GrowingPains

The community is the guru

Last week, in a meeting with a customer, I was introduced as a "community guru". Although flattered, of course, the label didn't feel right to me at all. I told them that instead I consider myself more like one-eyed in the land of the blind... I kept thinking about what exactly was bugging me about the label. Here are some of my musings. I would be happy to learn what you think. 

Gurus are dangerous. The term guru implies somebody who is leading the way, followed by followers. It is nice to have a guru, because it means somebody else is doing the hard thinking work for you and you can hide behind that person's authority and visibility. This may be great for religious cults, since there it's totally up to the eye of the beholder which arbitrary person to put one's faith in. It doesn't make any sense at all for communities, however. 

Communities cannot be designed, predicted, or owned. Communities are unruly, living beasts, with very much a will and soul of their own. Each community is unique. No matter how hard we try to inspect, frame and classify them, they always escape capture. Each individual community has its own norms and values, practices, energy, and sense.  The motley crew of community members themselves best know the essence of the community and the unpredicatable characteristics and quircks of their peers. Only they really know what could possibly work and what not. 

Outside "experts" have only a very modest role to play. At the very best, they can give some heuristics and guidelines, share some lessons learnt about what happened in other communities and give some hypotheses about why it happened that particular way. It is up to the community to decide what does make sense in its own case. It is the community members who should speak, the outsider who should listen. Not the other way around. The community itself is the guru.

Co-creating the CIRN Commons

What?

At the Prato 2009 conference, we decided to set up a wiki, dubbed the "CIRN Living Knowledge Base". At this year's conference, we decided to change its name into the "CIRN Commons", as this much better reflects what it is about: a shared, active knowledge resource, used and jointly created by the members of our global community:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/

Why?

There are two major reasons for us to get very serious about this commons:

- Only a small fraction of CI researchers and practitioners can afford to attend the conference in Prato. If we want to practice what we preach about empowerment, we have to do our best to include all our global friends and colleagues in a much more intensive and inclusive way. As Clodagh Miskelly  very rightly so put it on Twitter (@miskellaneous): "wd be lovely if you kept those of us who can't afford Prato in your loops...I suppose I'm talking about outreach & networks from the people who can manage to get to the annual bash." The CIRN Commons is one means by which we can help close the "resource divide" in our community.

- We call ourselves community informatics researchers and practitioners. If we, with all of our combined expertise, experience, contacts and resources cannot make this commons come to be, what right then do we have to claim we can help others resolve their CI problems? So, the commons can and should become a vibrant showcase that we can use to convince others that we really know what we are so passionately talking about.

How?

We're all info- and communication-overloaded human beings. Yet another unseen database that we spend too many wasted hours on, we can hear you think? No! This is not about creating huge amounts of dead data. It's supposed to be a _working_ resource, a portal to what all of us are doing and deem important. So, if you are already maintaining info relevant to the community, don't duplicate it, but add links on the commons. If, however, you have something new you would like to share, or would like feedback on: create a page and invite people to it, start a discussion on one of the mailing lists you subscribe to and include a link to that page, etc.

Again, this is not about you having to spend much time building the commons (of course, if you're looking for a new hobby, you're more than welcome to :-)). If all of you literallly add your (little) bit, overall this resource can be bootstrapped and grown into something really useful. Think creatively: what are you doing anyway that with very little effort could be made useful to the community? Some examples:

- Larry Stillman uses the wiki to disseminate information about the Prato conference:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Shaping+CIRN+2011

- Sarah Copeland has been doing a literature review for her PhD research, and has used that to create the initial CIRN bibliography. Andrew Clark has collected lots of CI reports, and is adding them to that page. Now, we ask you to add your own publications to this growing, already much visited page:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Bibliography

- At this year's Prato conference, Doug Schuler gave a fascinating Liberating Voices Pattern Language workshop. One group got so inspired that they decided to use the commons to jointly develop this idea into what may become a real project (the BRIDGES:Building Bridges Across Communities Across Time & Space workshop, if you're interested, please join in):

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/BRIDGES

- Many of you are or have students. Students have to do assignments, which normally go to waste after having been graded by their tired teacher. Wouldn't it be much more useful for our field as a whole and exciting for the students themselves to know that their efforts contribute to a common, evolving repository of knowledge?

