Two years ago, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (www.BGI.edu) faculty gathered to radically reinvent their sustainable business curriculum for the next decade. Our goal was not only to update course content, but also to significantly update how the material was taught. We wished to make our teaching process (our pedagogy) more interactive and also more effective for students graduating into a 21st-century work environment, where people increasingly work in teams-both online and offline.

As a specialist in group interactions, I was asked by the faculty whether formal graduate student study groups (called "Study Buddies") should consist of two people or of three. I did not have an easy answer to this question.

My expertise with group dynamics comes from professional experience as an entrepreneur and from considerable experience both building online communities and helping others to do the same. Through these processes, I've seen how groups of people act differently at different sizes. As I discussed in my previous blog post on Group Thresholds [Allen], there are pros and cons associated with different group sizes. However, the smallest group that I spoke of in that article was the 'working team size', which is a group of four to nine members (but ideally about seven). I didn't talk about groups consisting of less than four members-specifically dyads (a group of two people) and triads (a group of three people)-and that was what the BGIedu faculty was now interested in learning more about.

My first inclination when considering BGIedu's request was to say that triads would be the best size for study groups, but I wasn't sure. I knew from my past research on group size that a dyad has a significantly different behavior than any other small groups. However, I wasn't certain if triads should also be considered on their own, or if they were just the low end of one of those 'work teams', which I'd always thought of as containing four to nine members. Triads were a hole in my research.

I decided to dig deeper into this question by engaging my teaching assistant Elyn Andersson and my writing partner Shannon Appelcline to help me investigate further. This post is the fruit of our research and our discussions about dyads and triads. We hope it might help you decide whether a dyad or a triad is the better team size for groups that you are working in.

Choosing between Dyads and Triads

Before I share with you the details of our investigation, I want to be clear that dyads, triads, and small 'working team' groups can all be effective. Any challenge faced by groups of these sizes can be overcome by a good process, teamwork, training, or just positive energy. However, my thesis is that certain sizes of groups are better for certain purposes-and when a group size is selected appropriately it will require less energy and thus be more likely to be productive when the inevitable group challenges occur. When choosing among a dyad, a triad, or a working team, the important thing to focus on is thus the intent in forming the group.

For the groups being considered by BGIedu, the faculty felt that the students taking the new curriculum needed three things:

• More formal support for studying (i.e. not ad hoc study teams);

• The inclusion of emotional support in that support structure; and

• A system where the members of a study group would help each other to keep their commitments to study.

The last requirement - that members of these study teams would be accountable to each other without one student just taking up the slack of another - was the toughest one.

Clearly, working teams of 4-9 people were too large for our purposes. Teams this size are rarely intimate enough to support the needs of individuals. In addition, research shows that they are poor at supporting accountability. That's because working teams of 4-9 are very vulnerable to social loafing (i.e., slackers)-except when the tasks assigned to these working teams are highly independent (i.e. an entrepreneurial team that has different members focused on different topics, such as management, development, operations, marketing and sales) or when they require high diversity. An upcoming blog will cover this topic in more depth.

Removing working teams left the question of dyad vs. triad - which our research would show were both very different from working teams. Triads ultimately fit BGIedu's particular need better. That was primarily due to advantages of accountability and cohesion, combined with some emotional support. However, some simple numerical properties of triads also prove useful: they have elemental diversity because they're up to 50% more diverse than dyads; and if someone misses a team meeting the other two-thirds of the team can still benefit. For all of these reasons, my recommendation to the BGIedu faculty was that these formal study teams be formed in triads.

Dyads, however, are quite appropriate for a variety of other purposes, and should not be dismissed. I'll be talking of some of their advantages before proceeding on to the lessons learned about triads themselves.

The Dyad

Everyone has had experience with dyads. The first social experience of anyone's life is a dyadic relationship - that between a mother and her unborn child. This parent-child relationship continues once the child is born. Overall, dyads are the most common social group; they are seen everywhere, in personal, academic and business relationships.

To decide if a dyad is the best group size for your needs, it is again important to focus on the purpose of the group. A number of interesting characteristics of dyads - some benefits and some limitations - make them unique from triads and other larger group sizes, among them:

• Emotional Support

• Commitment

• Reasoned Agreement

• Power Inequality

• Group Accountability

Emotional Support

There have been some academic studies [Taylor] that suggest that it's easier to be open and share within dyads. The research has shown that people feel safer about revealing personal and intimate information in a dyad than they do when a third person is added to the group. As a result, disclosure rates increase when people are put into dyads as compared to triads. Furthermore, adding a third person to a group causes its members to be more socially conscious, making it harder for members to listen to the conversation and at the same time be aware of their own thoughts.

Together it's this trust level (allowing for disclosure) and this focus level (allowing for better listening) that make dyads much stronger for emotional support than triads or larger teams. If the intent of a group is to have an intimate and fully open space, or if the work of the group is emotional in nature, this might make dyads a better choice.

Though dyads are clearly more effective for providing emotional support, triads can still offer that as well under the right conditions.

Commitment

This intimacy and confidentiality of a dyad helps its members to build strong team dynamics relatively quickly. The two individuals not only will have formed a trust bond more easily than three or more individuals could, but they generally will have a better ratio of time to performance outcomes compared to groups of larger sizes, in part because less time is spent maintaining the team relationship itself.

In a triad or larger group, the group would need to put effort towards team work over task work and thus less time is put towards performing the task. In other words, more resources would be spent on relating to a teammate than on finishing a project.

Reasoned Agreement

The most unique element of dyads is that they are the only group size in which one voice is paired against another voice equally.

When was the last time you were in dyad in which you did not agree on an issue? Most likely, you and the other individual spent some considerable time trying to convince the other of your reasons, and the outcome was one of two things: you either both stuck with your opinion and walked away, or one of you changed your mind after hearing the other's ideas and opinions.

Because members can't 'vote', a dyad is either in agreement or disagreement, which forces a longer deliberation for tasks when consensus is required. There are times when you want a small group to deliberate deeply, and dyads are ideal for this.

Power Inequality

Though dyads have several advantages, they can also bring with them a few additional problems - one of which is a power inequality of knowledge that would be detrimental within some teams. For some tasks, this could offset the benefits of having a more intimate small group. For my BGIedu groups, I was concerned that it might prevent some students from benefiting academically from the study exercise.

This topic has been addressed in a study [Day] that compared homogeneous teams that were entirely high-ability or low-ability to heterogeneous dyads of mixed abilities. The study found that while high-ability people tested better individually after learning the material in a dyad with another high-ability team mate, low-ability people did not gain much benefit from studying in a dyad with a high-ability team member.

This was somewhat surprising. A student with more knowledge of a subject should be able to mentor a student with less knowledge, therefore creating a true dyad study partner. However, this study showed that this was not the case.

The study also argued against another common conception. One might assume that two high-ability team members could learn more together, when they could bounce ideas off of each other, than they could alone. However, this was again not the case: high-ability individuals performed better after learning alone than after learning with another high-ability team member! Only homogeneous low-ability teammates performed better after being in a dyad than alone.

This study pushed me toward triads for study teams at BGIedu, as dyads would not be large enough to guarantee high performance outcomes; the teams would always consist of one higher performing student and one lower performing student.

Group Accountability

Another disadvantage of dyads shows up in the area of accountability. The simplest version of this issue can be shown in this question: if one teammate says she did the majority of the work, while the other teammate says the work was shared 50/50, who was correct? A tougher question: if they both say that the work was shared 50/50, how is a third party able to determine if this actually was true?

Elyn, my teaching assistant, interned in a high school in Seattle while working towards her Master's in Teaching. Her experiences highlight this problem. In today's educational model, collaborative learning is highly valued, and Elyn worked to incorporate in-class group work into many of her lessons. When assessing the students' group projects, however, she found that it was difficult to determine if the students shared the work equitably or if some of the students rode on the hard work of their partners. In some cases, Elyn doubted that the work was split equally. In particular, she found that if she let the students choose their own partners, the students were more likely to say that 'both' did the work, rather than tell the teacher their friend slacked off on the assignment.

A recent study [Alkaslassy] supports Elyn's experience. In it, students working on a paired group assignment were asked to allocate the percent of work done between the pair. 86% of the students assigned equal credit between the two individuals in the group. At a surface level, one could presume that each party performed half the work and was honest in their assignment of credit. However, Elyn and I believe that in some dyadic relationships, friendship can become an overriding factor and that in those situations, students are more likely to allocate equal credit because of this friendship, not because of true equity.

In the psychological field, this relates to a well-known cognitive bias called the egocentric bias, where an individual will claim more responsibility for group action then an independent observer would credit them. Although this is most often discussed for larger groups, in dyads a member might rate their own efforts as being half of the effort when in fact is it is less. Thus in academic group projects, it can sometimes be more effective to have the students rate their peer rather than themselves.

Though group accountability can be a disadvantage for dyads, it improves when you have triads, thanks in part to a triad's inability to devolve. This, as it turns out, would be another comparative advantage that helped me choose triads over dyads for BGIedu.

Triads

There are a number of interesting characteristics of triads that make them different from dyads and also from small 'working team' groups. I'll talk about three of them in this article:

• Inability to Devolve

• Voting

• Elemental Diversity

Inability to Devolve

We all have experienced what happens when a party gets too busy or too noisy - the size of the conversation groups get smaller. If you are having an informal dinner for seven, sometimes the conversation will include the entire table. However while people are eating the conversation will typically devolve into smaller groups: four people at one end of the table will being having one conversation, while the remaining three will be talking at the end other. Sometimes one person will be left out of any conversation, but studies show that with small groups this is less likely to happen. We have a natural tendency not to want to exclude or reject individuals unjustly, so such a singleton will usually find a place in one conversation or another.

Working teams also have this natural tendency to devolve when confronted with external challenges (of which noise is one of the simpler ones) or internal challenges (such as differences of opinion), only reuniting when those challenges are resolved. A team of six can devolve gracefully a number of different ways: a three and a three; a four and a two; or three groups of two. Teams of five can devolve into teams of two and three. A team of four can devolve into two teams of two. In all of these cases the devolution does not exclude any individual's voice.

However, a triad can not devolve without excluding someone. Triads thus have a lot of subtle pressure to try to keep the group together, so that no individual is explicitly rejected - except for a good reason. This leads to more accountability for the individuals in the group, compared to teams of two where the dyadic nature of the group can override liability.

Unconscious Voting

A dyad's inability to vote was an advantage of that group size, and thus issues that require deeper deliberation are often better with dyads. However, you sometimes don't want as much deliberation. You want fast action.

I find that we unconsciously gauge each others' opinions in a small group very quickly, and even more so with a triad. This means that a triad seems to be able to come to at least some decision very fast. There are many cases where this can be very useful - if that is the intent of your team.

As an personal example, I saw a presentation in the early 1990s from the Apple Human Interface Group (HIG) about their survey of how users colored "folders" on the Macintosh. The result was that there was little commonality - everyone colored folders differently for different reasons. Afterward, I met with the team and suggested that that if they instead asked teams of three to decide how to color code folders that they used together, then the results from all the different teams would have much more commonality. This suggestion ended up getting me a consulting job with Apple HIG, and shows how a triad can quickly create successful performance outcomes.

Triads are not the only group size that can vote easily - all odd size groups can - but I believe the voting of a triad to be fundamentally different because the voting can be so unconscious and informal that the members are not even aware of it. This can be useful, but it can also cause problems.

When I was just starting my business, I was doing a lot of work with a company formed by two partners who had a 50/50 stock split in their company. Theirs was a good partnership; they had very different but complementary skills and worked well and profitably together. As a fellow entrepreneur, I was a peer to both them, and we were developing a new product line together.

However, when I worked with them on this product line, I saw that I'd changed their very successful dyad to a triad, and I thus became a tiebreaker in many of their business decisions - including business decisions on issues that had nothing to do with our joint product. This was caused by a shift in power: one partner might ask me a question about marketing rather than asking his partner (who knew marketing), and then it would become our opinion against the remaining partner's. Conversely, I found the marketing partner asking me to side with him on development questions.

I found this quite troubling; a more manipulative person could have controlled or broken that relationship by always breaking the ties in their own favor. In our case, we never shipped the product line and went our separate ways. I couldn't help but think it might have been because my unofficial "vote" was causing problems in their partnership.

When getting a result is the purpose of a team, a triad is better than a dyad as it allows for this voting to take place. As I mentioned to BGIedu, a triad can have a two-to-one vote, allowing a better chance at task accomplishment. Task accomplishment is also achieved because triads stay on topic better than dyads due of this voting ratio: if one member of a dyad decides to go off topic, it is easy for the other to follow his or her lead. In a a triad, two out of the three members would need to 'agree' to follow an unrelated discussion.

Elemental Diversity

One final advantage of triads when compared to dyads is that the knowledge base of the group is larger. I saw this issue clearly in my recent Social Web for Social Change class at BGIedu, where I changed the team size from two to three, and immediately saw a growth in elemental diversity that benefited the groups.

In this class, I have the students participate in an exercise on personal branding. I originally had the students pair up in teams of two, effectively giving each student a 'branding buddy' to help them form their personal brand and to give and receive feedback. In the last year, however, I decided to change this dyad to a triad.

At first, these groups followed the same methods I used for dyads: one person would self-brand themselves to a second person in the group, who would then echo back what they thought they heard the first person say, using their own words. However, it is difficult for two people to really hear the similarities and differences between what they said and what they heard. The third person thus became a neutral sounding board who told both individuals that spoke what they said. Together, all three could figure out the similarities and differences between the statements. After consensus is reached, all three students switch roles. I call this the Echo Exercise, and it shows how triads can be beneficial at times when the natural characteristics of dyads don't lead to optimum results.

