Terrariums vs. Jungles

Or old growth rain forests.

Chris Messina is focusing on Community Model (in contrast to business model), and I want to take this concept a bit further. I want to look at community dynamics, and how those interdependencies evolve their own feedback loops to gain health.

I've been reading Out of Control and Cluetrain Manifesto, and these two have been mixing in my mind in very interesting ways. So, markets are conversations, and yet a conversation is something that happens in a community. I've also been active on zaadz.com, and was interested in the recent flap over different underlying philosophies between zaadz and tribe.net. This is a kind of turf war, and it seems to me that the confusion between turf and community is very common. Turf is more akin to neighborhoods (geographical or ip-address centric). Community is much more amorphous, and the boundary isn't at all geographical (netographical?). I'm thinking this is related to the common confusion between networks and infrastructure.

In out of control, Kevin Kelly talks about Marine Biologist Lloyd Gomez's experiments with growing coral reefs. It is notoriously difficult to get the initial mixture just right, but after a while, the mutual feedback loops go "pop!" and the system takes off and starts to thrive.

When I think of what Chris Messina is talking about, I think of Gomez's tinkering. That's community model, and that's largely where zaadz.com and tribe.net are tinkering. But these are terrarium style communities. It's great to understand these things in microcosms, because it truly is like a model, like a model railroad, and tinkering allows us to understand.

I would like to see more work on understanding community in the wild, and to do this, we need to break down the walls between the terrarium and the real world. Second Life gets close I think. And I had high hopes for Meetup.com (for very different reasons, obviously... though I can start to see some possible bleed-over).

The toolset that I'm fantasizing over is one that not only thrives at real-world scales (not just size, but complexity... is there enough diversity in Second Life, or do we just have to wait 25 years?).

I'm afraid this may still be too abstract, so I'll go back to the concrete example of zaadz and tribe. In a true virtual community, I think it should be possible to explore without trespassing, and it shouldn't be necessary to spray-paint your particular brand of logos or slogans on the actual infrastructure to mark territory. Part of turfwars is the perceived need to badmouth the offending party, rather than simply move to another part of the room, or better, to just reconfigure the "room" so that you only see the people that you enjoy interacting with.

More concrete. Imagine you visit a restaurant with your wife and kids for your five-year old's birthday party, Barney Style, with costumed dino and all, and the host seats you at a table of drunken rowdies who are whooping it up after a tube ride down the local river. The tension that results is only present because the parties won't be able to successfully ignore each other. It is almost certain that name-calling, or at the least, dirty looks, will be traded. But, if the restaurant were configured such that both parties could enjoy themselves without infringing on each other, the tension goes away, and they don't feel the need to harass each other.

Most walled-garden terrarium style communities make it difficult to successfully ignore one another.

This is complicated by the fact that there may be times when the mom of the birthday party would find herself in with the rowdies, so it's not a clear case of just having two restaurants.

Give me a toolset that allows me to follow a conversation, no matter which terrarium the participants happen to hang their hat, while allowing me to inconspicously ignore the people who don't fit with my vibe (meaning that I don't have to call the management over to try to resolve any disputes for me), and allow me to turn the volume up or down on particular threads for my own tastes without interfering with other peoples experiences.

The way that I imagine this is looking at the structure inside-out from the conventional terrarium model. If I map my network not by geography or proximity, but instead by desired connections, then my community is whoever happens to overlap with my connections during a given window. No containers needed.

This idea seems very simple to me, and seems feasible with multi-valent attention trails (analogous to ants' pheromone trails). The ideas around emergence discussed in Out of Control are all relevant to this discussion, but I don't see them applied in ways that I would expect.

Is this really so hard?

Comments

[David]

My issue above was whether Community Model is the right question, or if is something more akin to Community Dynamics. Actually, the question that I find myself asking more frequently is akin to “what is your interaction model.”

Community model seems to me to imply tinkering with the community ingredients in the terrarium. Interaction model is tinkering with the feedback loops. I don’t know that one or the other is better, but I would like to see more experimentation with the latter.