For example, one idea could be to create our own CommunIPedia, with entries on the most important CI topics, containing definitions, references, discussions etc. Students could get asssignments (for grades) to develop certain subtopics on the commons, or upload parts of their assignments to the relevant topic pages after they have been graded. Patricia Arnold and Helen Hambly Odame have already offered to involve their students in such an effort.

The topic base at the moment is still very rudimentary, but it could be the stub for a CommunIPedia:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Topics

Ask not what CIRN can do for you...

After the conference, Steve Thompson and I have tried to clean up the wiki and simplify registration. Here are the steps we kindly ask all of you to follow: 

--- Essential steps that take no time at all (and for which you really have no excuse for not doing them :-) )

1. Register for a CIRN Commons Account

Fill out this form (if you already have a Wikispaces account, use your registered e-mail address, so that you can reuse your username+password):

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Getting+Involved

2. Create a personal profile

After registration (normally within a couple of days after you have filled out the form), you will get a notification of your account having been created, plus a link to your personal profile template page. You will be asked to fill out the details, which could be nothing more than adding a link to your home page. Have a look at the rapidly growing set of personal profiles already created:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/People

--- Steps that almost take no time at all (but which really give you that much craved for feeling of instant gratification)

3. It would be really nice if you'd add 1-3 (or more!) key CI publications to the bibliography. Which ones do you think are still lacking? Just use 10 minutes and make those edits:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Bibliography

4. Add your ideas about how to shape the Prato 2011 conference:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/message/list/Shaping+CIRN+2011

--- Steps that take a bit more time (but earn you the eternal gratitude of the CIRN community and a pat on the back or a hug from Larry, depending on your preferences)

5. Become a page steward of a topic or project you care about. Have a look at the vacancies at:

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/Contacts

So, there's something in the CIRN Commons for everybody. Your turn!

Collaboration Space: The Final Frontier?

Collaboration is hot. However, in all the surrounding excitement and hype about flashy social media, abundant communication, and innovative co-creation processes, we almost seem to forget the key role of "space" in allowing people to fruitfully work together. People jointly producing lots of tacit and more or less explicit forms of knowledge require many different technologies enabling them to do so. Social media are only the tip of the collaboration technology iceberg. Contrary to what many afficionados suggest, these tools do not operate in splendid isolation, but are embedded in a mesh of virtual and physical space. This point was driven home to me at Ton Zijlstra's birthday unconference at his house, where we experienced a wonderful variation on the space theme. Although objectively speaking we were just in an overcrowded family home, it felt like we were in a huge and spacious conference centre. Different rooms or even parts of a room were dedicated to a wide variety of emerging, constantly changing themes. The buzz of all those exciting and excited people expressing and comparing their multitude of opinions, made us literally forget where we were. It was as if the space receded in the background.  Obviously, the practical details mattered (enough locations, chairs, refreshments, programme, etc.) However, even more important seemed to be the overall combination of people, energy, and flows that literally filled this space. So, what is collaboration space? Rather than just meaning "emptiness" it seems to be some kind of substrate that needs to come to life (then ideally to disappear out of sight) by its community of users. What are the key physical elements of this substrate? How is this collaboration space filled/appropriated/embodied by its community of users? To what extent is collaboration space a function of the physical props provided, the energy levels of the crowd, and the flow of activities they are involved in? Perhaps we need some Relativity Theory of Community Space and Time? Any Einstein 2.0 out there? :-)

Open access: The grey zone

Open access publications are very important for promoting knowledge sharing, innovation, collaboration, and so on. Many research publications are still proprietary, however, and hidden behind high copyright walls. On the Community Informatics Researchers mailing list, an interesting discussion is being conducted about this topic, triggered by the invitation to one of its members to contribute a chapter to a research handbook to be published by a commercial publisher. Here's my response to the invited author who refuses to contribute as the handbook is not open access:

Michael,

In principle, I agree with your point. I think we should all strive for open-access publications wherever possible. However, I think there is a large grey zone in between which we cannot afford to ignore.

I have been co-editor myself of a research handbook in the same IGI series (the "Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems"). My mistake was that I didn't check beforehand what the pricing would be, which, frankly, is outrageous: US$ 495 for a two-volume handbook, all the hard work basically having been done by authors and editors! Afterwards, I solemnly pledged never to publish with them anymore unless they radically change their business model, as this model stifles, rather than promotes open research.