Final Notes

As it happens, this article was created by a triad. It wasn't purposeful, nor was it meant to show off the findings of this article. Instead, the triad evolved naturally because it proved the best group size for writing this piece.

I came up with the initial concept for the article and wrote out the problem and introduction. Elyn then did considerable research and wrote up a rough draft of her findings. To that point, we were a committed dyad, working together in an organic way. However, we also had an article that felt like it was in two parts. That's when I had Shannon join us. He reorganized the article, unified its voice, and produced a final draft.

Though it wasn't purposeful, you can see the advantages of triads just from this example. Most notably, our triad made great use of elemental diversity. Though I held the core ideas and concepts for the article, Elyn provided the research expertise and Shannon provided the editorial expertise that were required to complete it. Voting also came into the equation (in the unconscious way that it tends to in triads) when Shannon effectively "broke the tie" of two different writing styles.

Since then, this triad has fallen apart. It's something that was created for a specific project and with all of our other tasks, we didn't have room for it going forward. Teams breaking apart is natural. Sometimes it happens under normal conditions (as was the case with this triad), and sometimes it happens as a result of unhealthy conditions.

I did not give BGIedu any advice at the time about the termination of a team, although it will eventually come up: some teams will end badly, and members of these groups may leave with an impression that a triad is a bad group size, even though the size did not lead the group to ending in an unhealthy way. Perhaps the groups should be counseled, or perhaps the members should jump right back on the triad horse ... but that's a topic for another article.

From here, I'd like to open the conversation up to you. Have you had experiences in either dyads or triads that you would like to share? Were you one of the BGIedu students in a Study Buddy triad? Did the experiences match the studies shown here or did you have an experience that differed? We invite your comments.

Reference:

Allen, Christopher (2008) Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds Life With Alacrity (blog) (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2008/09/group-threshold.html)

Alkaslassy, E. (2011) How often do students working in two-person teams report that work was shared equitably? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36. 367-375. (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02602930903428700#preview)

Baer, M. (2010) The Strength-of-Weak-Ties Perspective on Creativity: A comprehensive Examination and Extension. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95 592-601. (http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/workingpapers/pdf/2010-02-008.pdf)

Basden, B.H., Basden, D.R., Henry, S. (2000) Costs and Benefits of Collaborative Remembering. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1. 497-507. (ftp://124.42.15.59/ck/2011-03/165/030/165/530/Research%20ArticleCosts%20and%20benefits%20of%20collaborative%20remembering.pdf)

Bertucci, A., Conte, S., Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T. (2010) The Impact of Size of Cooperative Group on Achievement, Social Support and Self-Esteem. Journal of General Psychology, 137(2), 256-272. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20718226_)

Blaskovich, J.L. (2008) Exploring the Effect of Distance: An Experimental Investigation of Virtual Collaboration, Social Loafing and Group Decisions. Journal of Information Systems, 22 27-46. (http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JINFE3000022000001000027000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes&ref=no)

Day, E.A., Arthur, W., Bell, S.T., Edwards, B.D., Bennett, W., Mendoza, J.L., & Tubre, T.C. (2005). Ability -based pairing strategies in the team-based training of a complex skill; Does the intelligence of your training partner matter? Intelligence, 33, 39-65. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000972)

De Cremer, D., Leonardelli, G. J. (2003). Cooperation in Social Dilemmas and the Need to Belong: The Moderating Effect of Group Size. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice, 2, 168-174 (http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/geoffrey.leonardelli/2003GD.pdf)

Laughlin, P.R., Hatch, E.C., Silver, J.S., Boh, L. (2006) Groups perform better than the best individuals on letters-to-numbers problems: effects of group size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4. 644-651. (http://www.agileadvice.com/archives/Research%20on%20Group%20Effectiveness%20vs%20Individuals.pdf)

Markam, S.E., Dansereau, F. Jr., Alutto, J.A. (1982) Group size and Absenteeism Rates: A Longitudinal Analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 25 921-927. (http://www.jstor.org/pss/256108)

Seibold, D., Kang, P., Gailliard, B., Jahn, J.. Communication that Damages Teamwork: The Dark Side of Teams. Conference Papers - International Communication Association; 2008 Annual Meeting. 1-32. (http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/3/0/5/1/pages230513/p230513-2.php)

Smith, S. and Haythorn, W.W. (1972) Effects of Compatibility, Crowding, Group Size, and leadership seniority on stress, anxiety hostility and annoyance in isolated groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 22, 67-79 (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1972-24882-001)

Taylor, R. B. De Soto, C.B., Lieb, R., Sharing Secrets: Disclosure and Discretion in Dyads and Triads. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1196-1203. (http://www.rbtaylor.net/pub_jpsp_1979.pdf)

The goal of this portion of the class is to cover an introduction and overview of the landscape of the Social Web, establish among the students the beginning of a shared language about the medium, and introduce a process toward a collaborative culture that we will use for the rest of the course. Students are also kicking off their Beat blogs on sustainability topics, with the goal of helping them move toward having an authentic online voice.

TOPIC: New Ways of Learning

When I designed this class four years ago, I was inspired by Michael Wesch's class at Kansas State University. This is a shared artifact created by his class that I use to set the stage for my own students.

• Wesch, Michael + Students “A Vision of Students Today”, Digital Ethnography. 12 Oct 2007
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
  • BLOGPOST: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119
  • HI-RES VIDEO: http://www.mediafire.com/?3xbhmdmsfmd
  • KEYQUOTE: “This video was created by me and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in.”

TOPIC: Shared Language

Every time a new group of people meet together — whether in a team, in a marketplace, or in a community — one of the first activities they must do together is create a shared language. They do this in order to communicate more effectively together, to put a context on the words that they have in common, to construct a shared understanding in their minds based both on available information and their individual diversity of experience.

• Allen, Christopher. “Creating Shared Language and Shared Artifacts”, Life With Alacrity. 2009-09-17
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2009/09/creating-shared-language-and-shared-artiifacts.html
  • KEYQUOTE: “Without a shared language there will be no clarity on mutual goals — whether it involves working together, transacting a trade, or creating something…However, some facilitators have learned that one of the best ways to help a group form a shared language is by having the group create together a shared artifact…It allows the individuals participating to ask the questions: "Is this what you mean when…"

• Pinker, Steven "Book Excerpt: Steven Pinker: Words Don't Mean What They Mean" Time Magazine, 2007-09-06
  • ARTICLE: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1659772,00.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship."

• Kim, Eugene Eric "Developing Shared Language" eeKim.com, 2006-06-09
  • BLOG: http://eekim.com/blog/2006/06/developing-shared-language/
  • KEYQUOTE: "Shared Language is a prerequisite to collaboration. Without Shared Language, we can’t collaborate. It’s as simple as that. When a group tries to collaborate without having Shared Language, the group will try to create it, whether it’s aware of it or not. This creation process is often frustrating and painful, and as a result, people sometimes try to skip this step or belittle the process. This is a problem. You can’t skip this step."

TOPIC: Introduction to the Social Web

So what is the Social Web? It is Social Networks of people having conversations; Who are sharing Social Media; It functions using Social Software applications; And takes advantage of the toolchest of open technologies called Web 2.0.

• Allen, Christopher “Intro to the Social Web Slidecast ” Slideshare 2010-09
  • SLIDECAST: http://www.slideshare.net/ChristopherA/introduction-to-the-social-web-2010-0714final-5299817
  • KEYQUOTE: “There is only one way to manage this rapid change — JOIN THE CONVERSATION”

So what are Social Networks? A web of interconnected people who directly or indirectly interact with or influence each other.

• Lefever, Lee “Social Networking in Plain English”, CommonCraft, 2007-06-27
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc
  • (ABSTRACT: http://commoncraft.com/video-social-networking )
  • KEYQUOTE: “Social Networking in Plain English introduces the basic ideas behind Social Networking. The video focuses on the role of social networking in solving real-world problems. The video includes: The role of people networks in business and personal life; The hidden nature of real-world people networks; How social networking sites reveal hidden connections; The basic features of social networking websites.”

• Levin, Adina "Social Networks Will Enhance Productivity" Ideas Project, 2009-09-04
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuCo5zgW5PU (00:04:58 in length)
  • TRANSCRIPT: http://www.ideasproject.com/transcript.webui?id=4538
  • (ABSTRACT:http://www.ideasproject.com/idea_person.webui?id=4537 )
  • KEYQUOTE: "The big trend I'm seeing in the future of communications is actually using the social network to share, to be more productive in the work environment, and to do more expression, organizing, creativity, in social and civic context. We're just in the early stages of the enabling technology to make that happen, how to make that happen technically, and how to make it happen socially so that we can use our social networks and use our groups as a foundation for doing really interesting, productive, and creative things."

SUB-TOPIC: Social Web - Social Media

• Qualman, Erik “Social Media Revolution 2 (refresh)”, YouTube, 2010-05-27
  • VIDEO: http://youtu.be/omSKo1OW6CU
  • ABSTRACT: “Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.”

• Shirky, Clay "How Social Media can Make History", TEDed 2009-06
  • VIDEO: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/clay-shirky-how-social-media-can-make-history
  • ABSTRACT: "While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics."

SUB-TOPIC: Social Web - Social Software

SUB-TOPIC: Social Web - Web 2.0

• Welsch, Michael “The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)”, Digital Ethnography
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
  • HI-RES VIDEO: http://www.mediafire.com/?6hqygitsy0v
  • SUMMARY: “Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes”

• Strickland, Jonathan "How Web 2.0 Works" How Stuff Works, 2010-01
  • ARTICLE: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-20.htm
  • KEYQUOTE "In September 2005, Tim O'Reilly posted a blogentry that defined Web 2.0. The explanation spanned five pages of text and graphics illustrating O'Reilly's take on what the term meant. O'Reilly's philosophy of Web 2.0 included these ideas:
    • Using the Web as an applications platform
    • Democratizing the Web
    • Employing new methods to distribute information"

SUB-TOPIC: History of the Social Web

• Chapman, Cameron "The History and Evolution of Social Media" Web Designer Depot, 2009-10-07
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/the-history-and-evolution-of-social-media/
  • QUOTE: "Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. It seems there are social solutions to just about every need. In this article, we’ll review the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day."

TOPIC: Best Practices

SUB-TOPIC: Best Practices — Passwords

• Allen, Christopher "Password Best Practices" Life With Alacrity, 2009-09-25
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2009/09/password-best-practices.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "Be Safe: None of these approaches is perfect, but they significantly raise the bar against any but the most determined cracker from breaking into one of your accounts. The domain letter technique will also make it very difficult for a cracker to break into your more important financial accounts if he gets access to your password from a poorly secured website or masquerades as a legitimate website or email by using a phishing attack."

SUB-TOPIC: Best Practices — Information  and Time Management

• Allen, Christopher “Scan, Focus, Act” Slideshare 2010-20111
  • SLIDECAST: http://www.slideshare.net/easleyme/scan-focus-act
  • KEYQUOTE: “My advice is that you break what it is you’re doing into these phases: Scan, Focus, Act. This is going to allow you to filter information more effectively.”

SUB-TOPIC: Best-Practices — Backchannels

• Guernsy, Lisa "In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus" New York Times: Circuits, 2003-07-24
  • ARTICLE:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24mess.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "But others are genuinely interested in a lecturer's topic and want to talk concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass around links to Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker's point. For them, wireless technology allows a back channel of communication, a second track that reveals their thoughts and feedback and records it all for future reference."

• Mitchell, Olivia "How to Present While People are Twittering" Pistachio, 2009-02-23
  • BLOGPOST: http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/
  • KEYQUOTE: "The back-channel blurs the line between the presenter and the audience. Now everyone can be an active participant."

TOPIC: The Social Era

• Merchant, Nilofer "Rules for the Social Era" Harvard Business Review Blog Network, 2012-02-14
  • BLOGPOST: Part One: "Rules for the Social Era" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/rules_for_the_social_era.html
  • Part Two: "Social Means Freedom, for Better or Worse" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/social_means_freedom_for_bette.html
  • Part Three: "Why Porter's Model No Longer Works" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/why_porters_model_no_longer_wo.html
  • Part Four: "Why Social Marketing is So Hard" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/03/why_social_marketing_is_so_har.html
  • Part Five: "Stop Talking about Social and Do It" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/03/stop_talking_about_social_and_do_it.html
  • Part Six: "Traditional Strategy is Dead. Welcome to the #SocialEra" http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/traditional_strategy_is_dead_w.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "Companies cannot survive (let alone prosper) without recognizing that Social as a phenomenon can allow us to redefine our organizations to be inherently more fast fluid and flexible by its very design. Not by doing a little bit more, or slimming down a bit here or there, or by doing a few things a little bit faster. No. We will not tweak our way into the future."

TOPIC: The Dark Side

SUB-TOPIC: The Dark Side: Information Overload, Attention, Multitasking

• Shirky, Clay "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure" Web 2.0 Expo
  • VIDEO: http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/
  • (ALTVIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI )
  • KEYQUOTE: "What we're dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we're always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload...Thinking about information overload isn't accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is."

• Baer, Jay “Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy”, Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert
  • ARTICLE: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-networks/social-media-pretend-friends-and-the-lie-of-false-intimacy/
  • KEYQUOTE: “Fundamentally, technology and our use of it isn’t – as we’ve all hoped – bringing us closer together. In fact, it may be driving us farther apart, as we know more and more people, but know less and less about each of them.”

• Richtel, Matt "Attached to Technology and Paying a Price: Your Brain on Computers" New York Times, 2010-06-10
  • ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html
  • SINGLEPAGE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
  • KEYQUOTE: " Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored."

