Designing for Civil Society

The new political test: can you YouTube?

Political candidates once needed skills in dealing with hecklers ... then reporters and TV cameras. Now it's citizen's media. Steven Clift, who has been promoting e-democracy world-wide for the last ten years or more, has an impressive event lined up back in his US base, with candidates agreeing to cope with a potential barrage of podcasts, videos and photos as well as emails. It could be more challenging than big media. As Steven bills it in his press release:

The era of YouTube(TM) and MySpace(TM) meets Minnesota’s strong civic tradition of innovation, thanks to a new online debate with the gubernatorial candidates co-sponsored by Blandin Foundation and E-Democracy.Org.

The Minnesota Gubernatorial E-Debate will take place online from Monday, October 9th through Thursday, October 19th. Minnesotans can participate directly in the gubernatorial campaigns by using the Internet - including video, audio, pictures, and plain texts - to submit questions and share their views with candidates and fellow citizens.

The E-Debate is designed to promote and facilitate substantive, interactive, in-depth public discussions of candidate positions and proposals.

All of Minnesota’s official gubernatorial candidates appearing on the November ballot formally have confirmed their participation in the debate.

Voters will send email questions, and candidates have the option to provide their Opening Statement in video via the YouTube.com video sharing service. Candidates also may record their rebuttals into audio podcasts, and also provide links to content related to their answers.

Voters may participate by submitting text questions and by using the new “Voter Voices” section of E-Democracy’s web site to share their own video, audio, pictures, blog posts, links, and discussion forum messages across popular online services (for example, Flickr.com for photos, YouTube.com for video, blog posts via the Google blog search, etc.

Minnesotans are then invited to view an integrated, dynamic presentation of all of this material on a single web page www.e-democracy.org/voices

It's an impressive set up, and a long way from Steven's early initiatives with email lists. What's doubly impressive is the way that Steven has managed to catalyse so many initiatives around the world through a mix of hands-on demonstration, speaking and networking without much funding and without being the least bit grand about it. More at his Democracies Online site.

technorati tags:e-democracy

Article analyses the online/offline mix around events

John Smith and Bev Trayner have an article in eLearn magazine that combines excellent practical and theoretical insights on how to mix online collaboration with face-to-face events - something I'm currently working on.

The article is based on experience in the development of communities of practice, and uses the CPD framework of community (participants), shared interest in a body of knowledge (domain), and the development of practices that support further learning (practice).

It takes three main phases - online ramp-up (preparation phase online), face-to-face meeting, and online follow-on (post-meeting online phase) - and details issues likely to arise. Here's the first two of ten as a taster:

Phase: Getting into the online space

• Launching into various preliminary interactions, usually involving Web pages, emails, phone calls, and payment which have the function of bootstrapping other points of contact.
• Engaging with this new online experience balances uncertainty and extrapolation from previous experiences.
• Finding other people "there"—a glimpse that it may be worthwhile.
• Feelings of familiarity or frustration, despair, or delight.

Phase: Finding your way: asynchronous discussions

• Dealing with technical mechanics and overcoming social obstacles,both online and in a context around the computer at home and/or at work.
• Discovering that an asynchronous medium has a rhythm that intersects "real life."
• Getting to know (or not) how to use different pathways or facilities to participate in an online discussion.
• Figuring out the "right thing to do," acquiring social learning skills or technical mastery and taking some initiative (or not) as aresult.

I'm doing some work with Bev on a Drupal-based site where some 30 people are preparing, in half a dozen languages, for a meeting in a couple of weeks time, and anticipate exploring in greater depth what lies beneath the bullet points. More on that once things have got going.

I think there are some similarities in John and Bev's model to Gilly Salmon's Five stage model developed from work at the Open University. Although both models have been developed to inform the creation of learning communities - formal or otherwise - I think the principles apply in many other settings. The consistent theme, as John and Bev say, is "learning comes about through informal engagement with other people". It's about conversation and relationship, not just assembling and ingesting chunks of knowledge.

John maintains the the learning alliances blog, and Bev keeps a blog called Phronesis. John has now set up a feed to capture content from others in the CPsquare community of practice (CoP) about CoPs which you can find here.

