Friday Apr 04, 2008
...doesn’t mean it’s a new idea.
This is the first lesson I learned from our annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference (a.k.a. the WWERC) in February. We picked the theme “The Power of Communities” for the conference because open source and the communities that support it are a key part of Sun’s strategy. I believe that communities are also critical to the success of academic, administrative and research computing.
For each of these segments, there are community development projects at various stages of maturity. In the academic computing arena, Sakai, a free, community source collaboration and learning environment, is already fairly well established. It's in production at over 150 institutions and being piloted by over 100 more. Kuali , a suite of open source software for administrative computing, is a more recent effort. In the research community, sharing open source code has been a key part of doing research for years, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
So given that there are all these academic communities, and given that we were just about to hold an education focused on the power of communities, I thought we should eat our own dog food and actually launch an online community of our own. So we created one on Ning.com, and invited all of the confirmed WWERC attendees to join.
Of that original list of about 500 people, 180 have joined. Of those, a small number connected online before the conference. Since the conference, however, activity in the community has dwindled. Maybe it will pick up again before the 2009 WWERC. I don't know. But we're looking into ways to re-energize it.
What I’m learning is that communities—be they in the physical or virtual worlds—don't just happen overnight. It takes work to be successful. It requires a commitment of time and money and an offer of value to (and from) the community members themselves. The difference, of course, between physical and virtual communities is that in the latter, it's easier to significantly increase the number of people in a community as well as geographic scope (among the digital “haves” of the world, at lest). But as I wrote in a previous blog posting, just having a bunch of people in a community isn’t useful by itself. It can simply result in a modern-day Tower of Babel.
So I’m going to document, right here in my blog, our journey of creating a purposeful online community. Now that the original catalyst for creating our online community (i.e., the WWERC) is over, the first step is to define what this community is for, in the long term. Is it a place for us to distribute information about Sun in education? Listen to our customers? Get them excited about Sun, our products and technologies? Give them a place to ask their colleagues questions? Let them give us suggestions for better products? Or all of the above?
First, I’ve got a bunch of questions for you all out there:
What's the most effective way to tap into the collective wisdom of the community? Such tools as social bookmarking like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon are interesting, but I don’t want to know what the whole world is bookmarking, I want to know what members of my ERC community are bookmarking. I want to know what books and articles they're reading, as well.
How can we get members of the community to contribute time and insights to Sun as well as to each other? What is reasonable given our target demographic? (I’ll write a future blog about what I’m learning about this from a blog-soon-to-be-book called Groundswell from a couple of Forrester analysts, Charline Li and Josh Bernoff.)
What technologies or platforms should we embrace? For example, we chose Ning to host our first generation of the ERC community. We needed something that was fast to launch and global in reach. Facebook is primarily focused on the US, and doesn’t necessarily have a good reputation among our target audience. Still, it has a huge membership. So should we sit on top of Facebook or be standalone? Should we link to Facebook or other communities, and if so, how?
If anyone has insights into these questions I’d love to hear from you. After all, just because these are new thoughts or questions to me, it doesn’t mean the community hasn’t already come up with the answers. That really is the power of community.
Thursday Mar 13, 2008
As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation
at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and
Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient
as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how
open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks
me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)
Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about
education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:
"Mass
education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither
the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural
education—indeed , all education—has to be totally
reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for
customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups
and even individuals."
We are approaching a time when we will be
able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer
connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given
the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the
Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning
through distant online mentors.
This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.
The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.
Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year
collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds
Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work,
and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range
of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content,
and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.
Monday Feb 25, 2008
In
the original Tower
of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language
and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that
would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as
powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude
of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of
Babel project was abandoned.
In the 21st century remake of
this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites.
Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the
communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to
build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to
interact with millions of people, so members create groups within
these larger communities. (Facebook
now hosts thousands of groups
appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos
in Oxford to Friends
of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create
separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn
(for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence
in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only
to discover that leaving
isn't as easy as joining.
Yet social networking as a
technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human
strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the
cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more
powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or
academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their
members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon
which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that
our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be
exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone
technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?
Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our
annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San
Francisco . We've got an incredible array
of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're
streaming the main
presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the
link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available
asynchronously for later playback as well.
The first Tower of
Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps
these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive
use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists
between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world,
it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to
crumble.
By the way, here's the original story from the Book
of Genesis:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of
one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,
that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them
thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we
be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord
came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded.
And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language
they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be
impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound
their language, that they may not understand one another's
speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face
of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is
the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord
scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)
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