Another Community Cycle and What's Different (and the same) This Time
What is different about this community cycle, and what can we learn (or remember) from the previous cycles?
This week Lauren and I take a side trip from our Season 3 theme of Metaverse to talk about the cyclical (at least to date) nature of online community investment.
Plagued by disinformation, bad behavior and poor moderation, 2019-21 saw a shift from the primacy of social platforms to the use of (relatively) smaller and more intimate community-based experiences.
The rise of interest, investment and participation in communities is extraordinary... and it has happened before.
In this episode, Lauren and I explore the current phase we are in, the incredibly weird and wonderful things that happened during the last cycle (which was the social media dominance cycle) and explore the mystery of why every community cycle seems to start with a great re-inventing and re-discovery of knowledge and practice.
In this episode, we discuss discuss a range of questions related to DAOs, including:
With each subsequent era, why do we have to relearn and re-invent basics?
Why do most organizations still struggle with community?
Why haven’t standards emerged?
Why is the enterprise community platform space so static?
Why do personalities and institutions almost immediately emerge during an upcycle that want to dominate vs develop
Key Quotes:
“Community for so many reasons tends to be apart from instead of a part of. That leads to all kinds of really negative outcomes. My assertion is community should be a part of any customer or partner facing function.”
“Community has been really framed as a function. So it's made, it's been made separate from, and not integrated as part of a chain of experiences or that connective tissue in the chain of experiences or overarching life cycle of that particular community member or customer, we continue to put community in a separate bucket.” - Lauren
“There is something that just strikes me as odd when one person tries to be the center of attention and leadership and focus for a community.” - Bill
”It's part of human development and curiosity to relearn and reinvent, but not from scratch. If we were truly curious, we would be practicing some critical thinking and we would openly transparently, privately, be asking questions like: what do I currently know or think, why do I think this and how else could I look at this? Before I do any type of research, the first thing that you have to do is a literature review, what exists, right? Because your big idea, or your research question, or even, you thought you had like an idea or a hypothesis of how that research question might be solved or interpreted and you find out - whoa, wait a second - somebody else had this idea, adjacent to the profession or the industry. And we've got to get better at connect.” - Lauren
“[One big problem is] established platforms that may not be aging well and shift from really trying to innovate to essentially selling what they have. Starting to ignore technical debt and innovation debt, if you will and really just focusing more on marketing and sales and pushing suboptimal platforms as hard as they can. I think that's harming us in a few ways.It's keeping the interaction models for community really static. It's homogenizing what community might look like.” - Bill
”I think it would be really interesting to look into some sort of institution that tries to roll up the more benevolent activities of institution and practitioners into some basic standards around definition, terminology, maybe even to a certain degree methodology.
Just for the state of practice of, of community leadership.” - Bill
“Have you ever read the book, a pattern, a pattern language by Christopher Alexander Alexander? I love that book. I love it for many different reasons. So for those that don't know it was published in the late 1970s and it lays out these different patterns, actions, that individual and communities can take to shape their spaces.
And what's really interesting is it shows the different types of patterns, the different types of processes. And it has a little legend that states ‘here are some of the processes we agree are core and central, here are some that we think are maybe common to various needs or context and conditions, here are some that we just don't have enough data yet and, or might be incredibly custom.’
I find that every time I get into the standard, you know, the standardization conversation around community, somebody goes, my community is unique as a snowflake, it's totally unique. We can't have standards and I disagree. I think that there's something we could do similar to a pattern language. And one of the things that I love also about how it's laid out in that particular book is it shows the relationship between the different patterns and the processes. And even in the late 1970s, talking about those patterns and processes, you know, they state that each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in their environment, and then describes the core solution to that problem in such a way that you can use the solution a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice. And if we think about that, You know how regenerated businesses operates.
And it's that type of critical thinking and connection that we might be doing individually, but not together, or at least not together to further the profession.” - Lauren
Resources from this episode:
“All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again” - BSG https://youtu.be/pHUEYIE_MZA
‘Pattern Recognition’ by William Gibson published (2003)
Cohere Podcast: The Golden Age of Online Communities & the WELL with Gail Ann Williams
‘A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction’ by Christopher Alexander (1977)
What is Holistic Managment? - Savory Institute
‘Leadership in Complexity and Change: For a world in constant motion’ by Sharon Varney, PhD
Cohere Podcast: Leadership in the Midst of Constant Change with Dr. Sharon Varney
Critical thinking questions from Dr Varney include:
What do I currently know or think?
How do I know this?
Why do I think this?
How else could I look at this?
Online Community Unconference Resources
The Schedule Grid from the Online Community Unconference 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA
