Dress the pig or Make him Fly? When faced with the question Dress the pig or Make him Fly? I will always choose to make the dang pig fly.
First, I consider social software actually to be emergent social software. That narrows the field to software that enables groups to form and organize themselves. Yes, it's still broad but at least it's not coextensive with any software that has a user interface.
from Marc Canter
I don't yet like the term emergent for what we are trying to do mostly because I disagree with some of the concussions in the emergent democracy paper but have not yet had the time to figure out why and state my position in a rebuttal post. So for now lacking such a response emergent or enabling groups to form and organize by themselves will work. I prefer the term self organizing network as presented by Dr. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's paper Statistical Mechanics of complex networks and more simply in his very popular book Linked by Albert Barabasi. The point of the distinction is that the topology and evolution of networks are governed by robust organizing principles. I like principles.
It is not always the group making the robust organizing principles, sometimes it us bungling Software tool makers. Joel states this nicely in a recent paper he posted.
Look at a few online communities and you'll instantly notice the different social atmosphere. Look more closely, and you'll see this variation is most often a by product of software design decisions. Or Joel's axiom of online communities:
Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels.
[from Joel on software-Building communities with Software]
I do like axioms, axioms of algebra, axioms of design, axioms of Xperience Architecture. Here is one of my often cited Axioms.
Humans have the pesky habit of being human and refuse to change their habits when pursuing their goals online. [Unknown meaning part of this I got out there somewhere but only google knows where.] Which brings me back to Marc's point.
That's why we're focusing on ACTIVITIES and why I'm so sensitive to Clay and Joel Spolsky referring to message boards and forums as on-line communities. Yes - of course they're ONE example of how people interact, collaborate and "commune". But there's also evites, email, IM, listening to music and watching webcasts together, uploading photos, leaving guestbaook messages, buying and selling things, auctions, tracking back and linking to, flirting, assigning tasks and loads of other activities. Personal publishing, communication and media - all holding hands and singing "Kum bah yah". Where meatspace meets cyberspace.
[from Marc Canter]
2:56:09 PM 
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