Stephen Downes on Community

I've seen Stephen slag us on his blog with no sort of accuracy in his claim that we aren't somehow "real". I'm not sure what his beef is, but it is somewhat amusing in that 43 things meets all his acadmic definitions - and is the outgrowth of thinking about what doesn't work in online learning tools. Apparently he even had us in his slides, but decided to slander rather than fact check. I have faith that the blogosphere will set this right.

I'm a political theorist by academic training and have spent lots of time thinking and teaching about ideas as to how communitites are constituted, constructed, and governed - and I've worked on online community related systems since 1996. So I'm sympathetic to Mr. Downes line of thought, if not his pronouncements about 43 things. But, whatever, if Flickr isn't one either, than I don't want to be either.

Of the 8300 or so posts I have written over the years, I have addressed one to 43 Things. Here it is; the reader can decide whether I have been slagging or slandering 43 Things:

"43 Things Amazon Conspiracy
There was a social networking meme that went around a few weeks ago called '43 Things' - the idea is that you would form online groups dedicated to doing one of the 43 things would would like to do. I thought it was interesting but not really applicable to online learning, so I didn't cover it here. Now I sort of wish I did, but am glad I didn't, because it turns out that the whole thing was a front for Amazon.com. Well. I don't know what to think, except to observe that companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their online efforts. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between a genuine grassroots movement and a marketing campaign. Meanwhile, I'll classify this story about 43 Things under the heading: funny. By Jason Kottke, Kottke.org, February 10, 2005."

The title is Kottke's, and I link to his article, which in turn links to the Salon article where the story broke. Link

I also mentioned 43 Things in my talk. Here is what the slide said (the slides are available here)

"Educational ‘Communities’
This is ‘community’ as defined in the educational works:
Subjects defined as nice neat trees of topics
People organized into schools, classes
The presentation of meaning ‘top down’; community defined by conformance
Ripe for abuse – propaganda, marketing – astroturf, 43 things, Raging Cow, the Lincoln Fry, WSJ Opinion"

And three links, to Dan Gillmor, one of my own articles and J.D. Lasica.

Here is what I said as I presented this slide (at 30:11 in my talk - the MP3 is available here ): "Educational communities the old way - nice neat topics, classes and so on - but this kind of structure both in schools and in the blogosphere where you have the flow coming from the top is ripe for abuse. And there's another one from J.D. Lasica just came out today, "Influence Peddling in the Blogosphere." And of course we heard mention earlier of Raging Cow and the Lincoln Fries. Eventually these companies are going to get good at this. Right now they're screamingly bad. But they are eventually going to bcome good. 43 Things had the entire blogosphere fooled for a couple of weeks. And... and it sort of fell apart. Eventually there will be things that don't fall apart. I look at the Wall Street Journal opinion columns and they are defining from the top down. There's a whole bunch of people out there who echo the words that they see in these opinion columns. They don't know what they mean because there is no context. They're just echoing the words. It just becomes a way for the Wall Street Journal to broadcast."

So did 43 Things do what I said? Well, let's look. According to the 43 Things site (dated February 8, 2005): "As we congealed around what we were building and how it might come together, I started conversations with various people in a position to help. I spoke with folks at Amazon (I worked there from 1996-2001, and Microsoft from 2002-2004) as well as several other angel investors and VC firms. We decided to self fund until we worked out a deal with Amazon.com. That came together in the Fall of 2004." Link

OK, then, so when did the rest of the world get to know about this? The Robot Coop blog makes the announcement February 7: "Amazon.com has invested in The Robot Co-op. We think it will get easier to meet our goal to Start a company that survives longer than 2 years though we still have lots of work to do." Sounds like it just happened, doesn't it? Link

So what prompted this flurry of disclosure February 7-8? Probably this: "When Salon asked Erik Benson, the 'chief janitorial officer' of the Robot Co-op, if his company is a subsidiary of Amazon, he said: 'Can I get back to you on that?' When pressed, he said the company is going to announce an investment from Amazon next month. But he wouldn't say if his company would be wholly owned by Amazon, or if the shopping site would just be one of several investors. 'Nobody's supposed to know that,' he said." Salon, February 8, 2005. Link

Now I had encountered 43 Things a couple of weeks before. I created my account on the site. Link And I joined a couple of Things'. Link
So I had had a good look at the site.

