Vacuum

Griefnet, support for grief, death, and major loss

GriefNet is an Internet community approach to on line grief support, providing support to people working through loss and grief issues of all kinds. Cendra Lynn is the leader of the organization, and I had some small technological part in starting it back in 1993 when the appropriate technology of the day was Gopher, not the World Wide Web. The system hosts dozens of moderated mailing lists for people who share a common loss like the death of a spouse or the loss of a child.

I had a nice conversation with Cendra last night about how hard it is to build a community where people who are going through a lot can have a place where they can trust each other enough to share what are not easy feelings to share. It takes active moderation, careful planning, and a constant attention to the details of online identity. The technology is not fancy - they are using the Mailman mailer, which is now 15 years in development - and the key community insight is that it's utterly crucial to keep people's identity pseudonomous (first name only) so that people can focus on working through grief and not get distracted by the rest of people's real lives. This is so completely unlike the over-sharing Google Plus and overtly commercialized Facebook as to be worthy of note.

 

Collaboration and community leadership

 

 

Thinking about collaboration and community leadership, since it seems to be something that I do.

The examples that come to mind share some common traits.

1. there is a mix of online and in person communications, and not solely one or the other
2. for routine everyday communications you use whatever everyone is using in your field; be that email or facebook or twitter or phone or sms, you adapt to the existing norms to start at least.
3. the successful communicator is good at more than one network and can move between them, pulling ideas and people along for the ride.
4. somewhere at the center of the network there's a culturally appropriate publication process that generates an external memory of what has been communicated, whether that's a ritual behavior, a database, something like a wiki, or some book or printed artifact.

I think that if you can manage to satisfy all four of these factors that you can get alongwith a wide range of technologies. The working amateur radio clubs that I know fit the bill, as do some networks that are coordinated by prolific bloggers or that have sprung up around civic wikis.

The thing that emerged from writing this was realizing that ritual behavior could be the external memory that you get from community leadership, and that doesn't necessarily need to be written down. Just knowing that there's some component of a community that gathers in an orderly way regularly and that follows a pattern that's not much different from the time before, that's a powerful synchronizing pulse that can feed all sorts of other informal collaboration.

Thanks to Kevin Doyle Jones for the conversation that led to this.

a2b3 lunch non-summary for 4th week of March 2012

Name check!

Thanks to +Gyll Stanford, +Steven W. Cornell, +Joel Vergun , +Patrick Haggood , +Dan Romanchik , +Linda Diane Feldt, +John Hritz, +Roger Rayle , +Dan Friedus, and +Brian Rice who made for good conversation at lunch last Thursday.

In no particular order, we talked about the +a2b3 Amateur Radio Club (with Dan Romanchik as the likely point of contact), since we had a couple of people who were online listening to +Skywarn for the last tornado. There was also good discussion of fruit trees and the impact of unseasonable weather on the fruit crops, and at my end of the table some neat talk about underground clay irrigation systems. Joel had a good reception from a Ypsi civic group about his DishFish project.

Events of note for the coming weeks:

Linda Diane Feldt on herbal health for men (Thursday)
Fool Moon
Festifools
Huron River Water Trail meeting
A2A3 Soap Box Derby (Saturday)
Brick Bash (Saturday)
+TedXUofM
+Grange Junior Makers

Thanks to the 11 (of about 450, or 2.5%) who showed up, and to the 97.5% of you who didn't for whatever reason, it would have been crowded!

What to watch on CTN, April 1-7, 2011

What to watch on CTN is the City of Ann Arbor's weekly programming guide to public access cable. Download this week's flyer as a PDF. Here's show listings for April 1-7, 2011. Note that several of these are also available on demand over the Internet at http://a2gov.org/ctn .

Edward Vielmetti is certain to make it big in television if he ever gets a chance to break in to the big time.

Alas, poor delicious, you knew us well

The scuttlebutt is that delicious is going to be axed by Yahoo. 

Once upon a time, I bookmarked everything interesting that came across my path to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us).  It was part of my routine, and a daily summary was posted through to this blog.

