by Jim Cashel
July 2003
Joe Cothrel has spent the better part of a decade focusing on the business applications of online community, most recently as vice president of research at software and services firm Participate Systems. Now an independent consultant and researcher, Joe shares some of his recent thoughts and work with us.
The realm of "social software" is showing a lot of movement. How do you think about this area
vis-a-vis traditional online communities?
We probably should define what we mean by "social software" -- there's actually some debate about this. I tend to agree with those who say social software encompasses everything we've been calling community and collaborative software up to now (e-mail, discussion forums, groupware, instant messaging), plus the relatively recent additions of weblogs, wikis and the yet-to-be-named (as far as I know) category of tools for connecting with other people (Meetup, Ryze, Friendster, etc.).
If you think of communities as collections of people that exist out there in the world (or would like to), and online communities as ways those communities come together and communicate, all this stuff fits together. However, many people use the term "social software" to refer only those recent additions, which also makes a certain sense since these new tools prompted the new term.
At any rate, I am a complete convert to the significance of these new tools, particularly blogs. A few years ago I used to talk about three eras in the development of online communities: formation, fragmentation, and integration. In the formative era, which started in the late 1970s, the boundaries of the community and the boundaries of the technology were one and the same. Think of dial-up bulletin boards or the early days of commercial online services like AOL. If you're not on my system, I can't talk to you. When the commercial Internet arrives in the mid-1990s, community platforms begin to fragment. All of a sudden I'm talking to you in a discussion forum while pointing you to my webpage on another system and maybe chatting with you via instant messaging through a third system. Blogs have taken that fragmentation a step further. Conversations that previously were captured in a single discussion thread are now distributed across many separate blog sites. You can see how some people look at this and say, "Where's the community?"
But the interesting thing to me is that even though blogs take fragmentation further than ever before, they also pave the way toward integration -- toward weaving online community interactions into our life and work in useful ways. I think this is what Ross Mayfield of Socialtext is talking about when he says, "Social software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software." Since blog tools typically give you the option of publishing your blog in an XML format called RSS, you don't have to go to a blogger's site to read his or her content. It's basically content syndication at the level of the individual. Now we're finding community platforms like Web Crossing including an option to publish in RSS. Blogs and now forums become places to create or contribute content that is read in another galaxy, as it were.
Today, most people read RSS feeds though an aggregator; some blog creation tools like Radio have an aggregator application built in. It's a powerful way to read content from many sources very, very quickly, but it's also kind of primitive. In reality, RSS feeds can be picked up and integrated into whatever web-enabled software program or interface a programmer wants to create.
You've also been paying attention to strategies on how to manage most active users in a community, so called "super-users". What lessons are you deriving?
Actually, this is where my interest in social software and traditional online community has come together. Some people talk about new social software as enabling "many-to-many" interaction, much as online community has always been described. Others like David Weinberger say it's "few-to-few" interaction. I think it's actually about a successful reconciliation of the two.
Anybody who's run an online community knows that you're always operating at two levels -- at the level of the community as a whole, or the "average" community member, and at the level of the "core members" of the community. (It's more complicated than this, but bear with me.) I call these core members the "significant few." Lots of things can make a member significant. Sometimes it's experience or knowledge. Sometimes it's a credential or a reputation or a position of power or authority. Sometimes it's just a willingness to devote more time and energy to the community and its business than anybody else. In a technical support forum, for example, it's not uncommon for one-half of one percent of the members to answer more than half of all questions. Look, knowledge is spread unevenly through the world -- as is generosity.
How do you manage the "significant few"? You reward them with recognition, or special privileges, or in some cases even money. Reputation systems have been around for a while, but within the last year have they have really become standard equipment for large tech support communities. (Both Cisco and SAP implemented systems in 02). Mostly, the "significant few" want the same thing that community managers and sponsors want -- robust communities in which to do their thing. But they can also be intolerant of novices. It's kind of a truism that the many want to talk to the few, but the few only want to talk among themselves. I think that's one thing that blogs manage very nicely, enabling interaction at a very high level among the few, without shutting out the ability of the many to read and even comment. Similarly, in the online community space we've seen an increase in online discussions which feature a panel of invited participants, and where other visitors to the site can read the discussion and submit questions which are presented to the panel by a moderator. I'm not arguing that these are superior to other ways of doing this; just that its useful for us to continue to create formats in which both the few and the many get what they need.
Managing both the many and the few is a challenge. Too much focus on either will get you in trouble. In business-sponsored communities, executives sometimes struggle with the idea of a "significant few." Sometimes they argue that they are not representative of the average customer. On the contrary, research I've done shows that, as a group, they are usually indistinguishable from other customers by any of the common measures of customer value -- purchase history, profitability, loyalty, etc.
Lately I've been working on an e-democracy project where the "significant few" concept gets really complicated: there, the few includes legislators as well as interest groups, and the many are millions of citizens whose input is needed.
"Communities of Practice" have received a lot of attention from the "social
engineering" side, but less attention from the technology side. Do you have comments on the technology
of communities of practice?
I think you are absolutely right -- there's been much more emphasis on the process issues associated with COPs than on technology. I think COPs have to some extent inherited an anti-technology bias that has long been part of knowledge management. Last year's best-selling book on COPs had one entry in the index under the word "Technology": "As a barrier to communication." At last year's Delphi Conference on Learning and Knowledge Management, none of the speakers presenting cases on communities talked about technology with any level of specificity, and few audience members asked. Yet everybody involved with communities has to make important decisions about technology.
I guess I'm biased, but I think at the end of the day you can't justify the spend on communities if you don't have scale, or at least reach. In most large companies the expertise is so spread out, technology is just a given.
The byword in enterprise software these days seems to be "consolidation," and I think the big ISVs (Microsoft, IBM, etc.) are doing their best to represent that their portal products include everything you're ever going to need for collaboration. Analysts are welcoming this development, since it rids them of the headache of trying to figure out a very messy knowledge and collaboration software space. My perception is that IBM is ahead of where the marketplace is, and Microsoft is behind where the marketplace is, and this continues to create space for other vendors to play in the collaboration area.
What is your view of the current state of affairs in the business of online communities?
Well, the business of online communities, being in part a software business, is continuing to suffer from the same depressed marketplace. Yet there are companies who have established a franchise -- Web Crossing, for example, on the software side, and Participate on the services side -- who are still out there every day helping companies get online communities done. And then there are niche players who have mastered certain segments, like the nonprofit space, and continue to do well there. So I guess the key is understanding where the opportunities are, and having enough of a presence and reputation that people think of you first when they want to get something done. One thing's for sure -- this kind of interaction may become many different things in the next few years, but it ain't going away.
Contact: Joseph Cothrel, cothrel@comcast.net