SUB-TOPIC: The Dark Side: Privacy

• Shirky, Clay "Facebook Killed the Private Life" Switched, 2007-11-06
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azIW1xjSTCo

  • KEYQUOTE: "You live your life online -- and anyone can read it. Should employers be able to troll your Facebook or MySpace page? Or should everything that you put online be accessible to anyone, anywhere?"

• Allen, Christopher "Four Kinds of Privacy" Life With Alacrity, 2004-04-22
  • BLOGPOST:http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/04/four_kinds_of_p.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "My thoughts have now gelled sufficiently to make some observations about privacy. When people speak about privacy, they may actually be talking about very different forms of privacy: defensive privacy, human-rights privacy, personal privacy, and contextual privacy."

• Madden, Mary "Privacy management on social media sites: Summary of Findings" Pew Internet 2012-02-24
  • SUMMARY OF FINDINGS: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Privacy-management-on-social-media/Summary-of-findings.aspx
  • KEYQUOTE: "Social media users who are college graduates are significantly more likely than those with lower levels of education to say that they experience some difficulty in managing the privacy controls on their profiles. … 11% of SNS users have posted content they regret."

• Consumer Reports "Facebook & your privacy — Who sees the data you share on the biggest social network?" Consumer Reports Magazone, 2012-06
  • ARTICLE: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2012/06/facebook-your-privacy/index.htm
  • ABSTRACT: "How much information is really being collected about you? How is it being used? And could it fall into the wrong hands? To find out, we queried Facebook and interviewed some two dozen others, including security experts, privacy lawyers, app developers, and victims of security and privacy abuse. We dug into private, academic, and government research, as well as Facebook’s labyrinthian policies and controls. And we surveyed 2,002 online households, including 1,340 that are active on Facebook, for our annual State of the Net report. We then projected those data to estimate national totals."

• Thompson, Clive "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" New York Times, 2008-09-07
  • ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
  • (SINGLEPAGE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all )
  • KEYQUOTE: "It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form."

SUB-TOPIC: The Dark Side: Power & Class

•  Boyd, Danah "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online" Personal Democracy Forum (YouTube) 2009-07-09
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGL09x76MGQ

• Boyd, Danah “class divisions & social networks” YouTube 2009-07-05
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CaK0GAT6A0 (00:01:13 in length)

TOPIC: Authentic Voice:

SUB-TOPIC: Authentic Voice — Introduction to Blogging

• Lefever, Lee “Blogging in Plain English”, CommonCraft 2008-03-05
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI
  • ABSTRACT: “A video for people who wonder why blogs are such a big deal. This is a short introduction to blogs - how they work and why they matter.”

• Lefever, Lee "RSS in Plain English", CommonCraft 2007-04-23
  • VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU
  • ABSTRACT: "A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web. This video comes in an unbranded "presentation quality" version that can be licensed for use in the workplace."

• Bernstein, Mark "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web" 2002-08-16
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writeliving
  • QUOTE: "Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge. Here are ten tips that can help."

• Patel, Neil "The First 7 Days of Blogging" Pronet Advertising, 2006-10-17
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/the-first-7-days-of-blogging.html
  • KEYPOINTS: "Don't launch until the blog is properly setup. Pick a topic and stick with it. Be consistent. Don't leave your readers stranded. Get to the point. Spice it up. Don't expect the world."

• Rowse, Darren "Declaring War on Blogger Apathy" ProBlogger, 2005-08-08
  • BLOGPOST:http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/08/08/1362/
  • QUOTE: "So I’ve decided it’s time to declare war on Blog Apathy and want to share a number of the things that have helped me keep my motivation up in blogging. Feel free to add your own experience and tips in comments."

SUB-TOPIC: Authentic Voice — Writing for Your Audience

• VanFossen, Lorelle "Are You Really Writing For Your Blog Audience?" The Blog Herald, 2007-05-04
  • BLOGPOST: http://www.blogherald.com/2007/05/04/are-you-really-writing-for-your-blog-audience/
  • KEYQUOTE: "Think about how the trendy, jargon, national, and regional references you use in your blog may be misunderstood or even confuse your blog readers. It’s critical for bloggers to be “understood”, so take time to look at what you write and how your writing may create a disconnect with your readers."

• Finney, Hal "Writing for the Future" extropy-chat 2004-11-19
  • BLOGPOST: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-November/011224.html
  • KEYQUOTE: "One thing we should keep in mind when writing here or in any online forum is that we are writing not only for the present, but for the future. Our words may well be read many times, even far into the future. They are recorded in public and private archives and will be available indefinitely. Given the likely increase in future levels of intelligence and attention, it may even turn out that more eyes see our writings in the far future than in the near present."

I welcome your thoughts for additional or replacement Social Web introductory readings that we can use in the next class in the Spring of 2013.

The class itself is an elective, but has become so popular that during this school year I am running the class three times: once this summer, again this fall, and a third time in the spring. This class is unique because it crosses class cohorts; it has also been available to members of the Seattle Metro MBA program; is the most popular class for auditing and alumni participation; and we have even had some faculty and TAs take the course. This means that we get a genuine cross-section of BGI and it has been a real inspiration and positive influence on the broader community and on other classes in the program.

The class itself is delivered in a hybrid (sometimes called blended) format — that is that we meet face-to-face on three different weekends for 6 hours each time over the course of a quarter. Supplementing those sessions, we meet online weekly in a synchronous chat room hosted by Blackboard Collaborate. In addition to being part of a hybrid program, my personal goal is for the class to be a completely flipped classroom, i.e. we reserve both face-to-face time AND our synchronous time in Collaborate for exercises, keeping lectures to a minimum. If I find myself lecturing, I try to record it so that in the next version of the course we can move the lecture into the readings.

This year is the first year that all MBA students are required to have iPads in the classroom. For many classes this will be mostly for electronic books, but in my class we will be using them for research, collaboration, social media, social networking and much more.

I have always intended the course content to be publically available, but I have just not had the time to massage it to the quality level that I was satisfied with. This year I have two TAs, whose assistance allows me to devote more time to making some of this material available to the public.

All of my course content is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.

Here is the official syllabus for this fall's class:

Using the Social Web for Social Change

Course Introduction

This course will focus on using the latest social online tools to effect social change. The course will incorporate technical and practical aspects of the social web, as well as critical discussion of the latest theories on how to effectively influence change using social web technologies.  Students will leave the class being comfortable creating a persuasive social web site or a social video on a sustainability topic, using either computer based or tablet based tools.

The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with the new and helpful tools available to them in the tool chest of open technologies called Web 2.0. Students will receive both a practical and a theoretical grounding in social networking, leading and participating in virtual teams, integrating the web into marketing efforts, and using the web to support social change. Students will use both computers and tablets for the duration of this course and will learn new and helpful tools specific to each device.

Prerequisite(s)/Co-requisite(s)

First year of the BGI MBA program

Instructional Contact Hours/Credits

3 credit hours

Please note that for every credit hour there will be a minimum of 10 synchronous contact hours (face to face and/or virtual session hours). Students should expect at least 2 hours of asynchronous learning (readings, written assignments, group activities) for every synchronous contact hour in this course.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the course, students will have demonstrated the following knowledge and abilities:

● Gain basic familiarity of using Social Web within a professional context
● Speak authentically online with a practiced proficiency using a variety of online mediums and have a mastery of least one medium
● Have a practiced proficiency in creating projects using Social Web tools that measurably effect social change

Core Competencies

• Demonstrate skills of online participation such as engaging in the blogosphere, and basic online community interaction
• Form an initial “personal brand” suitable for public profiles on- and off-line
• Scan, focus, act: learn effective tools to filter and organize large amounts of digital information
• Demonstrate the use of social networking services to articulate the student's personal network
• Create a variety of forms of social media, including demonstrating skills of basic audio and video editing
• Incorporate and properly attribute Creative Commons and/or fair use content into social media
• Demonstrate basic Web 2.0 approaches, in particular, openness, transparency, iteration, “ship early and often,” “fail fast,” and “perfection is the enemy of the good”
• Exhibit an understanding of the audience, use of techniques of influence and persuasion and an understanding of the barriers to change
• Participate in analysis, dialogue, constructive criticism, and iterative improvement of the social web with fellow classmates and faculty

• Zúniga, M. (2008) Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. New York, N.Y.: Celebra, 2008. Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/Taking-System-Change-Digital-ebook/dp/B001EH5YRW/ REQUIRED.
• Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York, NY: Random House. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Survive-Others-ebook/dp/B000N2HCKQ/ REQUIRED.
• Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2010). Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard. New York, NY: Random House. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-ebook/dp/B0030DHPGQ/ REQUIRED.
• Cialdini, R. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion (revised edition). New York, NY: Random House. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Influence-ebook/dp/B002BD2UUC/ REQUIRED.

Please note that we recommend (but do not require) that students purchase the Kindle ebook editions of these works, as it allows for shared quotes and annotations during the class.

All other required course materials are either available online, are in the BGI Library, or are part of Virtual Classroom archives.

All students are required to have an iPad 2 and a laptop with video editing capability. A video camera or smartphone capable of HD 720p or 1080p video is highly recommended.

Instructional Methods

Learning journals; sustainability-related “beat” blog; collaborative social media for social change; collaborative discovery, virtual classroom sessions.

Topical Outline

Week 1 — Introduction to the Social Web: Shared Language & Collaborative Discovery
(Oct 1st - 7th — Virtual Session: Wed Oct 3rd)
Topics: Social web terminology; social web basics — social networking, social media, social software & web 2.0; collaborative culture: shared language & shared artifacts; shared bookmarking & collaborative discovery; collaborative editing; scan-focus-act
Pre-Class Deliverables: Survey and pre-class readings & assignments; enroll in private Facebook group for course
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Comments on pre-virtual session advance readings, choose beat topic
Weekly Deliverables: Comments on weekly readings; set up beat blog; first beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media, collaborative discovery & shared glossary; iPad familiarization & setup

Week 2 — Collaborative Filtering / Barriers to Online Participation /  Personal Brand
(Oct 8th - 14th — Virtual Session: Wed Oct 10th, Intensive: Sat Oct 13th)
Topics: Collaborative filtering; filter failure; attention; flow; tagging — ontology vs folksonomy; barriers to online participation — online identity; reputation; exposure, privacy, risk, etiquette; online vs offline life; personal brand; authenticity
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Comments on pre-virtual session readings
Pre-Intensive Deliverables: Pre-intensive reading comments, pre-intensive suggested reading slide; pre-intensive personal brand assignments
Intensive Deliverables: Group discussion of topics, group activities on barriers to online participation; group personal brand activities
Weekly Deliverables: Post-intensive personal brand activities; comments on weekly readings;  second beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 3 — The Blogosphere, Social Networks & Microblogging
(Oct 15th - 21st — Virtual Session: Wed Oct 17th)
Topics: Blogosphere; blogging vs microblogging; social network theory; strong & weak ties; social networking services — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.; social capital; group size limits; ambient intimacy; branding keywords
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Draft personal brand; comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: social network articulation activities; social network privacy exercises; selected readings from Zúniga’s “Taking on the System”; comments on weekly readings; third beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 4 — Participation & Engagement
(Oct 22nd - 28th — Virtual Session: Wed Oct 24th)
Topics: Participation; engagement; affinity; association; participatory media; power laws of participation; participation inequality; participatory culture; attribution; copyright; fair use; creative commons; wikis & wikipedia; audio editing
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Revised personal brand; submit social networking profiles with revised personal brand; comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: Creation of edited audio for annotation of canvas or slidecast on topic of  students choice, comments on weekly readings;  fourth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 5 — Social Video
(Oct 29th - Nov 4th — Virtual Session: NONE FOR HALLOWEEN)
Topics: Video editing; social video; social media, ambient vs. immersive media
Weekly Deliverables: Pre-social video learning journal entry; social video associated with personal brand or beat blog; comments on weekly readings;  fifth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 6 — Memetics & Stickiness
(Nov 5th - 11th — Virtual Session: Wed Nov 7th)
Topics: Social video, social media, memetics, viral media
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: Selected readings from Heath & Heath “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” (Kindle book), comments on weekly readings;  sixth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 7 — Change: Tactics of Influence & Persuasion
(Nov 12th - 18th — Virtual Session: Wed Nov 14th, Intensive: Sat Nov 17th)
Topics: Tactics of influence & persuasion; barriers to change; ethics — values, power, propaganda;
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Pre-Intensive Deliverables: Pre-intensive reading comments, pre-intensive suggested reading canvas/slidecast/video
Intensive Deliverables: Group discussion of topics, team exercises in tactics of influence and barriers to change, brainstorming on social change projects; establish social change project teams, initial social change project teams, pitches
Weekly Deliverables: Readings from Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” (Kindle Book), comments on weekly readings;  seventh beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 8 — Overcoming the Barriers to Social Change
(Nov 19th - 25th — Virtual Session: NONE FOR THANKSGIVING)
Topics: Psychological and sociological barriers to social change, influencing environmental change; frames and framing; 
Weekly Deliverables: Post-intensive learning journal entry, Social change project teams finalize pitch, team roles assignment, draft plan for social change project; selected readings from Heath & Heath “Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard” (Kindle book), comments on weekly readings; eighth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 9 — Change: Understanding the Audience & the Channel
(Nov 26th - Dec 2nd — Virtual Session: Wed Nov 27th)
Topics: Audience, peers, online credibility; online channels; analytics; metrics; page rank;
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Audience and channel exercises, comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: First iteration of social change project; comments on weekly readings;  ninth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 10 — Open Topic (Student’s Choice)
(Dec 3rd - 9th — Virtual Session: Wed December 5th)
Topics: Student create social media on an open topic — past years topics have included: local social mobile / designing and facilitating online communities / fun, play & gamification / virtual reality
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Report on progress of social change project, comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: Audio-video social media creation related to open topic (canvas/slidecast/video), 2nd iteration of social change project; comments on weekly readings;  tenth beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 11 — Scaling Social Change
(Dec 10th - 16 — Virtual Session: Wed Dec 12th, Intensive: Sat Dec 15th)
Topics: Scaling, tipping points, disruptive change, culture of change
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Third and final iteration of social change project; report on results of social change project, comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Intensive Deliverables: Team creation of a fast social change project, group discussion of social change projects
Pre-Intensive Deliverables: Pre-intensive suggested reading canvas/slidecast/video
Weekly Deliverables: Comments on weekly readings;  eleventh beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Week 12 — Collaborative Iteration
(Dec 17th - 21st)(Virtual Session: Wed Dec 19th)
Topics: Iterative improvement, life-cycle of teams, constructive criticism, value of post-mortems
Pre-Virtual Session Deliverables: Comments on pre-virtual session advance readings; pre-session learning journal entry
Weekly Deliverables: Delivery of draft student personal brand portfolio, delivery of post-mortem or iterative change project; twelfth and last beat blog post; participate in class Facebook site, social media & collaborative discovery

Assessment Criteria and Methods of Evaluating Students

• Weekly Reading Commentary 10% 
• BGI Guide 20% 
• Social Media 20% 
• Social Change Project 20% 
• Class Participation 20% 
• Post-mortem 10%
  • Total: 100%

BASIC (1976)

In 1976 I encountered my first tool for ignition: Bill Gate's MicroSoft BASIC running on the IMSAI 8080. There was no ROM on this computer, so you had to load a boot program using the front panel switches you see above. This program would then allow us to use a paper-tape reader, from which we would load BASIC.