Groups vs. networks ... forums vs. blog communities

George Siemens in Groups vs. Networks quotes Stephen Downes to offer an insight into the difference between groups and networks, and I think by extension the difference between place-based online communities (forums) and the blog communities that Nancy White has been exploring. George writes:

Stephen nails it perfectly: "Groups require unity, networks require diversity. Groups require coherence, networks require autonomy. Groups require privacy or segregation, networks require openness. Groups require focus of voice, networks require interaction. The group I am with right now is very intent on being a group. That doesn't interest me. I have no wish to lose my identity and my freedom, my empowerment. Because a group is subject to this very objection - backlash, groupthink, the works. But a network is not."

George continues:

I have struggled with this theme in my own writing for the last several years. I like the individuality that a blog affords - my writing, my thoughts, my space. I don't mind collaborating with others...but only if I don't lose my voice and identity in the process. Our education system is based on groups...but it should be based on networks. Groups don't scale, and the urge to focus and move a group forward in one direction results in marginalizing certain voices in order to pursue the "common good". I'm not comfortable with that. A network (as I've been saying with connectivism) imbues individual nodes with personal voices...and finds it's value in aggregating, not overwriting (marginalizing) nodes not in line with the thinking of the majority.

Sanford Dickert, commenting on the news that the Tory party is to set up a social networking site endorses my point about the need to mix online and offline:

Sticking in one medium will limit the pool of involvement - better to extend across the space and find involvement tactics that involve and incorporate in multiple ways.

... and also emphasises the need to go where people are, rather than simply set up another place:

Funny thing, 100M+ MySpace members, close to 1M SecondLifers and the explosion of social networking sites is a ripe space to grow involvement. I think that the Tories action, while interesting, is again trying to create another space that they control. Better to go where the voters are (like, say, SoFlow or A Small World) and build from within, rather than from the outside. Use the community within and develop the community - and then grow the space for the community to be involved in. Do you need features that are not already available in the sites today? And if they are not there, could you find ways of meeting the needs without software development (like a forum or a mailing list)? Give it some thought and see what can happen.

All of this confirms to me that attempts to promote collaboration can't be either/or in the approach or media. Some people will prefer groups (forums), others will prefer blogs and networks, just as some like text, others audio or video. The challenge is to (of course) be clear on what you are trying to achieve with whom, and then be prepared to use a mix of methods over time.  That will often mean going to "their" places - blog, forum, club, event - and inviting people into "your" place - short-term forum, blog aggregator, event. Hmmm.... it used to be so much easier when we knew where places were.

Social networking gets political

I've just caught up on the story (via Simon Collister) that the Tory party are planning to launch a social networking site to discuss major issues like climate change, and to facilitate activities including volunteering. Here's why I think this has importance beyond the way the Conservative Party positions itself "as an alternative to Labour's 'nanny' state approach" as BrandRepublic puts it in the original story - although that is interesting enough. These are just immediate thoughts from recent links and what's in my head at the moment ... more welcome....

• Social networking sites - where people have their own online space and can network with others for fun, serious business, or a mix of the two - are attracting a lot of users and investment. (MySpace, Ecademy and lots more)
• Blog communities are developing to complement other forms of online communities, where again there is a mix of personal and collective space.
• The idea that crowds of people may be better, in some situations, at formulating ideas and making decisions is getting a lot of attention through the book The Wisdom of Crowds. Dave Pollard has a very useful analysis of what works best with crowds, groups and individuals.
• Policy Unplugged is exploring the mix of face-to-face social conferencing with blog communities ... and no doubt others are too.
• Nonprofit organisations are looking at social networking. NCVO is currently researching the significance for the sector, organisations in the east Midlands have a collaboration site

Pause for a moment ... all the above mean that there is a growing body of people across age groups, sectors and professions who are beginning to be comfortable with the development of relationships, ideas and actions through a mix of existing and new contacts, mediated by using a mix of different ways of communicating.
Then add in the approach being develop by the leading think tank Demos, with a web site ideally suited to feed and respond to all of the above ... because people can blend different items from blog posts, events, publications into their own contributions and so into whatever social networking platform they wish.
All this is a step beyond more conventional e-participation or e-democracy, where people are usually responding to something generated by government or another power-holding body. Influence isn't just more bottom-up it's potentially coming from all sides.
The ideas and practices of social networking are more developed in the US, and there is some analysis: Will social networks change politics? However, the focus is usually just on the online environment - candidates in MySpace, discussion in the networks etc. I think things get more interesting as the online-offline division starts to go (mixing meetings and blogging), and when old-style research and policy development becomes interactive and transparent as Demos is attempting to do.
This does, of course, raise yet another form of the digital divide. If social networking is a sphere of influence those with networking skills may become disproportionately influential. Of course, it was always thus ... just the nature of the clubs is changing.

