Produsage Communities

(Crossposted from Produsage.org.)

As I've said before, I'm no fan of Facebook - in fact, I think that ultimately, it is no more than a poor caricature of what social networking can be and do. Clearly, that's not stopped the site's rapid growth, but as Facebook users themselves have had more time to come to terms with the environment they're now operating in, I think it's in good part responsible for the fact that in some key territories, Facebook usage numbers have now plateaued and even declined.

The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook handles what should be its central asset - the social networks that its users belong to. Social networks are defined in the first place by the term 'friend', but being friends with someone on the site is no more than a binary decision: you either are, or you're not. There's no opportunity to do what we do in our lives outside of Facebook every day - to distinguish between different types and levels of friendship: work colleagues, old school friends, family members, neighbours, ex-lovers, casual acquaintances must all be classified simply as either 'friend' or 'non-friend'. What's the use of that?

So, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is over. I really enjoyed the discussion over the past week, and I've just posted some final thoughts for what it's worth.

Our discussion of democracy and social dynamics reminds me of the work of French author Pierre Lévy. In his book Collective Intelligence, he suggests that

We're now in the second of today's presentations by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, hosted by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (they're certainly getting their money's worth!). This one shifts our focus considerably, to virtual environments.

Perhaps the obvious question here is how people interact in such environments. Ralph suggests that from current environments, it's already possible to forecast what shape future environments will take; he has created a model called the Connected Presence Cube to describe such environments.

I'm very pleased to see that a new article of mine has just been published in the energetic Greek online journal Re-Public. Editor Pavlos Hatzopoulos invited me a little while ago to respond to a first wave of articles discussing and critiquing the emergent phenomena of the social Web, and the contributor list already includes a number key thinkers in the field, from Michel Bauwens to Trebor Scholz. In fact, I responded specifically to the opening discussion between Trebor and Paul Hartzog, which revisits the industrial-age question of "Who owns the means of production?" for the new, information-age context.

What was missing from this, from my point of view, was a concern not so much with the means of production, but with the next step in the chain - with the means that connect producers and users, the means that facilitate the interaction, collaboration, and ultimately the produsage that takes place when the producer/consumer dichotomy diminishes. This, I feel, should be the main starting-point for critique now - the question should be "Who controls the means of produsage?" In fact, its claim to exclusive ownership and control of the means of produsage within its gated community is one of the reasons why I am so concerned about the rise of Facebook, as I've noted previously.

Anyway - the article is now available on Re-Public, and reprinted below. A special thrill for me (having studied ancient Greek at school) is that Re-Public also published a (modern) Greek translation of the piece: Ποιος ελέγχει τα μέσα παραγωγής/κατανάλωσης; Cool...

Montréal.
There are about eight powerpoints in this auditorium, and this time I've come in early enough to plug into one - towards the end of the previous keynote here at OOPSLA I had to switch to taking notes on my PDA as my laptop ran out of steam. The second shared keynote between OOPSLA and WikiSym 2007 today is by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner (or, Babbage Linden and Zero Linden), and we're going to hear about Second Life as a programming environment. Of course we also heard a lot about Second Life at AoIR last week, and I'm quite enjoying these presentations - if nothing else, they certainly have great visuals.

Montréal.
The next session this second day of WikiSym 2007 is on political wikis, but opens with a paper by Renée-Marie Fountain on co-constructed development via communal constructivism in an educational environment. She begins with a nod towards the idea of the wisdom of the crowds, and especially perhaps of student crowds which we touched upon yesterday, and notes that in constructivist approaches students are invited to construct learning for as well as with others. This pursues what can be described as 'impossible public goods'.

Montréal.
The final session at WikiSym 2007 today is on wiki communities, and starts with a paper by Joseph Reagle, whose research focusses on open content communities in general (probably close to what I would describe as the communities of produsage), and is interested in particular at the role of leaders in such communities. He notes seven features of what he calls authorial leadership: leadership is emergent, and is conferred based on merit and exercised through 'speaking softly'; there is mixed governance, combining meritocracy, autocracy, anarchy, and democracy at various times; leadership is an informal status, and a role as 'benevolent dictator' remains limited and temporary; leaders' key role is to channel momentum towards the development of a community culture; leadership operates through persuasion, arbitration, and defence against disruption, and accrues 'idiosyncrasy credits' (the more respected a leader, the more are they able to act idiosyncratically, autocratically, dictatorially, in the interests of the community as a last resort); there is a danger of overreaching if leaders exercise their power too enthusiastically or are positioned as uncontradictable authorities; but there is also a humour and good faith culture which militates against a glorification of the benevolent dictator. Ultimately, then, the title of benevolent dictator is a kind of tin crown, Joseph suggests; such leaders still need to tread very carefully and need to participate constructively in the community, and they cannot rest on their laurels.

Montréal.
The next session here at WikiSym 2007 begins with a short paper by Sarah Guth from the University of Padua, on wikis in education. She's done some work using social software in teaching environments, and discusses the question of whether such teaching should take place in public or non-public social software environments. Using (public) wikis enables collective authoring (which enables critical reading and responsible writing); raises issues of individual and collective ownership (challenging conventional Western epistemologies of individual intellectual property); and highlights content as ego-less, time-less, and never finished while enabling continuous development. Publishing online also empowers students, and history and discussion functions focus on writing as process, not product.

Montréal.
After the fun and excitement of AoIR 2007, I've made the quick but painful overnight trip to Montréal for the two-day International Symposium on Wikis, which takes part here in association with the much larger OOPSLA conference (in case you're wondering as I was: apparently this stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications). Happily, Montréal is enjoying a very pleasant Indian summer which is a welcome break from Vancouver's incessant drizzle... Naturally, the WikiSym conference also has its own wiki, which should be worth checking for comments on the presentations over the next few days.

Vancouver.
Wow, time has passed quickly (and very enjoyably). We're in the final session of AoIR 2007 here in Vancouver, and Chris Wells and Justin Reedy are the first speakers; their interest is in the use of Internet in direct democracy. Direct democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere is increasingly common, increasingly important, and different from conventional democratic forms in important ways (the European constitutional referenda in a number of countries are one key example here, while in a number of U.S. states there have been referenda on limiting property tax rates).