Topic 5 – Online community building and social architects

Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

My online identities:

• Google profile
• Facebook
• Designthinkage.com blog
• ITC510 blog
• Skype
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Couchsurfing.com
• Google groups (seems to be quite seperate from the standard Google profile information)

Whether I show a “persistent” or “multiple” identities is a difficult question to answer when phrased that way.  I consider myself as showing multiple facets of a persistent identity – which contains qualities of both persistence and multiplicity.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier OLR questions, my Facebook identity is more focused on fun whereas designthinkage.com (my professional blog) obviously needs to have a slightly more serious tone to it.  These are both genuine attributes of a single persistent identity but are moderated to match the context.  This is consistent with how I would behave in the ‘real’ world.

What your online identity communicates is based on the context of the community.  If in a social network where questions are being answered, things such as how long you have been a member and how many questions you have answered help other members to judge the quality of your responses.  ‘Softer’ things such as the name and photo you choose for yourself also communicates how approachable your are and how serious you take yourself.  Ethically, someone’s identity online should not be a function of their race, gender or other attribute unless relevant to the community in which they are engaging.  This is one of the great things about the anonymity of the web.

Even an attribute such as a picture of yourself can vary wildly between communities.  Take for example a photo that you might have for yourself on Facebook compared to the image that you wish to project to a network of your professional peers.  The photo of you wearing a Mankini and holding a beer might be good for a laugh among friends but might be a career-limiting move if used as part of your professional identity!

Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games

1. Being a bit of a buzzword, “Social architecture” can be a little hard to define.   Most references to it seems to popup sometime in 2007 (around the time social networking starting to hot up) and be in close proximity to words such as information architecture, user experience, social media, sociology and even “ideation”.  I would define social architecture as “the design of virtual systems that facilitate and encourage specific social interactions”.

2. As I feel like I have already joined almost every social network available at some point over the last 5 topics I’ve decided to just go with the suggested communities for something new.  Whyville does a great job at initially engaging you.  You create a little avatar and before you know it you’re halfway through the registration process!  ShuffleBrain was interesting as it leverages your existing Facebook profile – which relates to the discussion earlier in this topic around the reuse of a persistent identity.  I tried a pattern matching game and found it really engaging.  It even used my Facebook photo to show me where I scored on the scale.

The key difference that I see between these two communities is that Whyville is a self-contained environment with a community of members that has been built up from scratch.  ShuffleBrain on the other hand utilises the existing facebook community to provide an instant access to participants by leveraging the identity that they have already spent much time creating.  This model of building identities and then sharing their information with applications on request has been wildly successful for Facebook and not only allows ‘sub-communities’ to spring up quickly but also increases the appeal and interest of Facebook in general.

3.

Community	Objectives	Rules of engagement	Unique features
Whyville	To provide children an environment where they can interact with other children and play games. There is an educational focus to the site and their is a focus on learning and safety.	Being a community specifically for children, these are more explicit than typical rules of engagement and focused on specifics rather than the general spirit of the community. Examples of this are the requirement that children under 13 years of age obtain consent from a parent before engaging in the community. In addition to this, the chat policy discourages the usual suspects of profanity, racism, bigotry etc as well as forbidden the disclosure by anyone of information that could identify a user.	The longevity of the community is one of the unique features of Whyville. In addition to this is the fact that this community exists for specific age groups – meaning that the population of the community would have turned over several times since its inception in 1999. The visual nature of the interaction is also quite unique. Although this has since been by done others such as Second Life, it must have been one of the first and most successful to adopt this mode of interaction.
Shuffle Brain	Shuffle Brain is community built around the playing of ‘brain games’. Although the game play itself is a solo activity, community is fostered through the element of competition and comments around specific games.  As the Shuffle Brain website puts it “…creating games that keep you sharp and socially connected”.	Doesn’t seem to have an explicit set of rules of engagement. Sitting within Facebook however I suppose that it must comply with their broader guidelines which is titled the ‘Statement of rights and responsibilities and can be found at http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=design#/terms.php?ref=pf. This covers spam, viruses and malicious code, bullying, content with nudity or of a hateful nature and interestingly a clause specifically regarding the marketing of alcohol-rated content.	Shuffle Brain is unique in that it is made up of two groups – game creators and game players. The emphasis on the game creator’s both encourages an additional sense of connection as well as giving more credence to the use of the games as serious tools for brain development.

4. Founding out about who is behind Whyville was actually rather difficult.  The about us section of the website didn’t shed much light so I took a cue from the small print at the bottom right and Googled “Numedeon”.  Their website is a bizarre virtual reception room which as an information architect made me cringe and remember the mid 90’s when metaphors stretched to their limits in an attempt to use them for navigation.  Although I can find precious little about who is behind Whyville, according to my definition of a social architect above, the Whyville creators can certainly be considered social architects.

Shuffle Brain was founded by Amy Jo and Scott Kim (I assume they are married) and seems to have investment from some major venture capitalists.  Given that she is listed as being an “expert in online social architecture” and he is a puzzle designer, it appears that they manage the site on an ongoing basis.  In addition to Amy Jo’s impressive list of clientele and her bio actually explicitly mentioning the words “social architecture’, the site has been designed with a definite social agenda in mind, so I would say that they are indeed social architects.

Tags: Assignment 1