. We start refusing requests, and then give in, and then a lot of the value the YASN could have for us is lost.

Unless YASNs offer us an easy way to structure our social network, this is going to happen over and over and over again. For the moment, Pownce and Viddler allow me to structure my social network. A lot of work still needs to be done in the interface department for this kind of feature. (Yes, Twitter, I’m looking at you. You said “soon”.)

So, to summarize, we need tools and services which make our social networks

portable: so that we can import and export our relationships to other people from one service to another
structured: so that we can manage the huge number of relationships, of varying and very personal degrees of intimacy, that highly connected online people have.

Update, an hour or so later: Kevin Marks points me to social network portability on the microformats wiki. Yeah, should have done my homework, but remember, this post started out as a quick reply to an e-mail. Anyway, this is good. There is hope.

The Shadow IT Department (and Shadow HR) [en]

[fr] Un article qui montre du doigt un nécessaire changement de mentalité dans les départements IT: nombre des outils que les employés utilisent pour améliorer leur productivité ont en fait été introduits de façon "sauvage". Vouloir tout contrôler à tout prix n'est pas la meilleure solution.

Here’s a very interesting piece I picked up in Bruno’s links: Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them). It talks about the chasm between what technology IT departments make available, and what tools employees install and use behind the IT department’s back to be more productive at work.

And that disconnect is fundamental. Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations. Consequently, when corporate IT designs and provides an IT system, manageability usually comes first, the user’s experience second. But the shadow IT department doesn’t give a hoot about manageability and provides its users with ways to end-run corporate IT when the interests of the two groups do not coincide.

“Employees are looking to enhance their efficiency,” says André Gold, director of information security at Continental Airlines. “People are saying, ‘I need this to do my job.’” But for all the reasons listed above, he says, corporate IT usually ends up saying no to what they want or, at best, promising to get to it…eventually. In the interim, users turn to the shadow IT department.

I remember that when I used to work at Orange, many of my most useful tools were things I “wasn’t allowed” to have on my computer. I also remember that when I got really bad RSI and using dictation software was the only way to get me back to work, the IT department flat-out refused our request for Dragon. (Somebody actually said that if I couldn’t type anymore, they should just get rid of me.) My boss had to have a chat with somebody else’s boss to finally have the program installed on my computer.

The bit that actually prompted me to write this post is the comparison with the way HR organises the company:

For example, a similar dynamic has long played out in HR. A company’s employees have titles and reporting relationships that give their work a formal structure. But at the same time every company has an informal structure determined by expertise, interpersonal relationships, work ethic, overall effectiveness and so on. Companies suffer when HR is out of phase with the informal structure. Employees are demoralized when the formal architecture elevates someone at the bottom of the informal architecture, and people who occupy the top spots in the informal architecture leave when they aren’t recognized by the formal one. Good HR departments know where employees stand in both the formal and informal architectures and balance the two.

A few months ago, I was giving a talk on blogs (etc.) to a bunch of Internal Communications people, and one of my points was that there is an informal structure inside the company (the value of which is in fact recognized by the companies, who will invest in “teambuilding” or “recreation” activities to encourage transversal communication), and that use of tools like blogs can help make this structure more visible and efficient. (Think Cluetrain, these 50.)