Now, where's the grey zone?

- First of all, there are many non/less-commercial, yet still non-open ways to publish, often provided by professional societies. Think the ACM Digital Library:

http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm

ACM is doing a lot of soul searching about whether to make this library freely available. They have a valid point, however, that the costs of maintaining a quality, indexed library need to be covered somehow. I think US$ 99 for a full year's access is reasonable. The costing model debate is not over yet, so I am sure that creative ways will be found for providing access to the many who also cannot afford this amount.

- Second, even with the very commercial publications, there are ways to work around their inaccessiblity. For instance, many commercial publishers, even IGI, allow an author to make a copy of a chapter available via his/her personal home page. In the case of our handbook, we made an index page to those chapters, so that many handbook chapters can now be easily accessed (unfortunately, not all authors took this effort, but that's beyond our control):

http://brianwhitworth.com/STS/

This triggers a concrete idea: perhaps we could turn a section of the CIRN Living Knowledge Base

http://cirn.wikispaces.com/

into a "CI Digital Library" that makes accessing this "grey zone" in our field easier? Any librarian (student) volunteers out there to think this through and set it up?

Aldo

Saving Web 2.0 from itself?

On September 18, Andrew Keen gave the Incubate Innovation Lecture. Incubate is an annual independent culture festival in Tilburg. Keen is a well-known web entrepreneur and web critic. In 1995 he founded Audiocafe.com and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. After a while, however, Keen realized the negative impact of the democratization of the Internet and the Web 2.0 hype. He is most (in)famous for his "Cult of the Amateur" book, in which he shows the downside of user generated content, peer production and other Web 2.0 related phenomena. These are often uncritically promoted as only having beneficial effects for society, if not being the cure for all its ills. Keen, however, builds an alternative case for why they, like any technology, can also be dangerous. Although at least partial counter-arguments to many of his claims can be made, he makes some very good points. Anybody interested in designing socio-technical systems and facilitating communities on the Internet, should at least seriously consider what he has to say. I took extensive notes of his talk and the ensuing discussion, and summarize the most salient points here, as food for critical thought.

Notes of the presentation by Andrew Keen

The hype

• There is a rebellion against the idea of authority.
• There is a shift from the organization to the individual: we're all increasingly working on our own.
• The old world of the creative artist was the organization, hierarchy. They needed, for instance, the studios for techology & distribution.
• The (Internet) technology that allows anybody to produce anything without large investment has upset this.
  
• "Technology has freed us, we are liberated". The (Web 2.0) idealists have sold us a dream, that we can all be creative, that we can all realize our potential.
  

There are several problems with this argument

The economic foundations of Web 2.0 don't work

• Copy-protection makes money. Almost nobody can make enough money out of free content. Advertising as an alternative source of income is not enough, it is very hard to sell advertising on the Internet.

Web 2.0 does away with the value of culture by abolishing the intermediary

• The Brave New World of the digital economy: "we are going to dis-intermediate". However, the middleman in culture is often the necessary one between the creative force and the audience. Yes, the old industrial economy in a sense is unfair, as it is dominated by gatekeepers able to say no. But so is talent, whereas the Internet is full of untalented people.
• There is a culture of self-expression, individual radical democratization of culture and identity. It may reflect the alienation of capitalism: as we get lonelier and more isolated, we feel the need to express ourselves in a narcissistic way. The Internet has become a "vast ocean of narcissism". We're not reading newspapers anymore. We don't want to know about the world out there anymore, but only what our social networks are doing.

Hope?

• In hindsight, Keen thinks things may not be as catastrophic as painted in his book. Still, there are serious problems that need to be addressed.
• It is clear we can't have an old style copy economy anymore. However, some things haven't changed. There are still talented people who can appropriate the new digital technologies to create worthwhile commentary on the world.
• However, if you do away with the intermediaries, there is a challenge for the creative people: how to earn a living? How to become a talent?
• The good news: it is still possible. The bad news: the supporting organizations are gone.
• The tools are there to promote oneself and show off ideas. However, there is a reshaping of the cultural landscape. Artists now have to be the self-promoters and do their marketing as well as be a creative genius.

