Musings & Meanderings

In past times, when communities were physically limited, ascending levels of authority were easy to comprehend. Divisions of authority were very clear based on skillsets and experience, as was the definition of each individual’s domain. (I’m not dealing with class systems and hereditary entitlement in this post.)

In a small physical community each member understands clearly their own and others’ roles and what each is able and expected to contribute. For most of us, though, delineation of domains has blurred in direct proportion to the size of our communities. As the internet leads us forward to the ‘global village’, where even niche categories of knowledge and competence can potentially contain a million individuals, our comprehension of personal authority is becoming further eroded.

The idea of connecting global pools of human knowledge and experience on every subject appears to promise many new benefits. This is easiest to see in areas of science and technology. Looking at the sum of global knowledge and experience, the necessity of categorization, classification and sophisticated indexing becomes a prerequisite to the usefulness of the parts. The fact that this is potentially accomplished via technology itself is awesome, but can technology alone address the real human need for personalization of authority? What of the many facets of knowledge that are less closely connected to technology?

I have been thinking that venues addressing our needs and desires in a broader and more balanced way is a path to incorporating what I’ll call micro authority into the development of the wired world.

Pre industrialization, when North America was gradually being settled by small communities in the traditional manner, it was natural for everyone to participate in an activity such as a barn raising. There was no difficulty determining who would do what; everyone did whatever they were best at. The point of this example is that everyone knew not only what they personally did best, but also who would know the most about any given topic or task.

Today, most of us live in communities where we might come in contact with thousands of people without having the first clue what the majority of them are good at or know much about. Our interaction with them tends to revolve around generalities, as well as whatever superficial specific brings about the contact. We still recognize many academic and professional credentials, but even these have ‘grown’ with the scope of our world to encompass fields often too broad to relate to on a personal level.

Nevertheless, most everyone is potentially an ‘authority’ on something, be it as narrow a field as tree pruning. Choose a few dozen people of your acquaintance due to physical proximity and take the time to express a true interest, and you’ll discover troves of knowledge on a range of topics that will surprise you.

In a neighborhood I once lived in for some years, there was not one person I spoke to at any length, on a block with approximately 20 houses, who did not have a great depth of knowledge on something. The range of topics included medieval maps, the physiology of cats, local zoning bylaws, children’s literature, continental European cuisine, and music theory. This was in a gentrified urban location where the majority of residents were white collar workers, but my personal experience is that the same theory applies everywhere. I’m simply more likely to find expertise on car mechanics or economizing in one neighborhood or on the stock market in another. Sometimes these mini troves of knowledge aren’t predictable based on socioeconomic demographics. The range of individual expertise is often astonishing, and the extent to which most people believe their personal knowledge to be of little value, to anyone other than themselves, is also unexpected.

For a long time, I believed that web enabled aggregation of people with specialized knowledge in common formed the strongest basis for growing online communities. This is also related to some of the theory behind aggregation. Although I still believe that there is a solid foundation and real value offered by this method of community creation, I no longer see such groups as communities. They are all special interest groups, which interact much as their real life counterparts always have. This applies whether their passion is antique dolls, coding in Perl, or Libertarian politics. Such profiles reflect most web communities of the past and the present.

My viewpoint continues to evolve, and I now believe that focusing on how virtual communities can evolve into more human communities, that fit together well enough to effect a virtual barn raising (or whatever the equivalent will be), is where much future potential lies.

The key to how real virtual communities might evolve most robustly requires an understanding of, and new ways of recognizing, micro authority. This idea goes far beyond the current mantra of developers and designers and coders learning to listen to users. It requires a re-evaluation of the value and applications of what users can contribute and generate, and further, a circular design process. Non tech community members have, collectively, plenty of intelligence, passion, and skillsets which, at present, are mostly disconnected from and irrelevant to a good deal of web development. This is typically more recognized by proprietary software companies building business tools and applications, and by academia focusing on open source development.

It isn’t Microsoft or the open source guys who are distracting us from rich potential here, though. They are each devotedly mining their particular lodes of it. The biggest distraction right now is the hard push of development through venture capital and tied to big media dollars, which tends to focus on the lightest fare and gear itself to the lowest common denominator in any development process. The current trend is to equate popularity with authority. This compounds the difficulty of learning how to identify and give weight to quality in general and the vast troves of micro authority specifically. Publishing, including wikis, and blogging are among areas that offer the best opportunities (so far) for more multi-dimensional communities.

I’ve recently read that a majority of the most successful tech companies were built by two individuals, and inside and an outside person. Beyond the few strong entrepreneurs who can execute and deliver though, are many millions of participants, and on a lot more than two sides.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Web Development, Perspective, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.