(2003-07-06) Shirky Group Worst Enemy

Edited version of Clay Shirky's E T Con talk from April. Human/group psychology and its implications for the design of Social Software (particularly the Virtual Community kind, which he says needs explicit Governance). We had every bit of technology we needed to do WebLog-s the day NCSA Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got GeoCities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

We're having a Social Software revolution now because:

• just because - Critical Mass of people who've internalized the ideas

• people aiming for native WebApp development instead of mimicking Client Server apps like Lotus Notes - little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue

• ubiquity: But something different is happening now. In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted... There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to WiFi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a Wiki up and running. (I think Live Chat makes sense for a meeting Back Channel only if there are too many people in the meeting, or it's poorly focused - so a significant number of people don't have to be fully engaged in the "main" discussion at any point in time.)

Notes "3 things you have to accept" and "4 things to design for".