At 15 it wasn't the hardware that got me excited, it was the idea of software — that you could take a creative idea that was in your mind and then craft that idea into a reality.

My passion of the moment was French (the daughter of my French teacher was quite cute), so my first program was an attempt to teach my computer to translate between French to English.

Alas, I utterly failed in my first attempt, limited by the 4K RAM, and I had no more luck working in 8K. But my failure didn't matter in the long term — it inspired a career creating tools that nurture creative passions.

BBS (1978)

My next experience with a tool for ignition was Ward Christensen's CBBS, the first electronic bulletin board system. Within months of its release in 1978, there were BBSs sprouting up all over the United States. I dialed a long-distance number, logged into a BBS, and discovered many passionate people wanting to share their experience — not only computer, but life. For the first time, I experienced computer software as a tool for human interaction, not only as a utility for running a program.

By this point I was working after school part-time in a microcomputer store, so I scavenged up an old S100 computer and a used modem and made available a small BBS in my hometown. No longer having to pay long-distance charges, at 17 I found myself at the center of an online community. This experience proved invaluable — indeed, today I credit my success to the skills I acquired in facilitating online conversations and growing communities that share common interests.

MacPaint (1984)

Six years passed, and personal computers started to become more common in people’s workplaces and homes. Unlike the IMSAI 8080, they now had screens and keyboards, and they made great text processors and data crunchers, but they weren’t particularly “sexy”. On January 24, 1984, the first Mac was released, and I dropped into my local computer store to see what it was all about. The original 128K Mac was “different”, as Apple’s later marketing campaign put it, but also clunky in appearance.

However, my jaw dropped when I saw Bill Atkinson's (MacPaint) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint]. The simple elegance of this software that allowed me to draw and express myself graphically on a computer screen with a mouse was what sold me on the Mac, not the hardware.

By this point, I was making my living doing software development. I wasn't an artist myself, but I dropped everything to hire some artist friends to start drawing on the Mac. I would start a clip-art company, I thought, not knowing that too many other people had the same idea. So I considered how I could build on my prior experience with computers and take advantage of this new platform. I wrote a bootstrap app (in BASIC!) to take advantage of the Mac’s serial port and enable the user to download a more serious terminal app. Later I published the first Macintosh BBS Mouse Exchange BBS, and the first graphical interface to a BBS.

Open Standards (1985)

Later in 1985 I experienced my next tool for ignition — though “tool” may seem an odd term to describe something so abstract — open standards. I had recently parlayed my facilitation skills into a paid position as a CompuServe sysop, and because of my bootstrap app, the Mac BBS that I published, I participated in my first open standard, called MacBinary, a way of encoding early Mac applications so that they could be transferred online.

This was my first experience working with other engineers to facilitate the creation of something quite ephemeral and hard to describe to non-programmers. Not quite software, but a language between software, enabling them to share information and work together despite being written by different people in different programming languages.

In the open standards community I learned the value of some principles that I use daily: "Ship early and often", "Fail fast", "Perfection is the enemy of the good", "Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept", etc.

My experience with MacBinary motivated me to continue participating in open standards efforts over the years, leading to what I consider my biggest success as a facilitator and co-author of the SSL Standard, the world's most widely deployed security standard. What drew me to SSL (as opposed to competitive security standards offered by others) was that it could be used for much more than just internet transactions. It could be used to secure a variety of conversations between people. Using the power of the RFC editor, I reserved ports for secure SMTP, IMAP, POP, IRC, FTP and more. I got some flack for this as internet ports are considered a limited resource, but it turned out well when SSL and these ports were used twenty years later during the Arab Spring to help ensure freedom of communication between protesters.

HyperCard (1987)

Twenty-five years ago this month — August 11,1987 at MacWorld — I encountered Bill Atkinson's Hypercard. Hard to describe but truly a tool for ignition if there ever was one, Hypercard has been variously called a "stack of virtual cards, "hypermedia system", "programming for the masses". Bill Atkinson described it as "a construction kit that lets normal people make their own software".

I was already programming in a variety of programming languages, but like MacPaint before it, HyperCard drew me in because of its elegance and its ability to allow non-programmers to participate in the creation of software. You can see the most complex HyperCard stack I ever wrote, running a TV studio at Apple Computer, in the first 40 seconds of this 1990 video feature on HyperCard.

HyperCard empowered a whole generation of passionate, creative people who otherwise never would have had the chance to share their ideas and visions with the world. I saw thinkers I admired begin to express their thoughts through software. Artists and designers loved that they could bring their language of imagery to life. Children who never had programmed before would start by drawing on some "cards", add buttons, show their friends, get excited and ultimately start on the path to learn how to express oneself through software. Amazing stories were told: some of my favorites were "If Monks Had Macs", "Spaceship Warlock", "Beyond Cyperpunk" and ultimately Myst.

HyperCard had a profound impact beyond those who discovered and used it on the Mac. Many do not know that Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, was inspired by HyperCard. Ward Cunningham, investor of the first Wiki also credits it for inspiration.

HyperCard's 25th Anniversary

In celebration of Hypercard's 25th anniversary, we asked Bill Atkinson to come to the Hillside Club in Berkeley to speak. In advance of this, I asked my colleagues and friends to share what inspired them about HyperCard by posting to blogs and twitter using the hashtag #HyperCard25th. Here are some of my favorite appreciations:

Lion Kimbro ‏@LionKimbro HyperCard showed me that writing code can be like molding clay into a sculpture, forever changing my idea of programming.

debs ‏@debs Happy 25th Bday HyperCard. You introduced me to the empowering world of computers as creativity..b4 you it was intimidating

Sean McBride ‏@smcbride HyperCard got me started with computers and programming. Made a card catalog for my library in grade school. Thanks!

Richard Ford ‏@rvf It uniquely let me develop and share tools to solve problems and teach in minutes rather than days. Happy 25th Hypercard!

AnthroPunk ‏@AnthroPunk Apple's The Virtual Museum was stack. QT Beta-VM had JPL MARS data for 1st MULTIMEDIA MARS FLYOVER EVER!

Chris Heuer ‏@chrisheuer wow, can't believe it's been 25 yrs! HyperCard gave me an innate understanding if hyperlinked computing, leading me here...

Jason Sims ‏@stormchild HyperCard was way ahead of its time. It influenced the creation of the WWW, and powered the classic game Myst.

Grant Neufeld ‏@grant I have seen nothing before or since that can top HyperCard for fun and ease of getting into programming. It changed my world.

John McDaid ‏@jmcdaid Happy birthday, #HyperCard25th a still-unequaled tool that enabled a generation of writers to do amazing things. Thank, you Bill Atkinson.

Jon Pugh ‏@thejonpugh I first saw WildCard when Chuck showed up at A32 user group meeting with a bootleg beta. It was love at first sight.

Danny Ngan ‏@poopoorama Wow, HyperCard is 25 years old! It was the first app I used for animation and interactive media back in 1989.

Andrew Stone ‏@twittelator 25 years ago I was so inspired by Bill Atkinson's demo of HyperCard, I dropped everything and became a Mac programmer

John Stack ‏@johnstack Happy #Hypercard25th Easy for newbies! Gave me hope that I could get something done and I did!

Peter Thoeny ‏@peterthoeny Häppy 25th Birthday! Today is HyperCard's birthday. It inspired wikis and TWiki.

We are connected ‏@MarkDilley Happy birthday #HyperCard25th !! Without you there would be no #WikiBirthday !!

David Weinberger ‏@dweinberger 25 yrs ago I was at the HyperCard launch, greatest I'd ever seen. But HyperCard + Net != The Web

Sean Parent ‏@SeanParent HyperCard turns 25! The natural language structure in HyperCard had a big influence on Photoshop Actions. Thanks Bill!

Geppy ‏@geppyp Happy birthday Hypercard!!! This weekend is the 25th Anniversary of HyperCard, my first step in the mac programming world!

Worth Godwin ‏@windowsmachowto I discovered HyperCard when setting up a Mac lab for school credit in 1990. Thought it was amazingly cool & kinda miss it.

Alex Seville ‏@alex_seville Coming up with ideas, and easily implementing them with Hypercard certainly influenced my lifelong interest in programming

Jason McIntosh ‏@JmacDotOrg I used Hypercard while employed at UMaine to make interactive presentations for students & faculty. My first programming job.

Kristee Rosendahl ‏@SmartGardener1 HyperCard had seismic impact on how we envisioned/designed "multimedia" at the Apple Multimedia Lab back in those early days.

Bryan Stearns ‏@bryanstearns Standing on the shoulders of giants… like you do

Clark Quinn ‏@Quinnovator HyperCard played big part in my work and thinking: learning games and performance support tools

Scott Draves ‏@spot Blew my mind and absorbed many hours, yes we had it back in the 80s. Now remember the man who made it

Infinite Canvas (2012)

It is the mindset expressed in three more quotes from #HyperCard25th neatly sum up what inspired me to create a new tool for ignition — Infinite Canvas.

Mike Sugarbaker ‏@misuba It's HyperCard's 25th birthday. We still haven't seen its equal as far as I'm concerned. I hope we do.

David HM Spector ‏@dhmspector HyperCard let me do fast prototypes & lots of flexible mini-apps for my clients; great tool! So Apple, HC for iPad? Please?

Howard Greenstein @howardgr Hypercard – An Amazing Tool I Still Miss #HyperCard2th

Since 2007 I have been running a participatory event, originally called iPhoneDevCamp, but now called iOSDevCamp. Over the course of a weekend we get ~400-500 people to stay up late and show their effort in a Hackathon. At the last one 71 new iPhone and iPad apps were created in 36 hours, 29 of which were open source.

iOSDevCamp appeals to me because it is creative ignition in action — it was founded on twitter, organized as an online community, supports the ideals of collaboration and nutures passionate creative people. In recent years I've been quite proud of the diversity of the conference, with designers, artists, women, young adults and even children participating.

However, today the barriers between being a spectator and becoming a creator are huge. It is increasingly hard for a new user to create a good-looking web page. The skills required to create an iPhone or iPad app are quite intimidating. I have had many designers show up at iOSDevCamp whom I was unable to match with a coder because they lacked the most basic understanding of the principles of interactivity. Sadly, I was unable to facilitate their full participation.

So at iOSDevCamp 2010 I started Infinite Canvas, based on the principles of what inspired me about HyperCard. This tool needed to allow artists, designers, photographers, children to easily experience creating interactive stories and experiences. It needed to not only be easy to use, but also easy to share — no gatekeepers saying "This isn't good enough". It needed to support discoverability, where those new to the language of interactivity could learn and advance their skills to ultimately create quite sophisticated experiences. And it needed to take advantage of the new computing experiences that the iPad offers — portability, touchability — advantages that even the lightest laptop was never quite able to match.

The first version of Infinite Canvas iPad app, initially a viewer-only version, was approved and released Friday in the Apple App Store, the day before HyperCard's anniversary. There is a library of example canvases available which can be downloaded for free using the app. Users will be able to create their own canvases in the near future when the Infinite Canvas authoring tool makes its debut.

We still have a long way to go to offer all that HyperCard offered. We support both simple tiles and HTML5 tiles, but the learning bridge between them is huge. But in the spirit of "Ship early and often", "fail fast", and "perfection is the enemy of the good" we wanted to make this tool available now.

Bill Atkinson once explained what motivated him to create HyperCard: "A lot of people are going to get opened up, enabled, empowered to control their computer. That's really what we're trying to do.” And that is exactly what we are trying to do on the iPad with Infinite Canvas.

This year's topic is Food, and this year many of my students of my BGIedu class Using the Social Web for Social Change are using the day to help kick off their "Beat Blog" assignments. The goal of Beat Blogs is for each student to choose a topic they are passionate about and blog about it at least weekly for two and a half months. Many students decide to keep their blogs going afterwards, am I'm always tickled when that happens.