Alternative ways of thinking

• Optimistic: Things are not so bad. Creative people have to reveal themselves. It is not enough to be a "silent genius". The Internet has a wonderful marketing potential for creative people.
• Pessimistic: The people who are awarded are the self-promoters. There is a danger of talent not being realized. You can't just be creative, you can't be shy! Hitchcock was shy, a backroom man. In the Web 2.0 world, he wouldn't have stood a chance.

Now what?

• Copy is dead. However, there is always value. Where's the new scarcity? It is the scarcity of (1) attention and (2) the physical. 
• People crave the physical. Record companies selling digital content are in freefall, yet live concerts are booming. The role of the Internet is becoming that of a promotion vehicle. Don't invest in digital initiatives, invest in theaters, home readings, live concerts, etc!
• The future is not as bleak as we may imagine, but it does trouble many people.
• We are changing our ideas of community and identity. The most troubling problem: we still don't know how to rebuild community. We fragmented the old industrial age, now we are suffering from fragmentation, isolation, atomization. Our separateness is the biggest problem.
• Our world is not a digital village, but a billion digital hamlets, in which it is only confirmed what we already think. The longer the tail in cultural terms, the weaker the community.
• We need to somehow rebuild a sense of authority. The authority of professionals has been undermined beyond the acceptable.
• There is a lot of potential in Web 2.0, but we need to loosen the ideological baggage: hardcore Internet libertarianism is dangerous for culture!

Notes of the panel discussion

After Andrew's presentation, there was a lively discussion with a panel and the audience. Members of the panel: Andrew Keen, Konrad Boehmer (Buma Stemra), Amelia Andersdotter (Pirate Party), Hans Abbing (artist/sociologist), James Kirby (musician). My notes here are not comprehensive, and focus on Keen's statements. For full videos of the keynote and the discussion see Bijgespijkerd.

Con: the more knowledge available, the better for creativity, so, Web 2.0 will generate more, not less talents

Keen:

• The cult of the amateur becomes dangerous when wrongly summarizing political information, for instance. Somehow, notions of authority will have to be introduced.
• Another problem is that of the pressure of "real-time". Artists not only have to be self-promoters, but also to be very fast. Web 2.0 has only a very short attention span. What happens to those processes that require longer spans, for instance good, in-depth writing?
• There is now less time for things to develop, this is bad for innovation. Every form of innovation needs a lot of time to develop. Technology speeds up anything, but the human system doesn't. We need the development of a slow communications culture.
• Filtering is key, this is where the money is going to be. 

Con: why/who is filtering? Industry, the political class with their vested interests?

Keen:

• We have to fight against that kind of filtering, not against filtering in general.
• For example, (mass media) reviewers act as filters, but also as "cultural repositories". This gatekeeping role is not ideal, but you learn their own taste.
• These reviewers are accountable, whereas so many Internet filters are corrupt.
• Google is problematic. It is just a machine, it is "disintermediating human beings".

Con: old media are also corrupt

Keen:

• You must never trust anybody, on the Internet or in the mass media. You need to be convinced by the intelligence of the argumentation. However, building good arguments costs time, thus money.
• There is, on the one hand, a "crisis of authority". Why is all authority so distrusted?
• There is, on the other hand, an obsession with friendship. We should seek opinions, not just "friends".
• "Digital feudalism" is on the move. Old media were relatively democratic. The new trust agents on the Internet are a tiny elite of A-list bloggers. This is a new cultural elite, but less accountable. There is also a huge problem with anonymity. 
• Media literacy is all-important. We need to learn for ourselves who to trust.
• If nobody's paying your check, you need to be Jesus Christ to survive. However, art and creativity are not religion!

My own perspective

Keen's polemic views have drawn a lot of flak, see, for example,  "A Bad Case of Nostalgia" for one of the more reasonable critical reviews. So, where do I stand? Web 2.0 is an essential technological infrastructure for enabling collaborative communities, which are my own professional focus. Of course, I wouldn't want to go back to the "old industrial" communications world in a million years. There is incredible potential in the new technologies, only a tiny fraction of which has actually been realized for empowering these and other communities. However, Keen may be forgiven for his, what some think, is a bad case of nostalgia, or worse, kind of style.

Keen is trying to make an important point. Web 2.0 is not a panacea. It's a very, very powerful technology. Still, like any technology, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. And even if the intentions are good, the implications may not be. Web 2.0 enables citizen journalism, but also indirectly leads to the loss of budgets for investigative journalism. The blogosphere has become a major force for the common good, allowing oppressed peoples to circumvene stifling government censorship. Still, it has also become a tool for the ultra-right(eous) to organize themselves.

