Books I'm currently reading or planning on reading:
Technically Together - Rethinking Community Within Techno-Society by Michele A. Willson. 2006. Peter Lang Publishing, New York.
Rise of Network Society - Manuell Castells, 2nd ed.
Community - Key Ideas by Gerard Delanty. 2003, routledge
1 comment:
Howard Rheingold has some interesting writings on online communities. He was originally a big WELL guy. I own the Katie Hafner history of the WELL if that's of interest. The Castells books is a beast...but rather unique. He doesn't write about online communities as much as he does about information flows.
This is a paper from IBM researchers on knowledge management as a social problem.
Here is an excerpt from that paper:
In this chapter we’ve argued that knowledge management is not just an information problem, but is, as well, a social problem that involves people, relationships, and social factors like trust, obligation, commitment, and accountability. This view raises a considerable challenge for those interested in designing systems to support knowledge management. Our approach has been to explore the creation of infrastructures for knowledge communities: on-line environments within which users can engage socially with one another, and, in the process, discover, develop, evolve, and explicate knowledge.
In our work on Babble, we’ve begun exploring ways of creating infrastructures that support rich forms of social interaction. We’ve found that social proxies are a promising development, and continue to be impressed with the power of plain text as a means of supporting interactions that are both complex and subtle. We believe that one of the most important aspects of a knowledge community is that it can be used as a place for unguarded discussion among people who know one another, who share professional interests, and who understand the contexts within which their remarks are being made.
The notion of a knowledge management environment as a ‘trusted place’ is an interesting and challenging one. How – technically, socially, and organizationally – can we balance the need for a safe and trusting place with the organizational imperative to share information? One decision facing us as designers is how and to what extent we "design in" norms and social conventions. For example, if we build in technical mechanisms to provide privacy, in addition to the usability impact, we also eliminate opportunities for participants to show that they may be trusted, or to rely on others to respect their privacy. The Babble prototype has no technical features for controlling access: anyone who has access to the client could, in theory, enter any Babble space. But, because Babble makes users visible, this results in groups noticing, commenting on, and ultimately discussing how to deal with this issue. We believe that a greater understanding of how to design systems that permit social mechanisms to come into play is of great importance in designing future systems for knowledge management.
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