Some of the blog posts by my students on the topic of Food:

• Make a Connection for Blog Action Day (from Building Stronger Communities Through Sustainable Agriculture, a blog on sustainable agriculture)
• Blog Action Day & Permaculture (from Dave-A-Culture, a blog on permaculture)
• to Meat or not to Meat (from Near the Level, a moderate's blog on polarities)
• Learning What to Eat and What to Believe (from Liz Toots, a blog on digestive health)
• Food, Attention & Leadership (from Attention to Change, a blog on attention)
• Food and Dignity (from Apps for Change, a blog on web-based and mobile applications for good)
• Food Security, Stewardship, and Cross-Cultural Bridge Building (Cultivating Bridges, a blog on intersection of economic community development & faith)
• The Importantance of Fair Trade Chocolate (from Cacao for a Cause, a blog on cacao, sustainability, and conscious consumption)
• Listen to Your Stomach (from Sounds & Silences, a blog on sound, silence and holding space)
• A Solution for Food Deserts (from Rhizome Design Blog, a blog on designing solutions to empower people to radiate joy)
• Social Ignition via Food (from Social Ignition, a blog on empowering non-profits)
• Local Organic Food IS Clean Technology (from Opportunity Knocks for Cleantech, a blog on opportunities in clean tech)
• Good Food. Good Business. (from Spark in the Dark, a blog on living well while living lighter)
• Monsanto's Perfect Pumpkin (from Taryn's GMO Beat, a blog on GMO genetically modified foods)
• We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming... (from (ir)Rational minds, a blog on schizophrenia and mental health)
• Redesigning food systems. Redefining impacts. (from Systems Diva (in the Making), a blog on systems thinking)
• Can The Oceans Continue to Feed our Growing Population? (from Follow the Ocean's Heartbeat, a blog on ocean conservation)
• Food and health (care) (from Bodywork Economics, a blog on a business case for health, wellness and preventative therapies)
• Blog Action Day on Food (from ticsnow, a blog on technology innovation creativity and sustainability now)

All of these bloggers are new to the blogosphere, but if you appreciate what they have to say, give a quick comment — it goes a long way to encourage them to continue.

Literally.

That’s because Circles is the Google+ feature that users are generating the most buzz about. It’s Google’s answer to the problem of organizing your social graph online.

If you’re not familiar with a social graph it’s a map of everyone you know and how they are related to you. Social graphs are tricky; as you try to define them you’ll inevitably run into some complications.

Pete Pachal, news director of @PCMag comments:

“People want things easy, and Google Circles isn’t easy. It puts the burden on users to take the time to think about each and every contact and put them in a specific bucket. To use the feature effectively, users will certainly have to create new Circles, and that requires even more thought. After using Google+ for a few minutes last night, I was often unsure which Circles to put certain people in and, more to the point, which to leave them out of. And what if you create a new Circle that should include some of the people in other Circles you already have?”

Circles are lists that you’ve created by grouping people together and giving them a name. They’re important in Google+ because when you post you must explicitly say which “Circles” you wish to share with. Posting to a limited list of people is a big change from existing social networks such as Facebook, where posts are sent to all mutual friends by default, or Twitter, where posts are public. This change forces you to think more deeply about your social graph and who should see each item you post.

Your Initial Set of Circles

Google+ will present you with 4 suggested set of Circles: Friends, Family, Acquaintances, and Following.

Google+ also defines five special Circles: Two are only for reading: "Stream" which is everyone in any of your Circles; and "Incoming" which is are posts that are shared to you by people not in your Circles. Then are three special Circles managed by Google only for posting: "Your Circles" which is everyone in any of your Circles; “Extended” which is everyone in your Circles plus the people in their Circles; and “Public” which is anyone.

Few find this default set to be sufficient. As a result, most Google+ users are soon creating new Circles, moving people around, renaming Circles, etc.

There are sound reasons for people finding the default Circles limiting. Sociological research shows that everyone has a number of concentric personal circles (see my blog post Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles for more details). These circles are sometimes called “ego-centric” social graphs as the individual is located in the center. This sort of graph is the model I used when I began reorganizing my own Google+ Circles.

I started out using Support (for my Support Circle), Close (for my Sympathy Circle), Trusted (for my Trust Circle), and Colleagues (for my Emotional Circle), but that didn’t work for very long. I’ve since been experimenting with a number of different ways to organize my Circles. I wanted an initial set that would offer useful early advice for using Google+ but would still be applicable for when expanded to hundreds of people. (I now have over 600 people in my Circles.)

One insight I’ve had is to avoid the word ‘friends’, which has been corrupted to almost meaninglessness in recent years. So instead I use terminology like Peers for my trust circle and Kith for the combination of my support and sympathy circles. (Kith may be familiar to you from the phrase “kith and kin”. The root of kith means “to know”, thus it’s those people that you know very well and that know you very well.)

I also learned that sub-Circles exist within Circles. Using a ‘general ledger’ system of naming Circles with numbers—which I’ll demonstrate in a moment—helps me keep these Circles and sub-Circles in order and allows me to easily add new Circles when I need to. Hopefully Google+ will in the future introduce features that allow us to order Circles as we please, but until then this numbering system works.

Working with Google+ has also shown me that some Circles are for reading and other Circles are for posting. I’ll talk a little more about this below.

It has only been a week, but by combining these insights to organize my Circles I’ve improved my ease of use and become better able to manage my time while using Google+.

Here is my recommended initial list of Circles:

0.0 ME - a simple Circle with just yourself in it, for saving posts, for drafts, etc.
1.0 KIN - your family & extended family
2.0 KITH - your best friends, your confidants (i.e. those with whom one shares a secret or private matter, trusting them not to repeat it to others)
3.0 PEERS - your trusted colleagues, those who you work closely with, your collaborators
4.0 LOCAL - your neighbors, parents of your children's friends, people you'd invite to a party
5.0 {various groups & interests}
6.0 ACQUAINTANCES - people you know, but that you don't know well or that don’t know you well
7.0 FOLLOWS ME - people who follow you on Google+, who you may or may not know
8.0 WATCHING - people whose posts you read, but who don't necessarily read your posts
9.0 SPECIAL - useful for special lists & exceptions

Expanding Circles

Many people will find my default set of ~10 Circles to be very useful, and need only add a few more. However, the design of this set is to allow for much greater expansion should you need it.

Like those “personal circles” that I wrote about previously, most of the Circles above are ego-centric: they’re fundamentally centered on your own personal social graph. This isn’t the only potential type of Circle, however. Socio-centric Circles aren’t centered on you, though they still have some sort of membership boundaries, while info-centric Circles are based on topics instead of being based on relationships. These socio-centric and info-centric Circles will support many relationships better than ego-centric Circles do.

If someone seems to write a lot about a particular topic, I put him or her into an appropriate info-centric Circle. My own info-centric Circles thus include people who post about topics like iOS Development, the Social Web, Sustainability/Green, and Entrepreneuring. If a number of people are all part of a group or all come from a certain geographical area then I put them together in a socio-centric circle. After creating the Circles, I put the ones that were geographic into 4.0 of my ledger, then placed the others in 5.0. (I tried separating out groups and interests, and found that didn’t work, so now I keep them together.)

I now have over 600 people in my Google Plus+ social graph. All together my Circles now look something like this:

0.0 Read Later
0.1 Drafts
0.2 Book Project
0.3 iPad Project

1.0 ALL KIN
1.1 Immediate Family
1.2 Extended Family

2.0 ALL KITH
2.1 Close Friends
2.2 Old But Distant Friends
2.3 Distant Family

3.0 ALL PEERS
3.2 Collaborators
3.3 Current Professional Colleagues
3.4 Former Professional Colleagues

4.0 ALL LOCAL
4.1 Local Kith, Kin & Peers
4.2 Local Berkeley
4.3 Non-Local Seattle
4.3 Non-Local Portland

5.0 ALL GROUPS & INTERESTS
5.1 Entrepreneurs
5.2 Apple & iOS
5.3 - iOSDevCamp
5.4 Green & Sustainability
5.5 - BGIedu
5.6 Social Web
5.7 - Jerry’s Kids

6.0 ACQUAINTANCES
6.1 Familiar Strangers
6.2 Friendly Strangers

7.0 FOLLOWS ME
7.1 Core Audience
7.2 Commented or Shared My Posts

8.0 WATCHING
8.2 Pundits
8.3 Celebrities
8.4 Noisy

9.0 ALL
9.1 Everyone But Pundits, Celebrities & Noisy
9.2 Read Daily
9.3 Read Weekly

In a future blog post I’ll share my ongoing experience with using this approach to Circles, but this example shows how easy it is to separate and add Circles as your interests change and grow.

Managing Your Circles

We, as humans, enjoy social networks in large part because we get to interact with people. Managing your Circles is thus about more than just understanding your social graph. It also allows you to manage your time effectively when you read and share with other people on Google+. Here is my approach for how to manage the time you spend reading, sharing, and managing your social graph.

Circles for Reading

I find it useful to think about Circles that are explicitly for reading as different from Circles intended for sharing. I have a few of these read-only Circles. Thus, my “Pundits” Circle contains people that share a lot and for whom I don’t always want to read everything. My “Read Daily” Circle is conversely for people for whom I want to read everything they post.

I’ve also found Circles helpful for close collaborators. It’s easy in Google+ to have a conversation with someone directly by simply typing their name as +<name> into the share field of posts. However, I find these direct posts get lost over time. To resolve this problem, create a Circle dedicated to just the two of you: a dyad. I have a number of people that I’m collaborating with closely and I use these small Circles to both keep track of our mutual posts and to see what they are thinking about at the moment. Examples of this kind of two-person Circle include my “Book Project” and “iPad Project”

Time Management of Reading Circles

Each day I look first at my “ALL KIN”, “ALL KITH” and and “ALL PEER” Circles to see what is going on with my support, sympathy and trust cliques. Then I’ll read my “Read Daily” Circles.

After reading these daily basics (which I try to keep to a limited number), I’ll typically pick an interest, a geography, or a group, depending on what I’m doing that day. (My personal time-management style is to only follow one interest per day, e.g. if I am working on my iPad app then I’m not reading Social Web posts.) If I’m preparing a blog post and want to see what my audience is thinking I might review “Core Audience”, or “FOLLOWS ME”. If I’m traveling I might read one of my non-local Circles such as “Seattle”. If I’m doing ‘weak-signal research’ I might start with “ALL INTERESTS”, but if I’m particularly tolerant of noise I might read “Familiar Strangers”, “FOLLOWS ME”, “Everyone but Pundits & Strangers”, “Pundits”, or even “ALL”.

Posting to Circles

One of the important reasons for creating Circles in the first place is so that you can share with groups of people. I’ve developed some strategies for this as well.

Circles for Posting

I’ve found it useful to create a Circle that only contains yourself. I have two of these — “Read Later”, and “Drafts”. If I’m reading and I see something interesting but don’t have time for it immediately, I’ll share it with my “Read Later” Circle so that I can quickly go back to it. Similarly, if I need to do some more research before writing and sharing, I’ll share my immediate thoughts in “Drafts”. As new features are added to Google+ these Circles will hopefully become obsolete, but they are useful for now.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Private Posts

When sharing, you want to ask yourself if this is ‘private’ post, a ‘quasi-public’ post or a ‘public’ post.

My private posts tend to go “KIN”, “KITH”, a dyad project, or one of the sub-Circles of PEER depending on their context. Some posts that are of only geographic interest (say a party, or local event) will be shared privately to the appropriate local Circle. If you are using my ledger system of using numbers in Circle names, these are the lower numbers—5.0 and below are Circles where I’m more sensitive about privacy.

Once shared, these more personal posts will be labeled as “Limited” instead of using the “Public” label that allows anyone to see them. If a recipient tries to share a “Limited” post, a box will pop up reminding the person: “This post was originally shared with a limited audience – remember to be thoughtful about who you share it with”. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, one purpose of Circles on Google+ is to determine who gets what information.

Though it may be easy to create Circles to segregate those with whom you wish to share private information, the recipients of your posts have no such limitations and could share outward beyond your intent (though they will be warned if they try to, as noted above). To enable further privacy you can disable resharing of these personal posts made to your Circles. To do so, share your post to a non-public Circle, then you select the arrow in the upper-right-hand corner where you can edit, delete or disable the post, and click on the final option, “Disable Reshare”.

There’s another privacy issue: by clicking the grey “Limited” label, a message’s recipient can see all others you shared the post with. This could potentially result in privacy problems, as the reader could discover who is in one of your Circles. There are ways of eliminating this by going into your Privacy account settings, which I will cover in a future post.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Quasi-Public Posts

I call posts “quasi-public” when they’re of narrow interest to a specific group or a topic that isn’t really relevant to other members of my audience. I find these quasi-public posts happen the most for my more esoteric interests—for instance, when I’m sharing a complex iPhone development article that is really only interesting to a narrow group of my contacts.

In Google Reader, I typically wouldn’t share these articles at all because there were so many of my contacts that wouldn’t be interested in them and it would only be noise to them. Ditto with Twitter. I found that sometimes people would stop following me after a conference I attended because I posted regularly and the conference was not of interest to them. This could be quite frustrating at times. Though these posts were not private by any means, I only wanted to share them with a specific group, such as an iPhone group. Now with Circles, I can share this information easily with my “Apple & iOS” Circle. I find that this feature is what makes Google+’s Circles so potentially powerful.

Though I might offer much of this more esoteric information as “quasi-public” posts to a specific group or interest, I’ll probably offer the best of them to the “Public”. Sometimes that is what it means to be a Maven—you share across social network boundaries.

Managing Sharing Privacy of Public Posts

Sharing a post to your “Your Circles” is effectively public, as is sharing to “Extended Circles”. Ask yourself if there is really some reason why you don’t want to make a post totally “Public” so that it is searchable by those who are not members of Google+. If there is some reason, consider sharing to your “ALL” Circle or some other more limited circle instead, as you’ll have more control and can turn off resharing or commenting.