Demos wins whizzy web site award: guide needed

Congratulations to Molly Webb and the team at Demos for winning best think tank website at the annual Prospect Magazine awards, by developing a place for "transparency and discussion" with social software consultancy Headshift.
Demos has been leading the way for a year or two with blogging and free downloads of publications. The new site ties everything together in a spectacular mix ... as Livio Hughes says on the Headshift blog:

Corporate, project and individual blogs; social tagging; RSS; wiki-based collaboration; podcasting... They're all in there somewhere - with good reason!

I'm a bit partial because I've worked with Livio and Lee Bryant, and it was Lee's talk on blogs and bottom-up knowledge management a few years back that really got me started in this field.
The site is clever because it is new-style item-centric rather than old-style page-centric, with each item (project, person, theme, event, publication, blog item etc) tagged so they can be mixed and matched just about anywhere.
If you go to the projects section, for example, you'll see under each one something like 13 blog posts, 19 bookmarks, 21 themes. Click through to Atlas of Ideas and you will find who are the researchers, and what themes are covered. Click on one of those - China - and you can find everything on the site tagged with China. If you click for example on Kirsten Bound - who is working on the Atlas - you can find the other projects Kirsten is working on, and her key themes. Click on bookmarks and you find other sites Kirsten and colleagues have found in their researches

You really do feel you are getting into the knowledge undergrowth of Demos (well, the stuff they are tagging us about anyway!). It's easy to bandy about terms like open and transparent, in celebration of the collaborative approaches that the Net offers - but it is really difficult to make it work in the way that Demos and Headshift are demonstrating. They certainly deserve the award.

It seems churlish to enter some reservation, but I confess that I did at first glance find the site a bit challenging. I'm pretty familiar with blogs, tagging and the rest of it, and don't feel smothered by a tag cloud (right). However, it is a touch overwhelming to find everything so Web 2.0. It's such a gormet tech delight it can be difficult to know which way to turn, and I wonder whether it may be rather challenging for people more used to traditional navigation.
I think it is a problem easily solved. The one element so far absent (unless I missed it) is video on the site. What we need is a guided tour from Molly - or perhaps an avatar to guard against staff changes. It would then a short step to Demos in Second Life. I bet there's an award for think tanks in virtual reality under consideration somewhere.

BBC helps start local blog communities

My first interest in social technology came from seeing in the mid 1990s the Freenets and community networks developed in North America, and for a few years it seemed that "getting local communities online" through a mix of access provision, training, support and portals might take off. There are still good example around of these projects, but a couple of years ago it became evident that the growing use of personal media and social networking was taking us in a different direction.
I was reminded of this the other day by a comment from Ingrid Koehler, responding to an item about blog communities. She wrote:

I think there's at least one other kind of blog community...and it's geographical - based around a city or a state, with people who really act as a community - sometimes meeting up, sometimes not. I don't think I've seen this in the UK (yet) but I've certainly seen it in the US. Sometimes these were started around an influential individual - but have carried on.

I don't know of any UK examples either - but it now looks as if the BBC might be helping create something on these line in Manchester. Robert Paterson reports via an item by Jake Shapiro:

Here is the summary  of what got my eye:-

Robin Hamman, senior community producer for BBC English Regions New Media, explained the initiative in an interview with paidContent.org: “We aren’t sure if it’s aggregator, a citizen journalism project or a media literacy campaign - it probably cuts across all three.”
This is a three-month trial launched last week by BBC New Media Central and BBC Manchester:
* Between 10 and 20 volunteers are being recruited across the city.
* Through workshops, participants will be guided through the BBC’s editorial guidelines and production values and then referred to commercial blogging platforms to start their own sites.
* The BBC will monitor RSS feeds from these blogs and highlight the best content.
* Pre-existing local bloggers/Flickr contributors are also invited to submit work or tag content “bbcmanchesterblog” so it can be picked up.
…As for the workload, Hamman optimistically envisages this as a one or two hour job each day for BBC staff — skimming the RSS feeds and wrapping editorial around the best. The rest of the task is to promote the blog to BBC journalists as an efficient source of content about Manchester.

