As a prelude, I must mention that the most significant thing is of course the community itself, both longer term hosts and temporary guests, all of whom I found to be genuinely open and welcoming which enabled me to make myself at home and join in easily.

1) The story about community developing around the nptech tag

Reading through Beth Kanter’s H20 playlist allowed me to see the shape of how this process unfolded, thus bringing a whole new idea into my mind. It is significant because once this possibility is understood, then the senses are alerted to the pattern and may be able to spot opportunities for intervening to help a similar process along. The elegance in the naming of the evolved tag name “nptech” compared with the more contrived “COP+maven” used in the excercise is probably a significant sucess factor and perhaps sheds some light on the disadvantages of both “DAR” and “distributedactionresearch” as tags.

2) Wiki barn raising concept. I’ve already written about this, but it’s perhaps worth documenting the learning process. By the time the session “early life of a wiki” came along, there was already a lot going on at the conference and at first I overlooked it. The case history of the NVC wiki day didn’t appear directly relevant. Reading the transcript of the telephone chat, I noted that the wiki launch made use of multiple channels and that the invitation called it a barn raising and turned it into an event. I began to become a little bit intrigued and later mentioned the term to Linda, who remembered that there was something abot barn raising on the meatball wiki. So the combination of online reading and offline conversation about another space reinforced the pattern and motivated me to look into it further. I then shared the connection by posting the meatball wiki link to CP2 where it was met with further encouragment. The concept of Barn Raising has since become an important supplement to my exhibition strategy and the meatball wiki community a significant node in my network.

3) Discussion engine.

This is a development of the old competition between forums and threaded discussions. The social software used by CPsquare is Webcrossing and my first impressions were quickly overcome with a recognition of some well thought out features. The absence of an automatically inserted subject “Re: ” is a good thing because it pevents the inevitable inappropriate headers and topic drift which occurs in all threaded discussions despite the best conscious intentions, and the practice it encourages is to reflect briefly on the reply you are just about to post in order to sum it up succinctly in a subject heading. This simple feature alone is a major improvement on previous systems and I notice that it is also implemented in some other modern web forums.

4) Better understanding of the nature and implications of mashups and COP2.o )

Four points are enough for now, much more will be revealed to me as I go through a consolidation process of reflecting on the discussions at the Action Research fringe event and on my own extracted contributions to the wider conference.

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It’s not as if there is an option to decide that mashups probably aren’t of interest to you, so you can mostly ignore them and they will go away.
Because this thing is already happening and it’s changing the way the people we all deal with are going to use their computers.

Fundamentally, I think it represents a final and irreversible shift away from the architecture of desktop/laptop computers and onto the internet itself. By providing open APIs, the big database owners – Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc have set up an ecosystem whereby the next generation of applications development centres around them rather than around Microsoft, Apple or Linux.

How will this shift in the big picture affect us?
That’s a topic worth exploring, in my opinion and I’d like to venture a few suggestions to get started.

1) Some new members will approach the existing communities having already had experience with rich, dynamic and compelling interfaces. If they are expected to fit in with an existing setup which looks dull and obsolete to them, they might just laugh out loud and then build their own cop2.0 instead.

2) The commoditisation of non-proprietary entry level computers will drive down the cost so that much of the rest of the world will be able to be connected.

3) It will matter even less which computer you happen to be sitting at today. Digital identity and synchronisation of workflows will be rolled out to everyone so that they bring all their own stuff with them when they join in.

4) Community links and ties will be more explicit, perhaps even to the extent that automated systems will be able to depict the existence of potential CoPs just waiting to be crystallised out.

5) Overall, perhaps there will be a tendency for CoPs2.0 to be more easily created and then dissipated again, with less clear boundaries and more rapidly shifting internal and external dynamics.

If none of this makes any sense at all then try reading “Mashup ecosystem poised to explode” at zdnet

“With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there’s a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked. It’s already happening. “

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