The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

I just returned from the ForumOne Online Community Unconference on June 6th, 2007 in Mountain View, CA at the History of Computing Museum. The feel of this year's conference was notably different from last years. First, the venue was a far better suited environment for this kind of conference. Attendance was also higher this year and there were more experienced practitioners among the attendees. There was also a more even split between people who were there for business and non-profit interests. Whereas last year's conference felt like a guerilla meet-up, this year's conference (aside from the unconventional Unconference format) had a more "conventional" feel to it (pun intended). Instead of a lot of philosophizing about how Web 2.0 will affect online communities, there were vendors and technology specialists there presenting specific Web 2.0 type platforms.

The day was divided into five breakout sessions, lunch, and an hour of what's called "speed-geek" presentations. It's basically speed dating and instead of talking about yourself, you court an audience of five or fewer people every few minutes with talk about your project, product, or work. I gave "speed-geeking" a try. It's the first time I've run into it and had no idea what to expect. SocialWave.net is not something that lends itself well to quick explanations because the discussion I need to have to explain what I'm doing starts with a sociological conversation, not a technological one. I'll write more about what I learned from speed-geeking Social Wave later.

One of the key concepts of the "Unconference" conference is that everyone has something to contribute and anyone can lead and everyone shares the responsibility of making a session productive. True to nature, the breakout sessions were divided into nine groups with each being started and moderated by the person who proposed the group. You didn't have to be an expert to propose and moderate a session, nor were you expected to be. If you wanted to propose a topic, you just had to get the discussion started. The sessions taken together as a whole was equal parts support group, focus group, seminar, and office meeting.

Online Community Camp 2007 being my second "Unconference," I can definitely say that it's not for everyone. I'd say that it's best suited for people who are not there to seek answers, but to seek ideas that they can use to form their own answers. Speaking for myself, as someone who has an extensive history and background in online communities, but has since become removed from the core of the movement, it was a day well spent getting familiar with the current industry lingo and the latest buzz.

An "Unconference" is sometimes a chaotic environment where it's impossible to know from what context different attendees are coming from. Different people had different ideas of what online community was, a sentiment echoed in one of the sessions I attended. Some attendees knew that they were only looking at a small slice of the pie. Some appeared to have difficulty imagining online community as anything other than blogging, chat, forums, and so forth. You have to take every suggestion with a grain of salt, but this sort of disconnect is to be expected. It happens in all industries and it should be no surprise encounter in a knowledge space like online communities where it's possible to separate a blog from a forum purely by the way a technology is used and how it's perceived.

Although the structural differences between a blog and a forum (or something else) is sometimes trivial, the practical consequences can be quite significant. Social dynamics can change markedly because of the ways people perceive how they're supposed to use a specific type of technology. For example, you're more likely to see someone continue to post in a blog even if there is no noticeable interest in what that person is writing. You rarely see anyone continue to post in a discussion forum if nobody replies back to his or her postings.

I wrote last year with a bit of personal exuberance that the online community industry was finally beginning to emerge as a mainstream player in the IT world. Similarly, the conference last year had a feel of people who were just happy to be there. If this year's Unconference is any reflection, the industry has matured tremendously in only one more year. The conversations that I had a chance to be in on this year were more directed, professional, and insightful. It was still a good time though. Howard Rheingold made an appearance wearing very fun clothes. It was a good time, but it was also time well spent if you prefer a day-long brainstorming session over extended slideshow presentations in darkened rooms.

ocu2007

This is actually old news, but the number of times that I heard people at the ForumOne Online Community Unconference refer to younger people as being more gifted in using technology reminded me that I hadn't blogged about a study I heard about in the news over two years ago.

In this Nielsen study, they found that teenagers were less successful at completing given tasks on a set of websites that they were asked to visit. It took them longer and they failed to complete the task more often than the parental group.

Teens were found to have poor reading skills, unsophisticated research strategies and a "dramatically" lower patience level, according to the study.

I didn't get my hands on the full study and I have no idea how rigorous its scientific design was, but nonetheless, it's a good foil for conversation. It doesn't take a psychologist to understand that a person's level of confidence does not have a direct correlation with their actual ability to perform a skill. I also remember another study that pitted kids vs. parents in performing tasks in Photoshop that came to the same conclusion as the Nielsen study mentioned above. If you know of which study I'm trying to recall, please comment or send me an email.

My socialwave.net project has given me a lot of anecdotal evidence to present to this discussion. Over the course of trying to bring social networking to the unconverted in my neighborhood and my region, I've given tutorials and demos to adults of all ages. The only people who were hopeless were the ones who had some other mental block over computers that were not related to their capacity to learn. One had decided that the Internet was evil and that I was a bad person for trying to get the unconverted to try it. Another was convinced that all of her personal data would instantly get siphoned up by criminals the second she plugged in her modem. Characters who exhibited these sorts of phobias did tend to be older, but I also met one person in her 20's who had a severe distrust of technology.