Robert then follows up with more detail through an interview with Robin, which reveals that the idea stemmed from "digital citizens" sending  their content to the BBC:

So after the Tube bombing there were 7,000 emails and pictures coming over the transom into the news room at the BBC. After the Fuel Depot explosion there were 25,000 by noon! There was a staff of 7 who were overwhelmed by this.
The infinite scale and the infinite Noise created by having an open door was becoming apparent to the Innocents who then asked - how much will this cost to keep this type of interaction going? Can we in reality sift through all the noise to find the diamonds? Is this really participation? How could we find the quality as the noise builds?
These were the questions that Robin's team asked when they asked for permission to try a different track. By asking this type of question - they got the green light. They had exposed the unsustainable nature of and open door and no filters in a world where content was going to reach for infinite.
So what are they doing? They are creating a Space where they will have a Host.
The Host will select what goes into the space. Really a new kind of editor - see the link to the old?
So who are the contributors? They have gone into the local community (This is regional BBC) and found the best bloggers. They have met with them several times. Beer has been drunk. They have an offer for them. If they want to be picked up in this space by the host, they have access to a wide range of training - first of all about what is the BBC way for journalism ethics etc and secondly they offer all sorts of technical training. If you want to make a better video - we will help you etc.
All keep their own blogs but offer an RSS feed. There is a static hosted BBC site that filters this content. When the host is running with a story, the Host will not run a full story from any source but will use a number of excerpts as most bloggers do now. So the etiquette of the 'sphere applies and the work of finding material mainly defaults mainly to the aggregator. The material includes of course, text, stills, video and music. The offer includes help in all areas. So not only does this build community but also competency.

This experiment seems to me highly significant because it is exploring several issues:

• The changing role of big media (BBC) in relation to small media (digital citizens) ... in this case actually amplifying and empowering them. Would it were always so.
• Creating a community space by aggregating individual spaces (the blogs)
• The relationship between physicially-defined community (Manchester) and its online citizens
• The new facilitator-editor roles this demands.

I think there are some issues in common with the development of blog-based communities in relation to face-to-face events that I raised earlier. I'll be watching Robin's blog to see if he offers us more.
Then I wonder - why do I need to pick up news of what's happening in Manchester from Robert blogging from Prince Edward Island, Canada. But then, why not. And why not post something about this in the discussion about Nancy White's(Seattle) paper on blog communities, hosted in Australia. What's local, what's global these days?

What does it take for online collaboration to work with events?

I'm doing some work with Steve Moore and colleagues at Policy Unplugged, where we are mixing social conferencing events with before and after online activity on a multi-user blog space ... so I'm on the look-out for other examples of this type of mix, and what works and what doesn't.

The most recent event was Bricking it where Johnnie Moore worked his magic as open space facilitator, and within three hours had more than a hundred people generating a score of conversations around issues of globalisation. Pictures and video  clips here. The meeting technology is clearly excellent, and so is the Drupal-based blogging system  developed with Robert Castelo. The challenge for this and future events is how to help participants make most effective use of the system, in ways that really add some value to the face to face experience.  I'll be exploring this in more detail, but for now was struck by an item on the ever-excellent Anecdote blog - Why people don't use collaboration tools. There Shawn Callahan develops themes originally raised by Dave Pollard, first on his blog and then actually using a collaborative writing tool, Writely. Dave and Shawn produce a useful analysis of the barriers to using online collaboration ... see the Anecdote post.
Not many people used the Writely tool to develop ideas further, and Shawn observes that perhaps collaboration requires a strong need to work together. In other words, it is down to purpose, motivation - and whether people feel it worth the investment of their time to use the tools. If you are a team spread around the globe, with tight project deadlines, it is clearly worth making the effort. If you are going to get together with people face to face, where is the added benefit of blogging and commenting before and after?
I believe there are major benefits ... making sure you meet people that look interesting, by reading their profiles online ... raising your own profile ... flagging up issues you want raised .... providing background reading ... carrying the conversation on afterwards ... building up your social network.
But then, that's just my view. The people who really know are the people who come the event, so we need to start that conversation with them. One of the people contributing to the Bricking it event was Leon Benjamin, author of Winning by Sharing, and as you can see in this video clip I asked him what he thought the solutions to the challenges posed by globalisation might be. His response - I don't know, but together we can work it out. I hope the same applies to collaborative tools.