Managing Your Social Graph

Maintaining your Circles can take away from the time you can spend on reading and sharing. I’ve come up with the following strategy to limit the time I spend.

To start with, I have some basic rules for which Circles to place people in:

• When I’m notified that someone is following me, I add them to “FOLLOWS ME” and an appropriate other Circle. If I vaguely recognize a follower’s name or face, I put them in “Familiar Strangers”. If I don’t recognize them at all but they look interesting, I add them to “Friendly Strangers”.

• When I’m notified that someone has +1’ed, commented, or mentioned me in a post, I add them to “Core Audience” and the appropriate sub-Circle. I will also make sure that the other Circles they are in are correct.

• If I discover while I’m reading that someone is too noisy for the Circle I selected, I’ll move them to a more appropriate Circle—or place them in the “Noisy” Circle or even block them.

Time Management of Your Social Graph

In addition I review a few of my Circles every day. I do so by going to “Manage Circles”, then selecting “People in your Circles” and sorting by last name. I choose that letter of the alphabet that corresponds to the day of the month and hover my mouse over each name. (For example, I look at names starting with “L” on July 12th, as “L” is the 12th letter.) Google+ highlights the Circles that each person is in. If they’re in the wrong Circle, I move them. I might even click on some people and review their profile so that I can see who they are—or (if I already know them) see what they are up to lately, update my address book, and maybe send them a brief email. At the end of the month (on the 27th through the 31st) I review my overall Circles lists. This way, over the course of each month I briefly review my entire social network, without spending too much time on it. (I try to spend 10 minutes or so a day.)

Periodically (right now weekly, but hopefully eventually monthly) I do some larger scale management of my Circles. Learning how to do this the first time is a pain, but once you know how it only takes a few minutes.

• I go to “Manage Circles” and select “People Who Have Added You”. I sort that list by “Not Yet in Circles”, “Select All” and add the people revealed to “FOLLOWS ME”.

• I then do the same with all of my Circles to update my “ALL” Circle.

• Finally, I copy my “ALL” circle to “Everyone But Pundits, Celebrities & Noisy” and remove any Pundits, Celebrities or Noisy people from that Circle.

When managing your Circles, remember the motto “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good”. You are the only one that sees who is in which Circle, and you can place people in multiple Circles. So your Circles don’t have to be perfect, just good enough. If you share a lot of private posts, concentrate on making sure that those more personal Circles are more accurate.

Using these approaches, you should find Circle management quick, and you won’t get mired down in Circle management for hours at a time.

Summary

Looking back, I wish I had this organization when I started on Google+ two weeks ago. By using some of these techniques from the beginning I would have made my life a lot easier. Over the next month I now have to go back and re-organize people and re-Circle them. I hope sharing these tips will make your use of Google+ simpler from the start!

Also, I expect that Google will be adding new features to make Google+ easier. For instance I’m hoping for #hashtags (the ability to tag posts into topic categories), favorites (the ability to tag posts into a persistent archive, hopefully with an option tag), ordering Circles, concentric Circles, and better integration with Google Reader. (I share my favorite blog posts on Google Reader at  and my best of best articles and posts in Twitter Favorites or Delicious.)

As with any new online feature, people are finding out new things and coming up with new ideas every day. So what are your methods for organizing your Circles and social graph?

If you want to follow me on Google+, I’m at +Christopher Allen.

If you'd like to comment using Google+, there is a public comment thread about this post.

If you would like to subscribe to my Google+ posts in Google Reader, use my PlusFeed.

Some other posts from my blog related to this post:

• 2005-03: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2004-08: Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture
• 2004-08: Progressive Trust

Some recent high signal-to-noise blog posts on Google+ and/or managing your Circles:

• +Matt Stratton: How I Set Up My Circles in Google+
• +Anson Alex: Guide to Working with Circles in Google Plus
• +Adina Levin: The promise of Google+ for organizing
• +Sterling Ledet A Thought on Google+ Circles – Privacy vs. Relevance
• +Dave Pollard: Google+: On Communities, Circles, Friendship and Love
• +Beth Kanter: Are You Going To Adopt Google+ for Professional Learning/Networking? Why or Why Not?
• +Damon Morda: Five Steps to Configuring Privacy on Google Plus (+)

Some quality recent public Google+ posts regarding Google+ or managing your Circles (be sure to look over the comments):

• +Robert Scoble: My tips for newer users of Google+
• +Dave Gray: Where circles can go
• +Dave Gray: Sharing Universe
• +Dave Gray: Is Google plus public or private?It’s neither, and both!
• +Beth Kanter: Insightful Threads
• +Craig Kanalley: Tips & Thoughts on Google+
• +Paul Goode: Sketch on Google+

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on related to this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• personal circles - everything I have on the of personal limits.
• familiar strangers - those people you recognize by face.

Illustration by Nancy Margulies, Many thanks to +Elyn Andersson and Shannon Appecline for their assistance with this post.

The real value of participating in this exchange is in the reciprocity and the social capital, but if the indie project is financially successful some ill will can arise about who really owes whom. One way that some creative producers deal with this is to have in effect two budgets, the real budget, and the virtual budget. Joss Whedon (creator and producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Firefly, Dollhouse, etc.) describes how he did this for his recent successful internet project Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in a recent interview at the Wharton business school:

Whedon: We got so much of this done through people doing us favors — department heads and people who have access to things. But you've got to pay your day-to-day crew. The actors all did it for nothing. And we all did it for nothing. So, the production costs alone — the basic costs of filming the thing, and getting the locations, props and everything — ran a little over $200,000.

We had a secondary budget drawn up in case of a profit, wherein we were trying to find rates for Internet materials. In some cases they didn't exist. We used models that had been created by the guild for repurposed, or reused, material that we used for original [content], because this had never come up before.

We didn't want to leave a sour taste and say, "Well, we made some money off of you guys being kind." It was like: No, everybody has to benefit from what they've done, obviously not enormously — it's Internet money we're talking about — but as soon as we got in the black, we paid everybody off.

So that budget was probably about twice what the original budget was.

Knowledge@Wharton: You've now earned more than twice the original cost?

Whedon: Yes.

Knowledge@Wharton: Which members of the production shared in the profits on the backend?

Whedon: The crew that got paid, got paid. [Those] who didn't get paid [included people like] department heads who had jobs and could afford to do this as a lark.

As we go forward into profit, there are also residual schedules and payment schedules for all of the creative people. We're trying to figure out how that works.

From the start I also laid down a gross participation scheme for my three key actors and the other three writers. While the guild was negotiating for one-tenth of a yen, I said, "How about we just get into some percentages." It was an opportunity to say to the guilds, "Guess how much better we can do" — which, in the case of the Internet, is the only way for the guilds to survive.

I've used a similar technique for internet startups, where the favors and the free time often fly wild and cause the entrepreneurs problems later.

My general rule of thumb is to get entrepreneurs to think one-third brains, one-third brawn, and one-third money. That is, people who bring knowledge, people, resources, brand, etc. get 1/3 of the outcome, people who actually work on the project get 1/3, and people who fronted the money or paid cash for expenses get the last third. Many people get a little equity from all three piles. If money comes in, the people who fronted cash get their money back first, then the other shares of revenues are distributed to everyone else based on the contributions.

It isn't a perfect model, but an afternoon of discussion with a team early on the entrepreneurial process--using this as a starting point for discussions — is often very successful in addressing future issues head-on before people become invested in differing expectations.

I suspect that many other industries may have interesting creative ideas on how to monetize favor if an outcome is good, but otherwise give out reciprocity of favors or social capital in the common good. Do you know of any of these?

Credits: Joss Whedon photo CC-NC licensed by JD Lasica / SocialMedia.biz.

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year's Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is sponsored yearly by Change.org. I wish I had known earlier as this would have been a great exercise for my sustainable MBA students at BGI.edu, as they are all creating their blogs this week for my class "Using the Social Web for Social Change".

This is now the second time this week that a significant event on this topic has slipped by me. Apparently on Monday the 19th there will be a Social Media for Sustainability Conference in San Francisco, that seems to have a really good list of speakers. But I only heard about it yesterday.

Part of the problem is that as a blogger I'm not hooked in tight with the sustainability community — clearly because of my BGIedu connections I am sympathetic, but I mainly for the last I've have been writing about the social web or the iPhone. My disconnect demonstrates the challenge of communicating outside your own social circles, both for those trying to create change, and to those that might benefit from the message.

Which brings me to a point that I need to make to my students – we have to figure out how to get ourselves out of info ruts. I teach a technique of Scan Focus Act that is really good at letting you manage your time to read and connect to a larger number of people via blogs, however, if you are too insular, you still may not get the information you need on time. It is through the weak links that we often get our useful information from, and we have to take time to maintain those weak links as well as the strong links to our community that are more easy to maintain as they are more satisfying.

Other then the fact that I learned about it late, I'm reasonably pleased by the example that the Blog Action Day website serves for my students. It satisfies the basic principles of identification and connection, and has a number of good calls for action, the first being to register your blog. The links featuring blog posts with whitehouse.gov, UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and a number of major websites, including the third on the list being in spanish, give the site a credibility. The most recents tab gave the site authenticity. I think I probably would have made the signup process shorter, and had users fill out information later, but it wasn't bad. 

There are a lot of things at this website which will be a good jumping off point for my students to think about as they work on their on blogs on sustainability, and their future Social Change media projects.

I talk about this a bit in my Group Threshold and Dunbar Number posts, where I call the group threshold size of between 10 and 24 people the “Judas Number” nadir, or low point. These group threshold nadirs exist when groups are too large for some processes to function effectively, but too small for others to work.

I am particularly aware of this threshold when I host small parties at my home. At 7 or so people everything just seems to work — conversations flow, everybody gets to participate, and everyone has fun. A the numbers climb past 10 I find that I as the host have to work harder, to be more aware of making sure that everyone is having a good time and that no one is left out. At some point as a party gets larger things just begin to flow again, as there are enough people that small groups can form and conversation flows well once more.

I've also seen this at business meetings. When my entrepreneurial companies were small an “all hands” meeting could be incredibly effective. All the issues and ideas got brought up, and everyone felt committed to our decisions. However, as these meeting grew, at some point the “all hands” meeting took too long and started requiring process and rules to be effective. The energy this consumed also diminished much of the efficacy of the meeting.

One tool that I've used to manage these odd-sized groups in the past is what I call “The Braid”. It is derived from a group process called the Café Method, of which The World Café and Conversation Café are excellent examples. In The Café Method, people meet in smaller groups around tables, and then flow from table to table sharing ideas, but ideally keeping each table at 4-7 people. There is an excellent free PDF guide to the Café Method offered by The World Café called Cafe To Go.

The Braid is a little more organized then the more ad-hoc Café Method. When you start a meeting you are given a small card that tells you which table to sit at for each round. Each table is assigned a scribe for each round to take notes at the table, and to report out the notes to everyone who arrives for the next round.

One nice thing about the organization of The Braid is that over the course of a number of rounds you'll have a brand new group of people to talk to during each round. Thus over the course of an hour or so you'll actually get to have a relatively short yet rich conversation with almost everyone in the room, rather than with just a few.

There are different forms of The Braid for different numbers of tables and sizes of groups, but my favorite is the Four Table Braid for groups of a minimum of 16 to a maximum of 28 people. One of the peculiar things about this Braid is that it seems to function well if people arrive at different times. The Braid fills first table A with 4 people so that they can begin talking, then fills table B, C, and D the same way. Once those tables are full, new arrivals are woven into The Braid one at a time until all tables have 5 people, then 6, then the max of 7 for a total of 28 people.

Another nice thing about the Four Table Braid is that no one needs to be the scribe more then once; the task is equally shared among all but the last 8 to arrive in a group of 28. Also, in just 4 rounds with 16 people, 90%+ of the participants have met. With 28 people, you simply only need 5 rounds to match the same 90%+ meeting percentage.

I find The Braid useful for a variety of different situations. The simplest usage is as a group warming and introduction exercise. You need not do more then two or three rounds in order for more than half of the people to have met each other. The Braid is also useful with a focused objective. For instance, I once used it after a game designers' conference, with each table having a list of "game design laws" where the participants were asked to either give an example that was in favor of the law or contradicted the law. It also can be useful in combination with a variety of other group process techniques, for instance after an MG Taylor Take-A-Panel, where each participant first creates a page telling a story about themselves 15 years in the future and then the group uses The Braid to discover common insights. The Braid can also be good before an Open Space or other unconference event.

I am including here my templates for a Four Table Braid. It includes 28 cards for printing on Avery business card paper, 4 table pages with instructions for participants, and 1 page with instructions for the host. I make these available as CC-BY-NC-SA license. I welcome any DTP folks out there who would like to make these documents more functional or more attractive.

A Three Table Braid is easy to figure out by hand, but larger Braids are more difficult. I've never figured out an algorithm for designing these quickly (any math wizzes out there?) so I've posted my spreadsheet for the Four Table Braid for those of you who might wish to figure out how to implement larger numbers of tables. I would love to have a Ten Table Braid as a warm up exercise for a small unconference.

Four Table Braid by Christopher Allen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.LifeWithAlacrity.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at ChristopherA.LifeWithAlacrity.com. The Power of Conversation graphic is used with permission from The World Cafe Image Bank.

Multiple Passwords

Note that I said that you want to ensure your passwords, plural, are strong. That's because you'll want at least two. They should both be good passwords, but they should be used in different places.

Use a “non-secure” password for any non-financial websites that you sign up for, such as Facebook and Twitter. Use a different “secure” password for places where your credit card is on file or money changes hands, such as eBay, Amazon, your bank, and your stock broker. Because banks and other financial institutions are more likely to maintain good security over their transactions, reserving a password only for those sites makes it more likely that they will remain safe.