I think many respond in such a visceral way to Keen because his arguments express something profound and deeply disturbing. It is my strong conviction that as the shapers of this new Web 2.0 world, we have to heed his call, and start thinking in a much more sophisticated, balanced way about not just the pros but also the cons, instead of being enamoured by the superficial glitz and feelings of false belonging engendered by many (but of course not all) of current Web 2.0 pseudo-communities. 

From my point of view, one concrete way to balance the pros and cons of Web 2.0 are socio-technical patterns. These patterns circumscribe describe the goals, roles, workflows, and communicative norms of (collaborative) communities. Through these patterns that communities define themselves, they can combine the energy and drive of Web 2.0 with their own, evolving "authority by merit" structures. Have a look at my "From Inspiration to Activation: Making Online Collaborative Communities Work" presentation if you want to know more.

Social capital/ism

Last Thursday, Noreena Hertz gave a talk at the "debate temple" LUX in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is one of the leading intellectual spokespersons of the alternative globalization movement, having gained prominence with her book "The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy" (2001). Thursday was an important moment for the new world order-inclined, as it was the day of the London G20 summit. Some of the rhetoric coming from the world leaders at the close of the summit even resembled demands coming from their fiercest critics. For example, the summit attendants declared an end to the "Washington consensus", meaning that unfettered globalisation and deregulation is now outmoded, and that a more balanced approach to regulating markets is called for rather than letting them run free. Of course, these are only lofty words and their translation into messy real world practice will turn out to be difficult as always. Still, one should not underestimate the import of having the world's most powerful jointly declaring a much needed change of paradigm.

Hertz saw in all this hopeful signs for a changing world order. She was cautiously optimistic that a new, more people-centered and more sustainable era of capitalism is on its way, after the harsh "there is no society" Reagan/Thatcher-inspired ideology of ultra-free markets which has been dominating the globalizing world in the past three decades. She saw five reasons for why things may now really change to a significant extent:

1. People are mad. People are really, really angry with the irresponsible ways of big business, its excessive bonuses, the ease with which it shifts capital and jobs for no other reason than increasing profits (and those bonuses), their failure to really address environmental and social issues at the levels and with the urgency needed (think global warming), and so on.
2. The end of the ultra-free market dogma. The general public no longer believes that the global free market will take care of all of society's ills just by itself  (meaning: by the excessive bonus recipients).  The majority of people are now in favor of curbing the excesses and (re)introducing real, rather than imaginary regulation.
3. Expectations of government are different. No longer the mantra "business is good, government is bad" prevails. Responsible business is a cornerstone of society, however, citizens expect their governments to intervene when corporate abuses occur.
4. Economics as a scientific discipline is bankrupt. Economics when reigned by the grand names like Smith, Keynes, and Schumpeter was a serious scientific discipline, that paid much-needed attention to history and context. In the past 30 years, economics has become dishonest and mainly produced neo-con ideologues, who wielded an excessive, unbalanced influence on societal decision making. However, the intellectual basis for "Gucci capitalism" is gone, economists are no longer calling the shots.
5. A more cooperative ethos is emerging. In the past decades, it was everybody for himself. However, perhaps most important for truly effecting change is that the age of super-individualism seems to be over. An era of communitarianism is dawning in which we are pulling together worldwide.

Hopeful Hertz may be, but not naive. There are many vested, and very powerful interests which will do their best to derail these processes of societal innovation. Also, we don't really know what are the limits of cooperation. There are many, very big issues like migration, climate change, poverty, and international security which will stress the willingness to work together, such as demonstrated by the increased levels of xenophobia displayed everywhere. An increased sense of community is not necessarily good. Our "belonging" is their "being outcasts".  It is clear that no rosy future awaits the world. Much, very hard work is needed, with many conflicts remaing to be resolved.

Communities are crucial to accomplish societal change, provided they are involved wisely. One issue that intrigues me is whether there is a direct link between the more humane, social capitalism that is being called for at the macro-level and the idea of social capital being one of the engines of dynamics in communities at the micro or meso-level. Social capital is a concept under construction, with many definitions. Robert Putnam, one of the leading scholars on social capital, considers it to refer to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1995). This, according to him, and many others is essential component to building and maintaining democracy, only to be strengthened by the many new forms of Internet-based social networking emerging these days (Shih, 2009).  Definitely a field worthy of study for economists looking to find a new focus for their research efforts... 