Official blogs and wikis needn't be boring

While the Defra wiki - trashed by libertarian politicos and then relaunched - continues to be mentioned as a warning to government servants of the perils of online collaborative tools, a linked blog and wiki is doing rather effective service for the local authority improvement and development agency IDeA.

The wiki, appropriately enough, is about partnership ... or rather Performance Management in Partnership. Hmmm, sounds a bit dry, particularly when you read on and find reference to procurement, coordinating systems, and risk management. But that's where the blog, and the chatty email updates from policy officer Ingrid Koehler come in. There's commentary on policy developments, reports on events, useful links ... and Ingrid's holiday snaps, both blogged and Flickred. I liked The Burg(h)ers of Calais.

If Ingrid is away, Adrian and Vicki help out. You feel there are real people in there. Their conference reporting makes you believe other officials are human too:

David Cook had the best "back to the floor" type tip. He regularly listens in on randomly selected customer calls to the council on tape on his drive home. This helps him get a finger on the pulse of what the main customer issues are, and also on how customer service is being handled in the council.

The technology is not fancy. The wiki runs on a commercially-hosted service, Editme, and the blog is on Blogger. As always, it's the people who make the difference.
Meanwhile, over at the Defra wiki, the Defra science strategy team have popped in a rather intriguing article on political philosophy:

The idea is known as One Planet Living. It’s rather simple really: if everybody in the world lived as we do in the UK, we would need three planets to support us. It is often presented as the latest fad in Green political thought. In fact, it's an idea that dates back several centuries.

The article goes on to say that great thinkers like Max Weber, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke were all acutely aware of ‘green’ political issues, and serves to show that no one political tradition has sole green credentials. This has prompted one commenter, signing in as Matt Qvortrup, to remark:

If the Greens are to consolidate their gains and expand, they need to recognise that part of their message is a conservative one. It is deeply attractive to certain conservative instincts and this should not be a matter for embarrassment but for celebration.

I shall monitor the page closely for signs of the return of Guido Fawkes and his co-conspirators. I sense the Defra civil servants might welcome a bit of action. There's no point having a blog or wiki if you don't get noticed.

Scavenging Media for Guerilla Public Authoring

Over the past 10 years Proboscis have developed an enviable reputation for using new media to develop creative projects around public authoring - including Urban Tapestries which I wrote about earlier. As Proboscis explained then:

The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

There was some sophisticated technology behind the project - so I was particularly intrigued to get an update from Giles Lane announcing that in future they will be using free online services - a kind of guerilla public authoring, as Giles calls it. They'll be experimenting, and producing a scavenging handbook.

Our concept of scavenging is to break down the core components of public authoring and devise a methodology for linking them together and sharing them. The method will be one that requires little or no expert knowledge to set up and which can be adapted to the local conditions depending on what resources are available to the community.

This is the sort of thing that techies might call mashup, though I think Giles's term is much more evocative, and fits their approach of shifting the focus from technology to the social and cultural practices by which people make sense of their surrounding, and add their own interpretations by analogue and digital means. While mashups often require programming skills, the Proboscis handbook will help people put together their own systems without too many tech skills. As Giles explained to me in a follow-up email:

The scavenging idea is a development of our original approach for  Social Tapestries, which was to look at each group or community we work with to see what were the appropriate technologies and  capabilities, and to adapt our approach to those. Whilst we have been developing new versions of Urban Tapestries over the past 2 years we  have struggled to secure the resources needed to deploy and maintain  such a service, to resolve significant technology issues and make it  available to the public. This leads us to think that whilst a dedicated system for public authoring is desirable, we should have alternatives that enable the fundamentals to be achieved that are not  dependent on a single service.

While the costs of developing custom systems is clearly an issue, things have changed dramatically over the past few years with the development of the sort of free services offered by Google and Yahoo. On a slightly different front, I'm impressed by the way in which Ismael Ghalimi is putting together what he calls Office 2.0 - a range of free and paid-for tools covering, well, just about everything from calculators and calendars to word processing and video publishing. Get scavenging!

Blog communities: Nancy White explains being in many places at once

Nancy White, recently in London  talking about Internet tribes, has now written an article about blog communities and how they differ from forums, email lists and other ways we communicate with each other and relate online: Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? at The Knowledge Tree.