Of course, this could just be the tip of the iceberg. You might want to create a third password for shopping sites, or another one for less reliable sites that you might use. Ideally you would use a different password for every site. That would surely be the most secure, as someone breaking into one site couldn't get into your other accounts — but clearly that is too many passwords to remember. As a compromise, I'll talk shortly about an easy technique to both remember and vary your passwords.

Criteria for Bad Passwords

In a moment, I'm going to suggest an excellent method for creating a secure password. However, if you prefer to use your own methods, be sure to watch out for these common problems which could result weak passwords.

• Do not use obvious words. There was a time when “password” was one of the most common passwords on the internet (along with “root” and “”).
• Do not use words from the dictionary as passwords. Some of the oldest password crackers just dumped the entire dictionary at an account to see if any of them worked as passwords. This doesn't apply just to English either. It's easy enough for a password cracker to use any dictionary, whether it be French or Klingon.
• Do not depend on a dictionary word with simple substitutions. Though I'll talk in a bit about the advantage of substituting letters for numbers, a dictionary word with simple substitutions will be no more secure than just a dictionary word. That's because later password crackers would run not only the dictionary, but also a dictionary with a few substitutions, such as “0”s for “o”s and “1”s for “l”s.
• Do not depend on multiple dictionary words concatenated together. If you were concatenating three or four words, you might be OK, but password crackers were checking two word dictionary concatenations a decade ago.
• Do not use obvious names of people or places you know. Your girlfriend's name, your street address, and your favorite pet's name are all straight out. A password cracker may not be able to guess these (though testing against common names is another strategy used by some), but if someone who knows you can break in by hand, that's no good either.
• Do not write down your password, and especially do not write down your password in an online or computer file. If you picked the best password in the world, it doesn't matter if someone else can easily look at it.
• Do not keep the same password forever. It's pain, but you really should change it every year or two, at least, just in case someone has broken into one of your accounts, and you don't know it.

A Method for Creating a Strong Password

So you've learned a lot about what makes a bad password. What makes a good password? The following suggests one method that you can use to create a password that's not easily breakable — but which is easily memorable.

1. Pick a short phrase, or an obscure but memorable long word. For example “amber waves” or “perspicacious”.
2. Shorten it to 7 characters, such as “ambrwvs” or “prspccus”.
3. Convert a letter other then first to a number. You can use those obvious substitutions here (e.g., A=4, B=8, E=3, G=6, I=1, L=1, O=0, R=2, S=5, T=7), since they're not your only method of security. This might produce “ambrwv5” or “pr5pccus”.
4. The next part is the key trick: use a specific letter from the domain name for the last character for your password and capitalize it. For example, you might add the third o from google, producing “ambrwv5O” or “pr5pccusO” for a GMail password. This ensures that even if you use your password at multiple sites, anyone who steals the password can't use it another website unless they know the trick. You can also use this trick with your computer's password by choosing the third letter from the name you use for the computer, or for a password required for a software application, by using the third letter from the app's name.
5. You should check the quality of your example password at Password Meter -- “ambrwv5O” weight is 54%, which is pretty good for an 8-character password, “pr5pccusO” is 44%, which is OK, but both are significantly better because they will be different at every site.

The same technique can be used with longer words to create more secure financial passwords. These might be easier to remember if you use the first letters from a sentence or poem that you can remember to generate the initial phrase. For example, “My first pet's name was Arthur the Valiant Dog” would generate “MfpnwAtVD”. Again, you convert one or more letters to a number (“Mfpnw4tVD”). 

When you add the domain letters to your secure password, you can strengthen it again by adding multiple letters, possibly to different parts of the password. For example, add the first and last letter the domain name. Thus a Google Gmail password might add a “G” to start and an “E” to the end, producing “GMfpnw4tVDE”. This one rates 70% at Password Meter, but again is actually better because of the site variation.

Also, most financial sites will accept, and some even require, passwords to include a symbol — I don't recommend this with your “non-secure” password as many ordinary sites do not allow symbols, but if you need one, then the following are some easy to remember substitutions: A=@, E=#, I=!, L=!, O=* S=$, or you can just put a symbol between the first domain letter and the passphrase (many sites will not allow a symbol at beginning or end). For example, password above could become “G$Mfpnw4tVDE” which raises this password's Password Meter rating to 90%.

With these two passwords you'll find it very easy to both remember and be secure against most password based attacks.

A High-Tech Alternative

An interesting high-security alternative that works best on webpages is to use SuperGenPass Bookmarklet — it takes the domain name plus a private master password and creates a unique high security password for each website based on a cryptographic hash of the two. It can generate any length of password and you can't really get a password that is more secure, but there is the occasional web page that the bookmarklet doesn't work on. Fortunately, you can save http://supergenpass.com/mobile/ as an .html file to your disk and you can open it anytime to manually create a supergenpass password for a website that you can copy and paste. I've even used SuperGenPass on my iPhone.

Secondary Authentication

Many sites require you to give them additional identification, such as mother's maiden name, the name of your pet, etc. Crackers have broken into various celebrities accounts — such as Paris Hilton and Sarah Palin — by researching this information and asking for a password reset.

You can avoid this danger by treating these authentication requests like passwords. I have a standard word that I use for my mother's maiden name, my pet, etc. They're things that I can easily remember, but no one could figure out. Like the password technique above, I can easily add a letter from the domain. I've had no problem with customer service phone calls to banks; when they ask me for my mother's maiden name I just spell it out my encode word for them.

Be Safe

None of these approaches is perfect, but they significantly raise the bar against any but the most determined cracker from breaking into one of your accounts. The domain letter technique will also make it very difficult for a cracker to break into your more important financial accounts if he gets access to your password from a poorly secured website or masquerades as a legitimate website or email by using a phishing attack.

However, don't ever think that a good password is the be-all and end-all of security. You also have to protect it adequately, and that doesn't just mean not writing it down, as mentioned above. You also must be alert to “social engineering”, where a cracker might call you or email you pretending to be associated with some institute where you might have an account.

Security is a constant game of oneupmanship between you and the black hats. Thus you need to ensure that you're always alert to the current best practices for setting, resetting, and protecting all of your security information on the internet.

But mastery of words is not enough to allow effective conversation.

That is because words themselves don't have meaning; the meaning is provided by the people who use them. Meaning is in the mind, not in the words.

Words also require context, outside of which they may have different meanings. For instance, consider the word "trust". To a banker or CPA "trust" is a property held by someone to manage for someone else's benefit. To a cryptographer it is the confidence in a future outcome based on probabilistic mathematics and past experience. Finally, to the lay person "trust" is about honesty. "Spin" is another example of a word that changes with context; to a weaver it is the production of thread, to a physicist it is a property of elemental particles, to an athlete it is a type of exercise class, and to a politician or public relations professional it is a way to tell a story to sway pubic opinion.

Creating a Shared Language

Every time a new group of people meet together — whether in a team, in a marketplace, or in a community — one of the first activities they must do together is create a shared language. They do this in order to communicate more effectively together, to put a context on the words that they have in common, to construct a shared understanding in their minds based both on available information and their individual diversity of experience.

Don't forget that the linguistic root of communication is the Latin verb commūnĭco  — which doesn't mean "to communicate" but instead means "to share something with someone, to take or receive a part of, to partake, to participate in". Thus the creation of a shared language takes us to the roots of communication.

Without taking the time time to create shared language, groups have a difficult time forging mutual trust. Without a shared language there will be no clarity on mutual goals — whether it involves working together, transacting a trade, or creating something. Without a shared language commitments can be hard to make, and if misunderstood can lead to disagreements. These group formation phases — trust building, goal clarification, and commitment — are essential.

Yet the art of creating a shared language together is not taught. Some individuals and groups do it intuitively while others will just let it evolve naturally over time. However, some facilitators have learned that one of the best ways to help a group form a shared language is by having the group create together a shared artifact.

Using Shared Artifacts

A shared artifact is the creation of an object or shared space that is created collaboratively. It allows the individuals participating to ask the questions: "Is this what you mean when you are talking about this? I use these words, so suppose we change it to this? Is that what you mean? Does this reflect our new shared understanding?"

Examples of shared artifacts include Watson & Crick's Tinker-Toy DNA model. Each scientist would work on the model separately, then use grad students to carry the model around to his partner to express certain ideas. Both Compaq Computer and Southwest Airlines were reportedly established after their founders wrote their ideas down together on a table napkin, another shared artifact.

Both of these examples show an important factor in shared artifacts — if the shared artifact is not constrained then it will be too large or complex for the group to reach some measure of completion. Finishing the shared artifact really helps establish trust and the connections between the participants.

A shared artifact is also useful because flooding someone with information and terms gives no assurance that the recipient has gained knowledge of the subject. Instead, the act of creation confirms to both parties that the knowledge was successfully assimilated.

Another advantage to creating a shared artifact is that it isolates any problems to the task at hand. Often there are differences in status, purpose, or perspective that can get in the way of group formation, but a focus on a common task of the creation of a neutral shared artifact allows those issues to come later as the participants develop the trust and shared language required to talk about those tough issues.

The best facilitators know what kinds of shared artifacts work best for different groups under different circumstances. Sometimes a shared artifact is just a model of a process drawn on a white wall. Often it is a creation of a mission statement or joint objectives. I personally like taking old mind maps and trying to recreate them anew with more recent knowledge.

The Future of Shared Language

The nature of shared language is changing in the 21st century. The conjoined social networks in the blogosphere — via Facebook, Twitter, or the attendee-focused Unconference — cause new terminology and new language to form ever faster. I've personally seen words like "retweet" and "attribution" gain important contextual meaning within my social networks. As with any shared language, newcomers have difficulty discovering their meanings only by osmosis.

Tagging is another means by which shared language is rapidly expanding. Certain words are gaining context through common use at Delicious.com, Technorati, Flickr, and other tag-enabled web sites.

To a certain extent, all of these new shared languages are built upon shared artifacts. Twitter, Facebook, Delicious.com and others sites each create constraints on how language is shared and with whom. However, there is little purposeful social design being applied to these new shared languages. Though there may be shared artifacts, they are not purposefully facilitated.

Will these increasingly organic shared languages prove better than more purposefully created ones or worse? Is social language facilitation the next big thing in social network? Or is there just not enough space for it within the tightly constrained social artifacts of the internet? These are questions that we as social software technologists need to address as the future of the internet increasingly becomes the present of our social groupings.

(I learned the concept of Shared Language in 1990 from Michael Schrage's book Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration. It is out of print, but there is a new edition retitled No More Teams!: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration. The use of a modeling language to facilitate group formation I learned from Matt Taylor (@worthyprojects) of MG Taylor Corporation, though the use of the term shared artifacts and approach is my own. I make passing reference to the early stages of team formation ("trust building", "goal clarification", "commitment") which come from the Drexler/Sibbet Team Peformance Model. The poem is by excerpt of a larger work by John Campion and is reprinted with permission — the work reflects the poet's Ecotropic concerns and are part of his third book-length poem Medusa. Look at the work under the Medusa Project link. The table napkin photo is from an excellent post on The Idea Napkin by Morry Potoka and is also reprinted with permission. The Watson-Crick photo is public domain, and the Life With Alacrity graphic was produced using Wordle.)

Defining "Noncommercial":  A Study of how the Online Population Understands "Noncommercial" Use
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial

The topic is somewhat of a sticky one, as there are many competing interests. There are content creators who wish to profit from their work, there are other content creators who don't want anyone to profit (even themselves), and of course there are content creators who want everything to be free provided you share free content back.

There also is not agreement on what noncommerical means. There are some clearly commercial uses, but there are also various type advertising and sponsorship and use by non-profit or education institutions where money changes hands (such as a card at a museum gift shop). Finally, there is use in news or criticism where users feel that they are not restricted due to the rules of fair-use.

I'm not sure that there is anything definitely "new" in this report, but there is some consensus and some interesting facts:

• The vast majority (73%) of creators define “commercial use” as a use where money is made, 76% of content users agreed.
• 33% of content users thought that individual use was noncommercial use, whereas only 19% of the content creators believed so.
• Content creators rate uses by individuals as being less commercial (89%) – unless the user is a professional who earns money (35%)
• 13% of content users thought that fun, enjoyment, entertainment and artistic use was noncommercial use, whereas only 3% of content creators believed so.
• 52% of the content creators don't believe that content users understand the noncommercial provision, and 43% believe that content users don't respect the term.
• 50% of the content creators have been contacted about licensing their noncommercial content, 24% of the content creators have attempted to contact another creator about appropriate use of a CC license.
• There is a lack of agreement on a lot of edge cases of noncommercial use. For instance, some feel cost-recovery is acceptable noncommercial use, money exchanged hands for a charitable use would be noncommercial, or use by a for-profit company where no money changed hands would still be noncommercial.
• There is some interesting analysis of what people might be willing to change their mind about. For instance, before focus group participation only 8% thought that use for charitable purposes for social good would be noncommercial, but after the focus group 17% did.

All in all an excellent report, with lots of good data in it for further investigation. If you are involved in user-generated content, offer users creative-commons licenses, or are a consumer or provider of commercial content online, I recommend you take the time to understand these issues more deeply.

My personal take on this report is that the noncommercial provisions of the CC license need more clarification and there needs to be more user education. In addition I feel that Creative Commons also needs to look at the commercial use side of the problem. I appreciate the recent efforts toward a CC Plus metadata, but it isn't enough.

+

There are also problems in the area of attribution, as all Creative Commons licenses except Public Domain have the BY provision. These get particularly difficult when you have a remix of content from many creators. There's also difficulty in the fact that it's not stated what places attribution must be listed in. For instance, can you do a movie or a podcast with remixed content, but have the attribution credits be a link? Or must they be credits in the media itself?