Postscriptum: The above argument is of course exaggerated in order to make a point. Globalization does have its positive sides, such as increased wealth for many and international collaboration, travel, and exchange of ideas. There are many serious and good-willing economists who have contributed to realizing the benefits of globalization and redressing some of its failures. However, Noreena's overall point is well taken: too many people still believe that if the free market is left to its own devices it will take care of itself. Any shortcomings, if perceived at all, are allegedly either caused by too little, rather than too much market or by not giving it enough time to produce its full, wholesome effects. This, I think, is of a dangerous naivety and lack of concern about those who suffer the full force of the downside of those effects.

References

- N. Hertz (2001). The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. The Free Press, Simon and Schuster, New York.
- R. Putnam (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy 6(1):65-78.
- C. Shih (2009). Social Capital from Networking Online, in The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff. Prentice Hall, New York.

Argumentation support: who cares?

Argumentation support tools aim to create structured maps of arguments that aid sensemaking in a particular problem domain. A wide range of argumentation support tools exists, some of the more well-known ones including CMaps, Compendium, COHERE, and DebateGraph. My own GRASS tool also classifies as being an early experiment in this realm.

Despite their great potential to help structure, visualize, and reason about arguments in all their manifestations (including debates, conceptual models, and knowledge maps) , the actual use of argumentation support tools in practice has turned out to be disappointing.

Three important reasons that the uptake of these tools is so low are:

• argument mapping in terms of defining appropriate concepts and relations is inherently difficult.
• maps quickly become too large for users to literally continue to see the bigger picture.
• the functionalities and interfaces are often way too complex for the average user.

One particular question that keeps popping up when analyzing this problematic is "who cares?" Why would somebody want to go through the considerable, and at least partially unavoidable, effort of creating knowledge maps? Who is going to use them? How are the creation and usage processes of knowledge maps related?

Thus, sensemaking on its own is not enough. It should be actionable sensemaking, sensemaking that suggests (1) relevant stakeholders and (2) appropriate actions required to address the creation and usage issues identified. In other words, key aspects to address are:

• How to put the maps to good use?
• How to model the alliances of stakeholders, organizations, and policy-makers that would have an interest in contributing to/making use of the maps?
• What goal-oriented argumentation needs do these actors have?
• How can we satisfy those needs in such a way that the actor networks of creators and users of the maps become self-sustaining?

An interesting project in which at least some beginnings of answers to these questions may be found, is the ESSENCE project (E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change). ESSENCE goes beyond the focus on the functionalities of individual argument mapping tools. Instead, it aims to learn about why their usage fails in practice and to improve the usability, usefulness, and interoperability of argumentation support tools by comparing their application in a realistic and very important context of use: climate change. Key here, as in satisfying the argumentation requirements of many other wicked problems, is for these tools to support dialogue that builds common ground, resolves conflict, and re-establishes trust.

In the ESSENCE community, there is a strong interest and commitment by the participants to explore the pragmatics of these argumentation tools: what exact role do they play in the purposeful context of their communities of use? This issue, which is also one of the leading questions of the Pragmatic Web community, is still very much unexplored territory and deserves much more attention of the argumentation tool building crowd.

Visualizing workflows and business processes

SIKS is the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.  As an alumnus, I attended the annual "SIKS Day" in Utrecht on October 2. It's always a nice event to reconnect with my scientific peers and to keep in tune with state of the art research in my domain through the presentations given by SIKS members.

One presentation of particular interest to me was the one given by Wil van der Aalst on "Creating Better Information Systems with Process Mining". Process mining allows one to analyze business processes using event logs. What really struck a chord were Wil's ideas on visualizing workflow processes as a means for better understanding them.  Most workflow modeling notations are abstract, based on standard control flow nodes and edges. In such "sterile" notations, all activities are modeled the same way.

 

However, for human beings to better understand often very complex realistic workflow logs or models and the business processes of which they are a part, additional cues are necessary. Geographical maps are a category of visualizations from which much could be learned about visualizing such processes. Such maps aggregate, leave out irrelevant details, and stress relevant aspects. How such geographical map properties could or should be transferred to the workflow domain is still an open question.

