What could we do...

Replies to This Conversation

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Aaron Degenhart on December 16, 2010 at 6:42am

thank you very much for this Ben!! an inquiry that i am certainly holding with you and that gains quite some momentum in me the last weeks... thoughts are gravitating towards the inquiry... using your invitation here as a trigger to get some of it out... may it spark some thoughts...

In relation to my process work that i did as assignment in my KaosPilot school i came to think about subgroups, both mathematically and also in a very real and social sense. I wrote about it under the title of "social processors" on my own blog. Now, looking at the magic and power of 1&1 connections... i find it a VERY impressive number AND reality that with the current amount of 2700 members of this Online Community there are more than 3,6million (!) different possible 1&1 relationships (so you and me are one of them, you and Amy are one of them, Amy and me are of them and so on...) and for instance the amount of different possible subgroup-constellations of three people is over 3,2billion (you, Amy and me are one of them) and you can imagine the number will grow for subgroups of 4 people, 5 people and so on.

so... besides fostering the important emergence of conversations around inquiries that engage a lot of people (converging community building > strengthening center), i see an enormous potential to tap more into stimulating de-centralized small conversations of people that connect to each other (diverging community building > increasing connections, weaving the fabric, activating the rims).

And as the number of possible relationships within the network is growing exponentially with the number of members i am eager to explore automatic matching- and synergy-inspiring algorithms that supplement the personal work in peoples "social brains" like Amy's, mine or other active members here who connect people based on their knowledge and care about them... (which is still and will always be key in this process).

In my attempts around "mirroring a (online) communities brilliance and potential" (which manifested so far in the map, the collage (to be updated asap) and the tag clouds) i am seeking to stimulate a sense of "wow, awesome, that's us, imagine what we could do together, let me check out this and that and make stuff happen"... but maybe indeed the ”next step after the wow" is lacking...

This is the tricky and juicy part for social online architecture and it can become slightly meta/abstract/techy to talk about it as real people like you and me having a good conversation are on the other end... facebook is holding a patent called “Generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network”, i used this as trigger to write a blogpost on "personalized stories". So the question is again and again, how can you sort the data or inspire the user to search the data with results that are meaningful in their life's right now and activate curiosity to engage around the findings.

So, down to this ground - one thing that i feel is useful, is to encourage using the Advanced Search function to narrow down the huge amount of people to some that are relevant to you based on specific criterias like country, interests or needs.

Another wave that i'd love to kick off is to programe a "matchmaking application" that looks through ALL the profile information of the members here and uses words/phrases to scan for synergies [shared interestes] or actually concrete matches [potential in shared space] of someones potential contribution with someone else's wish to receive from this Community (see profile questions for formulation). The results of this "digging for potential social value in possible peer to peer connections within this Online Community" process could be published in the space, but even better would be to invest some hours to notify people about their "personal connection-recommendations" through comments on their profile or messages...

so, to make the next step on inspiring for next steps ;)

...i am skilled enough to foresee the mathematical architecture and data requirements of this algorithm but my programming skills are not good enough to implement it into code - so i am reaching out to find a programmer who can help me realize this matchmaking algorithm...

Permalink Reply by Ben Roberts on December 16, 2010 at 1:03pm

So cool, my fellow Benjamin! We are truly in synch on a lot of this. The matching system ideas you mention, for example, have been coming up in my work with FOUR YEARS.GO. And even more exciting to me personally is your energy around the "enormous potential to tap more into stimulating de-centralized small conversations of people that connect to each other."

So... here's an idea that seems so obvious for this community that I have to think it's already been tossed around... Why not mimic the WC process itself? Could we find a way (without too much programming!) to form all the members into small groups randomly, give them a suggested question or two along with instructions to just get to know one another, and let them have at it for a week or so? Then reshuffle the groups and continue the process? Perhaps email could be the format, rather than groups on this platform (since there would be so many of them). I'm thinking groups of six-ten rather than the traditional foursomes because in any random grouping, some people will not participate. But even if we got 10% of this list-serve to play, that would be awesome!

Maybe the thing to do is to invite people to do it each month, so that we're starting from a list that has some commitment level. We send out an email blast monthly (and/or include it in the newsletter) asking people if they want to participate. We ask them to email us if they're interested, use a spreadsheet to create the random groupings, and then we find some kind of program that can email back out to each of the groups individually so they can get the convo started among them. Or we even do that manually, if the numbers aren't too big. It could all be done for say 200 participants in an hour or so, I bet.

Of course, no WC worthy of the name could go on without a harvest. So we could also create a space in the WC Online Community for any exciting connections, insights, questions, etc. that emerge each week to be posted.

What do you think?!

Permalink Reply by Jerry Givan on December 17, 2010 at 11:19am

Interesting idea, I have noticed that one of the issues of the social online architecture, looking at the conversations, groups and blogs is how many are location based. It seems that where you are headed is more subject/issues/topics based conversations/connections. I think the answer may be headed more in the direction of a drill down index to cut down the number of clicks that it would take the average person to connect with a group or another person on their interest of the moment.

The current "groups" might need to broken into location based groups (one database) and then multiple subject/issues based groups (second database).

Permalink Reply by Amy Lenzo on February 5, 2011 at 4:25pm

Jerry,

I'm intrigued by your comment - and wonder if other people are having the same questions... I'm a special case of course because I pay special attention to new groups/conversations/etc. being proposed or started, but when I'm looking for something specific here I usually start in the search feature. Either site-wide by keywords, or specifically in the member database accessible through the "People" tab.

How do others find what the people/groups/conversations, etc. you are looking for here?