Then, as now, there is utterly no mention of Amazon.com on the 43 Things site. Check for yourself. Link

Same with the Robot Coop site. No mention of Amazon anywhere on the page design, no mention of the Amazon funding until February 7, 2005 - well after the fall of 2004.

So 43 Things was funded by Amazon for months before it was announced. And there was no way for the 10,000 users (as of February 5) to have known.

Was this a deliberate policy? Judge for yourself. Link

"I’m dumb but I did not understand: how happened that dave gave this talk?
Did he call up amazon saying “guys I’ve got thus funny thing I have to show you!” ?
— gabriele renzi Oct 10, 6:16am #"

"Amazon regularly has people come by and give talks. I think Dave was going around doing a bunch of talks about Ruby, and Amazon sort of fit into his schedule. That’s my guess at least.
— Erik Benson Oct 12, 4:39pm #"

I stand by what I said.

So putting aside your hard-on over 43 Things (not a fight I'm interested in), how do you propose to revoke the laws of mathematics & do away with the Long Tail of scale-free networks?

Tim

Several metaphors jump to my mind.

First, you're setting up a strawman when you talk about avoiding random connections, which I don't think anybody's in favor of. Nobody I know throws a die to decide which link to follow or which new blog to read. Fitness (salience) is always a consideration, although there may be limited ability to meaningfully differentiate. The point is that structure develops even if you do choose randomly (which nobody in the real world does).

Second, I think you're either tilting at a windmill, plugging your finger in the dike or pushing back the tide (take your pick!) in trying to stomp out or reshape power-law curves. Of course there are other topologies than scale-free (random, log-normal, small-world), but trying to shoehorn what naturally develops one way into an artificial topology is bound to be energy-intensive & ultimately likely futile.

Third, I've run out of metaphors but it looks to me like you're completely ignoring the proven value of long-range links to the health, stability & innovative power of a network. It's these connections that bring a fresh perspective into situations that've become stale or deadlocked. Ah, there's more metaphors after all - you're either missing the boat, missing the forest for the trees or cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Tim

Regarding the first two points: "Fitness (salience) is always a consideration..." , and "trying to shoehorn what naturally develops one way into an artificial topology is bound to be energy-intensive & ultimately likely futile."

It seems to me you can't have both points. It sounds like you're saying that people do take salience into consideration, but that I shouldn't because it's pointless.

The heart of the question is, of course, is whether (a) the current distribution is more natural than what I propose, and (b) whether being more natural is inherently better.

I respond in the negative on both points. The current order is an artifact of an artificial construction, the structure of content syndication networks as they were originally conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape and Dave Winer. It is no more or less natural than a network that could have been constructed slightly differently, say, by including 'DC:creator' tags in RSS files.

Even if it were more natural, it doesn't follow that it is better. Most human activity falls into the realm of the non-natural, including flight, artificial sweetener, categorization and atonal music. What humans do, uniquely, that is non-natural is add meaning to otherwise meaningless phenomena. That's how a piece of paper in your wallet can be translated into a burger.

Now for the third point. You write, "it looks to me like you're completely ignoring the proven value of long-range links..."

I disagree. Nothing I have written speaks against long-range links. It speaks only against the concentration of such links into hubs.

Finally, as to the fourth point: "Here's three examples of social networks that've become pathological due to their emphasis on salience..."

While I agree with your assessment of these sites, I would point out that they are not networks as I am proposing, and that indeed each is an instance of the centralized site-based network that I argued against, and that when I said that abuse was possible and likely possible in centralized networks, these would be three very good examples of what I meant.

Just curious, is it -all- scale-free social networks you're against, or only -some- of them? If it's all of them, how do you propose we deal with the scale-free networks that appear in (for instance) mailing lists, instant messages, wikis & the open source software developer network? If it's only some of them, what's your differentiation criteria between a good scale-free social network & a bad one? I'm trying to get a handle on how radical & far-reaching your plans are.

Tim