2003-04-25 What Groups Will Be David Weinberger http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e_sess/3545 Simple definitions: . "group": a set of people who know one another, and know they're in a group . this is as distinguished from "groupings", who don't know they're in a group . "community" is a "group" where people care about each other more than they have to. He doesn't like seeing this word debased so he's not going to use it The net is bad at groups. The groups are independent, you can't manage your participation, can't see what group's you're in. It's good at letting you form groups, but bad at handling them. No first-class was of groups. This is good! end-to-end principle: this kind of stuff shouldn't be built into the internet. Original end-to-end article, 1983: David P Reed, this is the early principle paper. Should read it. So there's lots of room for innovation around. Standard complaints about Friendster: - what are you interested in? what are your favourite books? You don't know what you're interested in! It takes you by surprise every day! That's why you read the newspaper. What's more, filling this in is a creative enterprise. It takes effort. One of the problems with this: there shouldn't just be one profile page. There are multiple me's! Plus, there's nothing there that's implicit. You're having to fill in a bunch of stuff which is usually left unsaid. Making explicit in social situations is almost always an act of violence to the things we're making explicit. We'll pulling something that is fundamentally contextual - they're relationships - and taking out the context. Losing the ambiguity you're losing some of the richness, especially because of the social aspect. We avoid this violence as a group. But you have to do this for the constitutional process. So the group has to be well-formed and strong enough to even get through this process. Weinberger thinks that "explicitness" is a theme that has continually returned at this conference: aboutness is hugely contextual. So ENT/ThreadsML -- all this topic stuff. You're organising things that want to be messy and confused. The topic of a thing depends on who is looking at it. You pull out different bits. Subject change! Knowledge Management is the largest failed social software so far. Two things . organising knowledge because there's too much . getting it out of people's heads incase they leave First. People try and filter information trying to find knowledge. But it's not like a diamond like that, you can't test it ahead of time, it's contextual. Second. Getting knowledge out of people's heads is impossible. It's not *contained*. You're asking the person to be creative, to make a knowledge educational thing. These people are teachers, it's not a skill everyone have. So that's difficult. Social software is emergent in two ways: . It allows the social network to emerge Social networks aren't real. Everything beyond 1 degree isn't real, because you haven't been introduced yet! But social software allows that virtual social software to actually appear. . It allows structures of the group also to emerge Mentioning the social software BOF, which was a mess, and everyone's scared to impose structure because that's a kind of violence. But the software should allow this software to emerge easier. conversation with lint scientists, "this is how we get actually embedded information". "embedded in the real world, in a real society, what to do for washing and drying!" "that's us!" we're the embedded ones, embedded in society. and this is emerging not because some marketing group said it was explicit, said it had to be done like this, but because that's social. weinberger hates digital id. it makes him nervous. we'll start managing our various selves, thinking about self on the web. hopeful finishing point: MAYBE the reason we are now willing to hear about social software and be exciting about it, in the broader community, maybe it's because we're coming out of our infatuation with bits, with clarity, with accuracy in an end in itself. maybe it's an end to binary thinking. [embedded metrics converted to normal senses are a way of seeing further in the murky proto ocean that is society. <-- this is everything we've been talking about for the last few days. here we are, seeing the social ocean, how do we see further? well, this is how we work, and this is the information we need: the features we need to identify. this is how to do it.] [and this is my realisation of the two themes of this conference, taking features from the online world and applying them to the virtual world, and vice versa. this first is *embededness*. the reintroduction of distance into the online world, and this is a consequence of this world growing bigger. so we need to find ways to *see* in this world, and that's all about understanding on the one end social metrics, and on the other end how individuals feel, sense and understand. the second is *semiotcracy*. the understanding that labels everywhere has helped us enormously online, and so the real world should be like that. electronic freedom, tagging real objects etc, the obligation to give things *handles*, even nanotech ties into this: the description/handle must achieve primacy, and this change of mindset allows us to achieve the nonrivalous society -- which is actually a bit wrong, because it's like queue theory and we just hit the next bottleneck/hierarchy/rival_good which is expertise or information. the ambiguity which is stuck in our heads. and weinberger is seeing this and saying it's great because in this new world the very ambiguity is key to the knowledge, and it's valuable to preserve it in a way we didn't need to before (value means we can't afford to throw things away)]