For those not familiar with the Well, it is one of the original and most enduring online communities. (Nancy hosts the Virtual Communities conference there with Jon Lebkowsky!)

Inkwell is a great example of a “public facing space” for a private communities which is reflected in Digital Habitats chapter six as the “context” orientation. It gives outsiders a taste of the Well, which may invite them in, and it gives the Well a way to add value out to the world. Plus a few Well member volunteers get free review copies and encouragement to help stimulate the conversation, along with one or two designated conversation hosts. There have been some amazing conversations in Inkwell over the years, and it is now a Well tradition.

In preparation for the two weeks, the three of us thought it might be fun to record a short conversation to introduce ourselves. This is not what usually happens on Inkwell.vue, so we’ll see how it goes.

• Etienne, Nancy and John interview each other

Some of the questions we raised and which might be fodder for the Inkwell conversation include:

• Do you recognize yourself as a technology steward?
• And if you recognize yourself in the role, does it make a difference in practice?  Are there consequences in terms of relationships, labels, or intentions that change as a result?
• In your community do you see the tech steward  role as more individual or more distributed across community members?  What are the consequences?
• What can we learn from long-lived communities like The Well?
• How do technology stewardship practices vary across different socialcontexts?

We are going to “interview” each other to save from falling into talking AT instead of talking WITH, but we have a few slides with definitions and URLs to pull out as needed. We’ll also be playing with Twitter using the #SIKM tag. As a back up, we also have an Etherpad because John and I like having a back channel!

Recently he realized he wasn’t so clear on orientations 7, 8 and 9 so this past weekend we hooked up on Skype and talked through them. Here is Shawn’s post and the podcast.

As we talked, I was interested to hear about the exercise he did with the orientations, and see how it compared to how I’ve been using them. Here is what Shawn wrote:

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I’d drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

I had not thought about using the orientations for community plans or aspirations. I had been using them as a diagnostic for technology stewards to a) become aware of key community orientations and b) then use that to plan or tweak the community’s technology configuration. But both make a lot of sense to me!

Thanks, Shawn

Nancy

We start by talking about how, in writing the book, we tried to not “just” be experts, but to also get at our experience and the more intimate level at which communities live. At the very end I remember to tell him that his interaction with the community that formed on his wiki was one of the first instances where I glimpsed what the role of a technology steward might be about. It has taken a lot of work to write about “less technical” people might take on the role, but I’m convinced that you don’t have to be a Ward Cunningham to serve your community with respect to its technology needs.

If you use the Notebook, leave a note here with how it does or does not work for you.  We realize some of the material may not make sense without the context of the book.  But we also know it can always be improved. So your comment may contribute towards future iterations!

Flickr CC Image Credit:  wenxin

So Chapter 5 is getting a quick rewrite to talk more carefully about the togetherness / separation and reification / participation polarities.  We hope the rewrite won’t affect the final publication date, but it’s an example of the complications and risks on the way to press.

Coincidentally, I’m reading a thesis from CPsquare’s research and dissertation fest titled “A system that Works for Me – an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system” by Andreas Lloyd.  He gives a precise and insightful observations of how a community of practice deals with the polarities through their technologies and their relationships at the same time. Referencing the thesis or discussing it is out of scope because that would delay publication!  But Lloyd’s work is a good reminder that seeking to be precise about the polarities in Chapter 5 is really worth the risk of taking extra time. The following extended quote starts on page 55:

The Jargon File describes how the importance of not being interrupted is deeply engrained in hacker etiquette:

… if someone appears at your door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one’s eyes away from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other’s presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word). The understanding is that you might be in hack mode with a lot of delicate state in your head, and you dare not swap that context out until you have reached a good point to pause.

