Online Communities of Practice
From:
Graham Lally
Date:
Apr 22 16:19 UTC
Short link
Hi there (and apologies if this comes through twice at all...),
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Steven Clift wrote:
> allow e-mail publishing and receipt like the open source tool we use for
> the UKIE forum. It seems clear to me that bridging the web-e-mail divide
> is the missing link - like GroupServer here - people can choose their
> technology and be part of the same space.
Amen to that. Furthermore, bridging the same divide over *time* is, I
think, one of the greatest underdeveloped challenges faced across the
entire communication landscape, not just sustainable political engagement.
In other words, I can only just about choose what format I use to
"interact" (send/receive) with services - web, e-mail, RSS, SMS, etc. But
it's still extremely difficult to jump from one to the other for different
tasks *within* each service.
Twitter is a great example - short messages are fantastic for low-level
engagement, but I want to be able to jump to longer message - basic e-mail
would do - when a conversation gets more involved, or when I have more
time to compose longer messages. The topic may stay the same for the
transition, but the context in which I engage varies - as a result of both
the subject matter within a particular service, and what's happening in my
own life right now.
Flexible "Multi-Level" engagement like this is key to sustaining
discussion, I think. But I cna't think of anyone or anything that does it
successfully. I'd love to be proved wrong, of course :)
- Graham.