If you aren't a social technology person, don't switch off ... because behind the tech stuff are some profound issues of how we do things as individuals in our own spaces, how we collaborate in groups, and how we get together in communities.
In the non-internet world architects, planners and developers often determined how public or private, congenial or not our places may be. The more handy DIYers among us build our own. Organisers, wardens, police, colleagues, friends, brokers all assist or control our relationships in localities or across far-flung networks.
I think Nancy's article is important because she offers us an understandable way of looking at how the social architecture of the internet is changing. More and more people are taking the DIY route by creating their own places (blogs) and talking to others from there ... instead of going to  the equivalent of the pub, the match, church or community centre. However, the physical-online analogy of place soon breaks down, because as Nancy explains, these days you can be in many places at once:

Until recently, the term ‘online community’ implied a community who interacted online within some bounded set of technologies. In the early years, bulletin board systems (BBSs) and forums (also known as discussion boards) joined email lists as tools that enabled a defined set of people to interact around some shared purpose, over time. These were usually clearly bounded communities. The boundaries were created by the tools themselves – usernames, passwords, registrations or joining of a list. The technological act of joining was the most visible indicator of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the community. Communities could be public or private and visible only to those who joined. Many of us interested in the application of online community to learning and work, ‘grew up’ in this era of bounded communities. We often brought with us our assumptions that online conversation, a core to our learning and work, would naturally happen in forums or email. We happily played with wikis as shared writing or repository spaces. We adopted blogs as personal publishing platforms, but community always found its infrastructural roots in forums and email lists, tools that many of us felt defined online conversation. Then blog adoption accelerated.
People began to blog in specific niches, from gaming, to politics, to third grade classroom curriculum, to chocolate; ecosystems of people writing about things they cared about. They started finding each other, commenting on each others’ blogs. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feedreaders began to offer new possibilities about how we discovered and read blog posts. Other Web 2.0 tools such as tagging and mashups created ways to aggregate and remix the individual offerings into a unique package, customised by each of us to our own preferences.
The game had changed. And with it changed some of our assumptions about what online community looks like, how individual and collective identity, power and control show up in these communities, and, at the core, the balance between the individual and the group.

In order to explain what's going on, Nancy develops the ideas she set out in London. First she suggests that there are three types of blog community - those around a solo blogger, those around a topic, and those developed on the same platform. Nancy then takes the idea of blog communities as networks, enhanced by different functions and types of participants identified by Ramalingam:
    * filters
    * amplifyers
    * convenors
    * facilitators
    * investors and
    * community builders.
As Nancy says Ramalingham’s (2005) six functions echo some of the work of Cross and Parker who describe types within a social network, i.e. Central Connectors, Unsung Heroes, Bottlenecks, Boundary Spanners and Peripheral People.
(The article gives excellent references as well as glossary of terms.)
Nancy goes on to give us an analysis of how the three different types of blog communities operate in terms of power, identity, modes of interaction and scalability.

In the social architecture, we see the most signficant set of differences around the issues of control/power and identity. This is a classic expression of the tension between the individual and the group that shows up in all social formations. From a design perspective, how might we intend the balance between individual and group to show up? If we want an individual focus, blogs give some of that in all forms, but has primacy in the blog centric formation.
Interestingly, all three offer a range of interaction options, although the power dynamics changes with the relationships in those dynamics. For example, while anyone potentially could comment in any three forms, the blog centric blogger could most easily prevent that interaction within the community. Power is key here. The topic centric community has the most distributed power. The boundaried community power distribution ultimately depends on the choices of the site administrator. In the single blog centric power clearly sits at the centre, as does identity.

Nancy emphasises that she is really just setting out some ideas, raising questions, and inviting comments.... and offers us more than the article as a launch pad. You can find some of the research collect under the tag blog_communities on del.icio.us. The article offers a link to a live gathering and conversation on September 25/26 (depending on time zone). You can read the article as blog item, or download as a file. You can listen to Nancy's podcast of the whole thing. All here.
The research has clearly made Nancy rethink the importance of new-style blog communities compared with old-style online community. She wrote recently:

I have been seriously thinking about totally redesigning my online facilitation workshop because we have entered a new phase of online interaction and many of the old assumptions are insufficient, the modalities are far more diverse .... and the challenges of multi-membership and what that means to our time and attention is significant.

This has echos of Robin Hamman on the death of online community, and earlier Amy Jo Kim saying forums were "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs. Something is definitely going on ... new territories are emerging. Nancy is giving us some early maps.