Delicious was from the tags era of the Internet, where in addition to noting that a thing existed you could add your own tags to describe it. Sometimes these were straightforward tags, like the 1533 pages I marked as "annarbor". Others were idiosyncratic, like the 5 pages I marked as "attention-to-irrelevant-details".

There are other, better ways to bookmark things so that lots of people see them. The facebook "like" button gets more page views without consuming any cognitive overhead about how to tag, whether to tag, and what you've tagged before. Actually writing about something is quite a bit better than just bookmarking it, because you get to be yourself for a little while and not just an automaton forwarding on links automatically.

Every bookmark I ever did on delicious, up until now, is archived for posterity here: vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/delicious-20101216.htm . As I review it, there really should have been more of them marked "attention to irrelevant details". It's hours of reading, though some of it goes by fast because the site that was linked to has disappeared, leaving only the bookmark and whatever clipping I managed to care about.

edit: now with more cognitive overhead

more delicious:

Les Orchard, Let a million bookmarks bloom. "Use the web. Host your own, pay for it, or find someone who values your data."

Stephen Hood, We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think. "The Delicious user community could organize to save the data themselves via a coordinated harvesting project." 

Edward Vielmetti is http://www.delicious.com/vielmetti.

Practicing questions with Aardvark

Aardvark is vark.com - as of February 2010 they are owned by the Google.  It's part of a genre of question asking sites where the answer comes back partly from "your network" and partly from the random parts of the net that you don't know very much about. If you think you have an interesting question, you can ask it on Aardvark and see what you get.  My practice efforts have been pretty dismal, but I might be asking for things outside of what it's capable of doing.

It might simply be that I've been at it too long and my non-random sources for answers to random questions are just better.  If you've collected enough mailing lists full of local people or topical experts or reference librarians, the appeal of asking an unspecified audience is limited.  Ditto the comparison with asking the same question to Twitter where it might ping-pong into someone's news stream, or asking a network full of PR people on HARO in the hopes of luring in someone's publicist who is happy to answer.

the frailty of human memory

I'm trying to figure out how to retell stories about a place that I only know a little about.  The particular spot is a one time grocery store, now a bicycle shop, that I am guessing was a center of a neighborhood in its time. If there ever was a lore around it, it circulates among a group of people who I don't know.  The owner of the store was notable in his day, but that day is about 60 years ago.

My usual routine is to find an interesting idea, do searches in unexpected locations that get uncommon results, and assemble a story from clippings of things already written.  This can be a fast way of going from scattered and fragmentary information about something to a composed account that makes sense. Clippings are easy to assemble, someone else has done the work, and you can sit down and be done when you're done.

What's harder for me is to write about something that no one else has written down, especially something which you in turn have only limited knowledge of.  The quotable information from print sources may be locked up in materials that are not scanned in, and perhaps never scanned in unless you scan them in yourself - that is, if you can find anything at all.  The real stories of how things were might only be tellable if you can locate someone to tell them to you and if you write the stories down carefully for them.

If you are interested in something and want to publish something about it to mark that interest, you might end up with only a fragment to start.  There are some media where it's acceptable to tell a piece of a story that's an incomplete image, but only a very few.  "That's not news" and "what's your point" are typical reactions when a newspaper behaves that way.  The encyclopedia's defense mechanism says "that's not notable". "Too long, didn't read" is the reaction in the blog world.  So you need some place to dump fragments that don't have to be complete that's safe so when it comes time to tell a story you can extend your memory.

Nothing gets around the problem that the real stories can only be told by people.  That's an opportunity and a challenge.

The end of Metblogs

Metblogs was a national network of local blogs. The idea was that in each of many metro regions, someone or some set of people would be recruited to write local content, largely for free. The whole network would be run on advertising revenue, and user generated content would fill pages with fresh, relevant, hyperlocal content.

From Metblogs series finale:

[U]ltimately the downturns in advertising and dwindling interest in blogs in favor of social networks and twitter have made the business unsustainable and we’re closing the doors at the end of May.