All are interesting problems that I hope Creative Commons will address in the future.

In order to better define who constitutes the tightly-knit "participant community" upon which the group thresholds act, we have to study power laws which let us measure the intensity of individuals' involvement in a group.

An Overview of Power Laws

The best-known power law is probably the Pareto principle, which is otherwise known as the "80/20 law." It's been overused throughout the years; Pareto's actual law only said that 80% of the wealth would be held by 20% of the population.

However, it offers a fine example of how power laws work. They generally describe a discrepancy between intensity and population: inevitably, some people do a lot more of the work in any social situation. Other examples include Zipf's Law, which suggests that the frequency of a word's usage is inversely proportionate to its ranking among words (making the second ranked word appear half as much, the third a quarter as much, etc), and the long tail, which talks about selling a very large number of items in a very small individual quantity.

For online communities, which have been the focus of most of my studies on the topic of community sizes, I've found that the participation inequality power rule is very apt.

This term comes from Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories, who said, "A major reason why user-contributed content rarely turns into a true community is that all aspects of Internet use are characterized by severe participation inequality." It's often equated with the 1% law, though I like to be more precise and say that 90% of an online community tends to be lurkers, 9% tends to be intermittent participants, and 1% tends to be active participants.

These values heavily influence online community sizes that are larger than the tightly-knit communities group thresholds that I previously discussed.

Power Laws & Group Thresholds

When I wrote about tightly-knit communities in my first article, I didn't consider the degree of participation. That's certainly an entirely valid model for some types of groups. Corporations, for example, ideally should be entirely filled with active participants, while Skotos' online game Castle Marrach also fits into the category due to the implicit requirements it creates for participation. There are some challenges to grow this type of community, since you're only searching for a specific type of high-energy participant — but they can be overcome if you offer sufficient incentive (such as a salary or a lot of internal feedback).

However, most communities, and in particular, online communities, will not fall into this category, and thus when we're looking at group thresholds, we have to measure them against the number of active participants, not against the number of total members. Thus, for groups which allow for non-participation, we'll often measure 10% (or maybe 1%) of the group size against the group thresholds.

RPGnet, one of the community sites that Skotos runs, offers a good example of this. We regularly see monthly uniques of approximately 200,000 users. However we probably have about 20,000 active registered users, confirming the lurker:participant ratio. When we recognize that only 2,000 of those are particularly active participants and that they're divided upon 6 successful forums, we start to see how community numbers that actually match the group thresholds can gel.

You can reverse this approach and look at active participants first. During some recent consulting for a local non-profit organization with 60 active online members, I was able to infer that their broader community was around 6000, which turned out to fairly accurately predict the total number of people who came to their live events over the course of a year.

Generally, this logic can be applied to a community of any size. You first measure whether it's an all-participant community or one that matches an existing power law, and then you use the corrected community number to truly measure which of the group thresholds may apply to it.

Power Laws & Leaders

The power laws can also help you to measure the number of leaders in a community. Inevitably all of your participants will become leaders of some sort, while your high-level participants will become the top-tier leaders.

I noted this in my first discussions of group threshold. In a group of 7 members, you can reasonably expect to have one higher level participant, and thus the one leader that we saw naturally appear. Similarly in a Judas group of 13, there's the opportunity for more than one leader to appear, creating the possibility for the first hierarchical conflicts.

Understanding your count of leaders can help you see how to grow groups. For example when I first created iPhoneWebDev I had to do an immense amount of effort to grow the community. This is because with Participation Inequality I had to grow the group by 10 members before I got the least amount of help increasing the content of the group and I had to grow it by 100 members before I had someone who was doing as much work as I was to create content.

At 100 members, with my first active participant, we continued to grow, but we were both were working hard and felt rather lonely.

I finally saw the group stabilize, then take off on its own, when it hit 600-700 members, and that shows how beautifully the power logs work hand-in-hand with the group thresholds. With 700 members, I could reasonably expect there to be 7 leaders. In other words, I had a committee of leaders: the perfect size for a starting working group.

From my experience with other online groups, if the iPhoneWebDev grows to over 10,000 members, I can expect that there will be some transition issues. As the core active community members exceed 100 people I will start having some Non-Exclusive Dunbar Number problems, typically social contract failures. These can be solved by either adding some hierarchy (appointing some people to be official "staff"), or by starting to break the group into sub-communities.

Varying the Power Laws

In my first article, I noted that it's possible to expend additional energy to make tightly-knit groups able to function effectively at non-optimal sizes. It is similarly possible for the values of the participation inequality sized groups to change by expending more energy. Conversely, a drain on energy may decrease this ratio.

For example when I used to run AOL forums I would frequently reward first-time participants with free time (at that time worth $5 an hour) if they asked good questions or offered valuable input. CompuServe similarly offered constructive feedback by telling users how many responses they'd received to a new comment when they logged back in, encouraging them to leave lurker status. More energy in the community — driven either by the moderators, good social software design, or by a greater commitment by its members — can allow you to increase the active participant percentage, maybe times 2, or even 4, but even with a lot of effort not by an order of magnitude.

As a group grows in size, I believe the participation inequality worsens. A huge Yahoo! group with a million members might have moved from a 90/9/1 ratio to 95/4.5/.5. I suspect this is because the energy required to change the participation inequality numbers is so large as to not be economical.

There are also some interesting interrelations between the numbers of people at the various levels of participation. Though discovering 100 new members has a good chance of adding 10 new participants, 1 of whom is very active, my experience has been that things trickle-down in the other direction as well: that adding 1 new high-level participant can lead to the creation of 9 medium-level participants and 90 lurkers (though don't let that suggest that all of your effort should be expended on the high-level participants only).

Looking at Participation Inequality

Here is a close look at four online communities, using the quantcast.com metrics service, where you can see some participation inequality in action:

From this you can see a typical online community site shows the normal 90% 9% 1% participation inequality. RPGnet shows a slightly better then average participation inequality due to its longevity and the quality of the community. ObesityHealth shows evidence of a great community with its 4% active participants, probably because you have to be very committed if you are going to have bariatric surgery. Last, an example of relatively unhealthy community that is unable to sustain its active participants.

You do have to be careful when analyzing quantcast numbers if you see active participants of greater then 6% — in almost all cases if you look deeper it is because there is some restriction that keeps people from lurking, either a fee or some other type of gateway, causing a distortion in the statistics.

Conclusion

Multiple factors influence the success (or failure) or community. As we saw in my first article on community numbers, the first factor is the differing group thresholds of community sizes. In my second article, I show that personal limits on the number of people you can have intimacy and trust with is an important factor. In this article I show that larger groups are subject to the power law of participation inequality, causing a small fraction of a community to be subject to group thresholds. In all three articles I show how expending energy can allow you to change the numbers, but with limits.

I hope this discussion of community numbers will give you some tools to look at the communities you are in, or are trying to build, and to better understand how to make them more successful.

Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
  (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
• 2008-09: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds
• 2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• participation inequality - more specifics on participation inequality.
• participation inequality - everything I have on the topic of power laws, including participation inequality.

If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them for:ChristopherA and I'll take a look.

Illustrations by Nancy Margulies. Many thanks to Shannon Appecline and F. Randall Farmer for their assistance with this series.

Unlike the group limits, personal limits actually measure something different: the number of connections that an individual can hold. They're yet another thing that you must consider when thinking about communities of people.

Personal Limits

The Support Circle: This is the number of individuals that you seek advice, support, or help from in times of severe emotional or financial stress. In most societies, the average size of an individual's Support Circle is 3-5. The people are the core of your intimate social network and most typically are also kin. In sociology papers this is often called the "support clique".

The Sympathy Circle: This is larger then the Support Circle — it is the number of people that you go to for sympathy and also those people whose death would be devastating to you. The Sympathy Circle typically is in the range of 10-15 people, but can vary widely from as few as 7 to as many as 20. The Sympathy Circle often may be made up of kin, but usually includes some peers as well.

In sociology papers the Sympathy Circle is also known as a "sympathy group", but I wanted to avoid the term "group", as it is implies that all the members of a Sympathy Circle are connected. Instead, members of your Sympathy Circle will have additional people in their own Sympathy Circles that are not part of your own.

An interesting issue with the Sympathy Circle is that as a personal limit, 10-15 is a typical size. however, if you bring them all together in one place, they will likely become a Judas-Number-sized group, with all of the problems associated with that size.

The Trust Circle: These are the people that you have some type of intimate connection to. One study measured it as the people that you would send a family Christmas card to, while another simply tested emotional closeness.

In pre-Friendster days the Trust Circle would be those people that you considered your "friends", however today the meaning of that term has begun to change. In my own usage, your Trust Circle are people that you have strong ties to and that in some measure you can trust. I have also called the Trust Circle your personal "intimate social network".

The size of different individuals' Trust Circles can vary widely (40-200), but some studies show that the mean is on the low side of 150. This has led a number of researchers to compare this number with the Exclusive Dunbar Number of 150. However, I believe that this is a mistake; they are related, but in today's society members of your Trust Circle are rarely in the same mutual group.

The Emotional Circle

I personally define your Emotional Circle as the total number of people that you can have some type of non-mutual emotional connection with, most likely spread across numerous groups of all sorts. You "like" them in some way, but do not necessarily have to have strong ties to them.

In academia this threshold is called "social channel capacity". A study using two different methods to estimate, both suggest that it falls right around 290. However, I like to describe this number as "just short of 300." As I wrote in Dunbar Triage, many people confuse this number with the Dunbar Number (and in fact I have in some of my older pieces). However, like the Trust Circle, it's a distinct entity.

Emotional Circle size can vary quite a bit from individual to individual. Some people might have half the average capacity, and others considerably more — which is much more variation than you see among the sizes of smaller personal thresholds.

Some of those variations are individual, but some are societal. As I wrote in Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships, I believe that our modern era of television causes us to create para-social relationships with imaginary characters who we nonetheless become emotionally involved with, and thus might reduce our social channel capacity.

Is our Emotional Circle smaller today because of TV or is it higher because online communities can help to remind us of our emotional connections to other people? That's a topic that probably deserves more study.

An interesting point to make is that the people who are in your Emotional Circle, but are not in your Trust Circle, are your "weak ties" in social network terms. What is important about weak ties is that studies show (pdf) that opportunities and knowledge flow to you much more through weak ties than through the more insular strong ties of your trust circle.

The Familiar Stranger

Outside of our Emotional Circle is a larger, more tenuous circle: those people whose faces you recognize, but who you know nothing more about. These are your "Familiar Strangers".

Studies show that the percentage of familiar strangers in your vicinity has a real impact on your willingness to take risks. If you are in a new place with no one that you recognize, you'll avoid eye contact and will generally be unwilling to approach strangers. In a place where there are a lot of people that you've seen before (say in your favorite cafe, at a conference, or in the lunchroom of a large company), you'll be much more willing to take risks, such as asking questions, or sitting down next to someone to eat lunch.

I haven't been able to find any studies to show how many people that we can recognize, but for some people it is much larger than the number of people in your Emotional Circle, probably well over a thousand. However, there is also a lot more variance: some people are face-blind or near face-blind, and have a difficult time even recognizing friends.

There could also be some interesting research looking more closely at social network software. I find it fascinating that the professionally-oriented social network LinkedIn resisted supporting photos in profiles for so long yet ultimately failed, as well as how other social network software companies have attempted to require "real" photos of people rather then allowing "fakesters" or avatars.

Crossing the Circles

I've used the term "circles" throughout this article because it's a great metaphor for these levels of personal involvement. They can literally be thought of as concentric circles of people getting further and further away from an individual.

However, if you want to consider them with an even more graphic bent, think of these circles as the ridge lines of a topographical map. An individual sits at the center, and around him lie many other people, fading slowly away as the distance increases.

Winding through these topographical lines, like forests or rivers, are geographies of physical and emotional connection.

Kin are one of the most interesting geographies, because they lie all across the map. There's a clump of them in the innermost circles, but there are also many who lie in the realm of Familiar Strangers, including those cousins and great-aunts who you only see at family gatherings, and whom you know nothing about.

There are also forces being exerted upon the circles, acting like gravity to draw people together. They are the forces of trust, influence, and more. Their pulls are greatest toward the center, across your Circles of Support and Sympathy, but as people move farther away, these forces drop off quickly.

Conclusion

Whereas the group thresholds that I discussed in my last article define the limits placed on community group size, the personal limits described herein instead define the limits placed on how many people an individual can know with various degrees of intimacy.

Perhaps there are societies where these two things might be the same. A true survival community might contain everyone a person knows, and thus he could draw out all his personal circles across that community canvas. However, in our modern era they're much more likely to be distinct, with an individual interacting with the members of his circles of acquaintances through numerous different group communities.

With this bifurcation of personal and group community limits, we have to briefly stop and ask a few questions. How do they relate? What can personal limits tell us about efficient community creation? Does founding a group upon a personal circle make its growth easier or harder? Conversely, what type of communities lead naturally to the creation of intimate circles?

In my next article "Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws", I will talk about how both group thresholds and personal thresholds have a role in larger, less tightly-knit groups.

Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
  (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-08: Dunbar & World of Warcraft
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
• 2008-09: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds

My bookmarks to various papers and websites on this topic are available at delicious.com/ChristopherA under some of the following tags:

• personal circles - everything I have on the topic.
• familiar strangers - those people you recognize by face.

If you have any links on this topic that you would like to share with me, tag them for:ChristopherA and I'll take a look.

Illustrations by Nancy Margulies, photo by davitydave. Many thanks to Shannon Appecline and F. Randall Farmer for their assistance with this series.