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I had recently posted a link to a great PICNIC ’08 video of Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater talking about the challenges of “managing” collaboration in an online community.
We know that these challenges revolve around having a promise that is relevant to the community, having tools and incentives that are appropriate for the task, and having the right norms that strike the right balance between authority and responsibility on one hand and freedom and control on the other.
However, even though we know the ingredients that go into a vibrant community, we don’t know the recipe. We can only say that a vibrant community “happens”, almost by trial and error, when the right tools, incentives and norms come together with a promise community members can believe in.
Philosopher Karl Popper captured this dilemma in his 1965 Arthur Holly Compton lecture, Of Clouds and Clocks.
Basically, all complex systems fall on a continuum between clouds and clocks. Cloud systems are irregular and unpredictable. Clock systems are regular and predictable.
Over the last 300 years, the pendulum of prevailing wisdom has swung from “determinism”, the view that “all clouds are clocks”, to “indeterminism”, the view that “all clocks are clouds”, to the present view that some systems are “mostly clocks”, while other systems are “mostly clouds”, and the world is an interlocking system of clocks and clouds.
Managing collaboration in an online community is a “mostly cloud” problem as of now. We know the boundary conditions which are necessary for a vibrant community, but we also know that these conditions are not sufficient. So, most social media “initiatives” are trial and error affairs. Most websites fail to become vibrant communities. Most communities fail to collaborate towards a shared objective. Most collaboration fails to produce the desired results. Instead of a how-to checklist, we have case studies of one-off success stories.
With more data, however, many cloud problems become less cloudy and more clock-like. Online communities are a tremendously rich source of data about user behavior and one of the big challenges in the next few years will be to use this data to learn more abut why some communities are able to collaborate to solve problems and create things while others aren’t.
My own belief is that even though we may learn more about the boundary conditions that are necessary for community and collaboration, we may not be able to develop a how-to checklist for social media success, anytime soon.
Cross-posted at MSFS 556: Social Media in Business, Development and Government.
Gaurav,
very interesting….it’s a great and different link between Popper and Social Media.
Congratulations,
Regards from Brazil,
Carlos
This is the first time I’ve heard of Popper’s theory, so I may be off the mark, but as for increased data leading to clouds becoming clocks:
A lot of what I’ve been reading recently is very much of the belief that we cannot do that. For example, NNT’s “The Black Swan” and Bookstaber’s “A Demon of Our Own Design” (reviewed here: http://blurringborders.com/2008/12/27/book-review-a-demon-of-our-own-design/) are convincing accounts of our inability to use massive amounts of data and the brightest minds to predict the future.
Now, the question of how to built a robust online community isn’t exactly predicting the future of the economy, but as Kevin Kelly points out, increased measurement and data doesn’t solve all our questions. Instead, it leads to more questions and more ignorance: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/10/the_expansion_o.php
So, even if we “clockify” all the new media clouds we currently have, it seems another cloud front will come rolling in.