Governments should manage tennis clubs (?)
It’s funny seeing corporations and old media types busy trying to figure out this new thing called ‘communities’, much like they struggled 15 years ago to fathom the internet.
Even though the system of the ‘network’ existed previously - such as telephone networks, postal networks and even townships, where roads and paths connect one house to another - the concept of interacting with nameless and faceless people was treated with fear and apprehension.
Efforts to contain the network of the internet, like AOL did in the early days and more recently the walled gardens on mobile carriers, results in the crowds diverting around the road blocks. The same thing will occur if communities are forced into neat, well behaved rows.
Communities existed long before online social networks. Look around, communities are everywhere. At their heart are people with shared interests who derive benefit from participating. Most communities are self-organizing and respond organically to the needs of members.
I was pleased to read the comments made by Prokofy Neva to the article by Roland LeGrand, The Five Habits of Highly Successful Community Managers, in Media Shift. She likens the idea of managing communities akin to a fascist dictatorship:
just because private companies run the technology doesn’t mean they get to behave in such a high-handed way like company-town stewards, driving workers into sub-standard housing and keeping them in debt to the company store
She predicts the rise of socialware that makes it possible for the consumers to be “equal citizens with the citizen platform providers”.
Handing over power to the members of a community is about relinquishing control and that is a radical shift from traditional hierarchical power structures.
Communities on the web are now a dime a dozen. Thanks to Ning, creating a social network is as simple as making a blog site using Wordpress.
Rather than impose a Community Manager, why not offer a Community Facilitator to service the people who are actively participating in your community of interest? Why not work out how to hand over space and place so they can take ownership and benefit from it’s growth and evolution? If you don’t, they might just go off and form their own community, where they do get the rights and rewards that motivate them to commit the huge amount of time it takes to be an active part of a thriving community.
Our goal at Treet is to enable a community of people to make virtual television. To do that, we support the efforts of members to participate and create. Our Wiki is evolving into a thorough guide on how to produce shows at Treet, our islands are starting to be places of activity for our members and our new website will provide a whole gamut of social features such as comments, discussions, feature suggestions and content creation.
So take note top-down company people, you need to think of how your local tennis club works and ask how you can help them do whatever they want to do, rather than send in the men in black to oversee committee meetings and report back to government.
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Good post starr. Unfortunately most organisations (especially gov)in Australia are slow to let go of control. and I see some merit. After 50 years of growing up on TV most people are not used to think. So making the decisions for them seems to be a good start. I hope we will see more Obama style governments where the public is informed and encouraged to be involved. Until then we have SL