Comments | lj_biz: Communities and Groups and Constitutions

andrewducker in lj_biz

Communities and Groups and Constitutions - Oh My!

Dec 25, 2004 18:45

I don't know how many LJ Staff have read A Group is it's Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky, but it's absolutely fascinating. Here are a few snippets:

People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with ( Read more... )

Comments 5

decadence1 December 25 2004, 16:49:44 UTC

[T]the culture now spreads to new people slower than new members join.

Possibly. Even that can be helped a little though? For example, users' introductory e-mails can briefly sketch out the site ethos (though they don't currently). This was once done by the site [link] in fact.

The article's comparison of various fora falls slightly since Usenet / MOOs are non-commercial (read: generally publically run) while LiveJournal is commercial - albeit not profit-oriented. One is more able to impose rules that might be unpopular with a small minority.

Basically I agree with what sherm said.

jamesd December 25 2004, 19:12:09 UTC

Agreed, in part at least: the software is an integral part of the social interaction. There's a very careful balancing act involved in the software and social system designs. Deciding what tools to provide to the volunteer fire department is an interesting and sometimes tough problem. At least the core MediaWiki/Wikipedia developers are aware of this and regulate what features the software will and won't provide based on anticipated user interaction effects. Similarly, as one of the roots there will full access to absolutely everything, I carefully consider what I will and won't do and disclose ( ... )

tj642 December 25 2004, 21:14:23 UTC

Deciding what tools to provide to the volunteer fire department is an interesting and sometimes tough problem.

The question is: Has anyone ever asked the fire department what tools they need? Are they being assigned tools that they "can" use...but there might be better ones out there?....etc.

The "key" is to write those rules so that they are strong enough to stand on their own (and support moderate pressure) -- but not crumble under their own weight or be to inflexable to change -- as rapidly as needed, if needed.

jamesd December 26 2004, 18:18:26 UTC

Yes, lots of discussion of various sorts about various options and ways to approach things. A couple of recent popular additions are a cross-project regular expression spam filter which doesn't take one of the technical types to update and a cross-project search for changes made by a particular IP address so cross-project spamming can be more easily dealt with. I expect the spam list to be used by all or most other sites using the MediaWiki software once we've released the hooks (and assuming people don't poison it by using it for non-spam purposes - one of the social challenges which goes with the technological part of the problem:)). This won't be the last act in the anti-spam fight, though - other things are also being considered.

For those who didn't read the article, the fire department is a Wikipedia thing, not LJ.

Own experience furlock June 28 2005, 16:52:04 UTC

Hi, just wanted to tell you about our own experience in a webring. This ring is a small but interesting example. The first year we needed no rules, no abuse control or something especially organized, as people were far too much involved as to doubt or to ask for special asistance. The second year visits boosted and the small community faced desintegration. The site started to leak in all forums. So rules were established ( ... )