The metblogs network never intersected with my world, so I don't know whether this is just the passing of time or some kind of deep-seated, widely felt loss. Their stats:

Detroit Metblogs: 2,218 posts / 3,722 comments

which I have to compare with Vacuum, just to give some sense of scale and scope (since 2003 when I started on Typepad):

2229 Total Posts, 2033 Total Comments

There's all kinds of business models that have to change with time. I can only say that because I lived through the era when modems ruled the Internet, and then after that when they didn't. So it's no failing to have started something that was a good idea at the time and then discover that times have changed and your idea doesn't have a neat transition to the current day.

Some parts of the Metblogs network died a bit earlier. This 2008 post on the situation in Portland signals what happens when founders intent, advertiser interest, and core contributor passions don't line up:

There could still be hope for Metblogs. My suggestions of public journalism, open comments and revenue sharing to attract quality writers were met with hostility when I floated them before. Metblogs could be a voice in the Portland digital media milieu. But most likely it will quietly fade further into irrelevance.

Here's their official going out of business notice.  Here's a feature about them from Wordpress, the platform that they had used.

Noted on Twitter by Valdis Krebs, who asks

starting to see the end of the "blog phase" of the Web? Or just the assimilation of another "form" into the whole?

If blogs are being assimilated, what are they being assimilated into?  If they go into newspapers, you get editors and deadlines and a hesitance to be interested in everything in favor of something narrower and more marketable. If the blogger becomes a diarist, then the novelty is writing for the world but not the form itself. Perhaps some bloggers are just frustrated talk radio hosts?  There are lots of possibilities to be assimilated into another established media form and not to create some new art form.

Another relevant touchpoint is the end of Arbor Update, which closed down after a 6 year run.  In my requiem for Arbor Update, I note that it gave up the ghost after many of its contributors who were also regular bloggers stopped blogging regularly.  This suggests a life cycle for blogging that matches what used to happen on Usenet; a cadre would form, start writing together, and then at some point their lives got busy or they got out of grad school or their public writing style needed to be formal and they left en masse.

I'm sure there's some epidemic model of when blogging stops, which would say something similar to the Framingham obesity study - when your friends stop blogging, you are likely to stop blogging.  It's not that any one thing got in the way; it's just that the cool kids had a million followers on Twitter, and the eyeballs of the media buyers were diverted toward how you could be more like them.  Or it may be as simple as not seeing eye to eye with a handful of people who are core to your effort and not being able to restart once they leave.

collaboration superpowers

Robin Sloan on Snarkmarket describing tools for large scale, real time collaboration, using Twitter, Google Forms, and Dropbox. Jane McGonigal gets called out for noticing and naming three collaboration superpowers and the tools and attitudes and interpersonal skills that matter. Note that these three are part of a list coming from a world of multiplayer gaming; if you were wondering why your CEO was spending time leveling up in some MMO, now you can see why:

Mobbability: the ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a tal­ent for coordinating with many people simultaneously. Cooperation radar: the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task. Ping quotient: measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement.

Jane McGonigal from AvantGame on collaboration, from 2007, here:

10 Collaboration Superpowers

View more presentations from avantgame.

a2b3 non-summary for Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010

Attendance: 19. I had the udon noodles, which are new on the menu at Eastern Accents and quite good.

My list of things to note from the day includes, but is not limited to:

• Google's proposed fiber to the home project, and how to get it to Ann Arbor
• Susan Crawford is back in Ann Arbor from a stint in DC and teaching cyber law
• I'm not sure that I wouldn't rather have a Droid phone than a Blackberry
• There is a super-nifty Droid app which is an exercise tracker w/maps
• Searching for low RPM motors that run on 2 AA batteries
• Next Tues.at Dow Aud. at UMHS a meeting on FDA regs for social media and medicine
• Census is hiring and training workers, $14-18/hr
• a2geeks
• Ignite 3 is coming up
• Earth Day is Garlic Mustard Day; I need your recipes
• next Tuesday is Paczki Day, I need your jelly donuts
• Ann Arbor Government Documents Repository continues to collect local govdocs
• Gelman Sciences has released some new docs on their pollution plume & cleanup
• Google Buzz is out
• the DDA is doing a survey on parking
• the hot pepper flakes are called "Ichimi Togarashi"

This list deserves hyperlinks; when I get them I'll go back and edit them in.

Thanks to everyone who came, see you next time.