I am really intrigued by this idea, as I see many applications in my own field of communicative workflow modeling, such as studied in the Language/Action Perspective and Pragmatic Web research communities.  Especially in collaborative communities, in which coordinated communication processes are key and ever changing, proper visualizations could be essential in better facilitating their evolution. Such "rich visualizations" should therefore become an essential element of effective methodologies for community communication systems development.  

Moving community informatics research forward

From Oct 27-30, 2008, the 5th Community Informatics & Development Informatics conference was held in Prato, Italy.  As always, the conference was a great meeting of minds of researchers and practitioners from all over the world, and from many different backgrounds, ranging from cultural anthropologists and process facilitators to hardcore computer scientists.

At the end of the conference, I was asked to give my impression of the direction the overall field is heading in, based on the presentations and discussions conducted. It was very hard for me to summarize the widely varying ideas and projects presented, an overview of which is given here. Instead, my aim was to identify some underlying methodological strands that, when woven together, could help to strengthen the fields of community and development informatics in terms of coherence, generalizability and reusability of research ideas and the practical impact of their implementation.This text builds on that presentation.

Framing community informatics research

Communities and technologies are key to community informatics. These technologies cover a wide range, with sophisticated computer and networking technologies only being one end of the spectrum. Face-to-face and other non-computerized technologies can be just as important, if often not more so.  ICTs should therefore always be read as covering this whole spectrum.

Communities and technologies co-evolve in that technologies both afford and constrain behavior of their communities of use, and, in turn, these communities shape the technologies as they are being applied in practice.

Community informatics research and practice cannot be seen separately. Without practice, no research can be tested and validated. On the other hand, no practical project can be done without an in-depth analysis, i.e. research, of many aspects. The term "community informatics research" should therefore always be read as implying both research and practice.

The difference between community informatics and development informatics in this respect is only one of degree. Whereas development informatics in general could be said to be dealing more with the practicalities of technology implementation and adoption, community informatics seems to focus more on the social interaction aspects of the technologies-in-use. Still, as with any of these complex but related socio-technical fields, it seems not very fruitful to overly demarcate their boundaries.  

Aspects of community informatics

When researching the interplay of communities and their technologies, at least four aspects are particularly of interest:

1. Context/values. Community informatics research, unlike more traditional branches of informatics, is very strong in analyzing the context of use of ICTs, including the stakeholders involved, their interests and goals, and many essential cultural determinants. In particular, much attention is paid to assessing the community values driving the development and uptake of these technologies. Such values include soft but key notions like passions, energy, empowerment, legitimacy, and social inclusion. Information systems developers not taking into account these context factors and values do this at their, and especially their communities of users', peril.
2. Cases. Community informatics research is very much case-driven. This results in rich, "lived" stories about authentic information and communication requirements, rather than the more abstract "user" requirements often elicited in classical IS development projects.
3. Process/methodology. This is both a strength and a weakness of current community informatics research. On the one hand, it has identified a large palette of situated communication, collaboration, development, evaluation and other community processes and methodologies. Furthermore, it generally displays a great sensitivity towards tailoring these processes to the authentic needs of the communities in which they are applied. On the other hand, perhaps because these processes are so often case-based and situated, the lessons learnt are hard to generalize and reuse across cases, making it difficult to go beyond "situated methodologies". This is unfortunate, as many community informatics wheels are continuously being reinvented, and the exchange with related fields, such as mainstream IS development, is minimal.
4. Systems. Another community informatics research strength/weakness. Much traditional ICT R&D focuses on devoping and evaluating individual technologies, such as office applications, e-mail, blogs etc. However, realistic use cases ever more involve "tool systems" of multiple technologies in concert, and in a specific social context of use, such as a particular community. Community informatics research in general is strong in taking such a comprehensive socio-technical systems view. However, as with its processes and methodology, this systems view is often not framed in more general terms, making it hard to disseminate findings more widely. The paradox is that, in contrast with general IS development approaches, community informatics research seems to have much more of a systems way of thinking in practice, while being weaker in the more theoretical, systematic approach to systems analysis, design, implementation and evaluation. Both community informatics and IS research in general should therefore continue to learn more from and influence one another.

Moving community informatics research forward

Community informatics is a "meta-field", building bridges between existing social and technical paradigms (in both theory and practice). This makes it so hard to frame what is the "right" way to move its research forward, as some of us are leaning more towards the social, others towards the informatics side. Still, how then to  address at least some of the process/methodological/systems weaknesses? Some practical steps forward could be:

1. Definitions, definitions, more definitions. Some of us seem to be afraid of giving definitions, as they would not capture every possible meaning and would overly constrain discourse. True, definitions, almost by definition, constrain. However, they also afford. They point out new directions and open up unexpected viewpoints. Furthermore, one should be clear about the exact role definitions should play. They are only hypotheses, forcing authors and readers alike to focus, explain, and align their ideas, not to force one particular point of view to be the one and only truth. Providing clear definitions is all the more essential when one reaches beyond the confines of one's own paradigm. Definitions should always be tentative, and multiple definitions should be allowed or even welcomed, as long as they help us become more explicit about stating and comparing our assumptions.
2. Identify lessons learnt/best practices. Another step to take would be to more systematically identify and compare lessons learnt and perhaps even come up with some best practices or at least criteria for assessing them. Granted, best practices are in the eye of the beholder and given the situatedness of much community informatics work may be hard to define. Still, as with the definitions, the contexts in which they are to apply should be described as carefully as possible, and their validity in any particular case always critically questioned. In that way, lessons learnt and best practices can help crystallize and convey the added value of our research to ourselves and the outside world. 
3. Testbeds/collaboratories. In IS research in particular and science in general, much work is currently being conducted on the development of testbed and collaboratory methodologies for large scale, realistic development of technologies in complex, evolving contexts of use. Case in point is the adoption of the Living Labs methodology, already used in some development informatics projects in South Africa, as presented at the conference. More strongly connecting community informatics research to these systematic approaches to socio-technical systems development and adoption could be very beneficial to both fields. Along the same lines, simulation approaches such as system dynamics, could be used to more efficiently come up with realistic testing scenarios in a CI context.  

Birth of a portal

On September 30, the Tilburg University student portal was launched. The portal seems to have been enthusiastically received by both the students (the end users) and the information suppliers (such as faculties, service departments, and student associations) who own the portlets that make up the portal. To get an idea of what it is, look here for a brief overview.

Developing the portal has been a very complex project, with respect to both the technology (trying to develop secure and scalable portlets and integrating the portal with a live digital learning environment in Blackboard) and the organizational back-end of requirements analysis, definition of procedures, and communication. Nevertheless, the many people and organizational units involved together have been able to produce something the university can be proud of. The project will continue until the end of December, to finetune the embedding of the portal in the university organization, but my role as project leader has now officially finished.

Some key development goals of the portal were that it had to be Single Sign On (one login for most applications), comprehensible (in terms of having a clear overview of underlying information resources) and userfriendly and customisable. One of the most important features of the portal to me is, however, that it is owned by the community and will be further developed in a continuous process. It is a good sign that during the demos of the portal just before the launch, many ideas have already come up for new portlets, which will be worked out in future rounds of portal development.

The portal is of, for, and by the students. It should be their view on the complex and fragmented information system reality of the university. As end users they have been closely consulted in the development of the current version. Furthermore, the students also play an active role as information supplier, for example through the news and activity agenda "community portlets" owned by the student associations.

To ensure ownership by the students, interactive, two-way communication with the students has been a priority in the project. Some communication channels were:

• Consultation with formal student representatives, such as with the Library and IT Services Student Advisory Board, as well as informal talks with individual students.
• A suggestion form which allows students to provide ideas for improvements and new features. An overview of these suggestions is publicly accessible.
• An extensive student survey resulted in over 900 completely filled out surveys. These results were the basis of many design decisions for the final version of the portal.
• A weblog was set up to inform the students and other stakeholders about developments and considerations during the development process.

The portal should have great value for the organization. Students have more efficient and customised access to that information that is most relevant to them. Still, the portal is much more than that. Creating a useful "cockpit for student applications", requires an extensive consultation and alignment between needs and interests of students, information suppliers and technology providers. In this process, bridges are being built between people and organizational units and much synergy and energy can be released in the university organization. As such, the portal acts as a "university wide web" in which users and suppliers of information and ICT meet each other in a continuous process of idea generation and collaboration, resulting in the development and integration of essential work support systems and processes.

I am moving on now with CommunitySense, but am very happy that I have been able to put some community theory into good practice...