I experienced this several times in my visits and interviews with Ubuntu hackers, whose partners and friends over time have come to allow room for and be forgiving of these programming­ related eccentricities. In turn, the hackers themselves often take care to balance their time on the computer in relation to their family’s needs, when they reach one of those “good points to pause.” I have found that this duality is also very characteristic for the way that hackers interact with each other on­line where you can’t assume that people are communicative at any given moment. As Ellen Ullman points out, this inability to be interrupted makes hackers somewhat asynchronous to one another – at least in the short term (Ullman 1995:132). This is reflected clearly by the fact that all of the Ubuntu hackers’ preferred on­line communicative means are textual and thus – at least to some extent – asynchronous. Email, newsgroups and web forums postings and bug tracker comments are all based on users reading and replying asynchronously. Even real time communications such as IRC chat channels and Instant Messaging bend to this rule as developers “ping” each other, and if there’s no immediate response, they can ask their question and let the other answer when he has time or attention to spare:

…
09:00	carlos	pitti: ping
[...]
09:07	pitti	carlos: pong
09:08	carlos	pitti: I did a mistake yesterday night and latest Edgy export has the plural form bug (bug #2322)
09:08	Ubugtu	Malone bug 2322 in rosetta “Truncated plural forms” [Critical,In progress] http://launchpad.net/bugs/2322
09:09	carlos	pitti: I’m exporting a new version with that fixed, but it would take around 23 hours
09:09	carlos	am I late to have it in the prerelease version?
09:09	pitti	carlos: ah, then I’ll rebuild the edgy packs this afternoon
09:09	pitti	carlos: it won’t go into RC anyway
09:09	carlos	ok
09:09	pitti	carlos: the plan is to upload the final packs tomorrow
09:10	pitti	carlos: thus I’d like to have today’s in perfect shape
09:10	carlos	I see
09:10	carlos	ok
09:10	carlos	pitti: I will ping you when the new version is available

Here, Carlos needs to notify Pitti of a new bug which he needs to take into consideration when building a group of packages for upload. Since Pitti is busy, the conversation doesn’t continue until Pitti is able to respond and they can coordinate their work. Most of the Ubuntu hackers’ day-to-day interaction takes place on IRC where they can pick up on interesting discussions and be available if someone needs to ask a question. The hackers deftly navigate back and forth between conversations, fluidly participating as the IRC client automatically notifies them when someone “pings” them or even just mentions their online moniker. And even if they miss something, they can always go back to check the chat logs or mail archives as all interactions within the community are recorded and publically archived online. At times, IRC is such an easy and non-intrusive way of quick communication that it supersedes conversation even when developers are in the same room. Mark Shuttleworth enjoys relating the story of how he went out to buy beer during one of the first gatherings of the core Ubuntu developers at his London flat. When he came back he found 18 hackers sitting in his living room, working in silence, exchanging textual information on IRC. [20] This anecdote illustrates how the work environment provided by the system takes precedence over face-to-face discussions simply to avoid breaking the flow state afforded by the computer. [21]

[20] I saw the same trend again and again at conferences, one time even witnessing two hackers quietly sitting in opposite ends of a conference room, having a furious argument on IRC about who should be responsible for fixing a troublesome piece of software, and it didn’t end until one of them looked up and saw the other hacker sitting at the far end of room and contentiously shouted: “Stop being such an arsehole!”

[21] This asynchronous sociality is not only a norm well suited to hackers’ mode of collaboration, but it is at times also a necessity as the Ubuntu hackers are spread across the multiple time zones, mostly in North America, Europe and Australia, making exchanges such as this common:

15:56	mdz	good evening
15:57	zul	afternoon
15:58	ajmitch	morning
15:58	mdz	good UTEvening

It is easy to forget that the Ubuntu community spans the entire globe, since it mostly becomes an issue when it comes to finding IRC meeting hours that fit all members of the community, and meetings typically rotate between being early morning, late afternoon, or late evening to accommodate as many time zones as possible.

During our meeting yesterday afternoon I was struck by how different the three of us are in our preferences and tastes when it comes to things like fonts, graphic images, and book design.  When you consider how we came to agreement on so many things when it comes to the content of our book, all those differences make me really appreciate the agreements that we forged during those four and a half years of collaboration

We’re working on a book title.  So the end of the project is nigh!

Thankfully not all is lost. There is the Internet Wayback Machine where we have been able to find most of the posts. We’ll have to reconstruct some of the latter ones where we only have snippets via technorati. We’ll be adding these posts back in as time allows. If there is something in particular you need, let us know and we’ll hunt it up.

But there is one HUGE loss.

We lost all your comments. We love you. We love your comments. So we deeply apologize for their loss! We have some back up plans to avoid this in the future.

Live and learn, eh?