Monster Threads and the Cacophony of Conversations

As any ONetizen who has tried to keep up with, or who has tried to join, the Ned thread knows, the most successful ONet conversations can quickly become monsters. These lengthy threads go beyond what E.F. Schumacher in “Small Is Beautiful” would call human-scale. If psychologist George Miller was an ONetizen, he could remind us of the dangers of pushing beyond the limits of the Magic Number 7 Plus or Minus 2.

For the regular reader, just keeping up with an active discussion can feel like a mental endurance race. For the newbie to a conversation, the monster thread looms like an unscalable mountain.

Before the year-end holiday, the Ned thread ‘hit the wall’ of tractability. So its most loyal conversants decided to sift through the thread for the gems to help the regular and newbie alike to know what we are talking about in this lively conversation.

Sure, you can always filter a thread to a feedback-rating threshold. (Here are Ned posts at level 5 or more.) But this programmatic approach is kind of raw, and the Ned team felt this ONet site feature didn’t do anything to topically organize the posts.

As a result (and through some Herculean efforts), a handful of Neders have mined, and are continuing to mine, the thread for The Best of Ned Thread Ideas. The result is helpful and evolutionary. But it still suffers from being a lot of work for the unofficial indexing team, and this listing also becomes a view onto Ned that is that of the indexers. Since each index editor brings his or her own interest and understanding to the task, the ‘best of’ list is necessarily a ‘best of according to who’ resource.

As the proverb goes, “seeing the elephant through many holes in the fence” can be an exercise in futility when taken in isolation, or one of revelation when taken collectively. As we populated Sohodojo’s Omidyar.net Blog, we realized that ONet community members’ post blogs could each be a view of the “ONet elephant.” Taken collectively, they will add a rich new dimension to the ONet community experience.

Monster threads are not only challenge to the “human-scale” of the Omidyar.net web site. The shear volume of what is on the ONet site has given veteran and newbie alike that “deer in the headlights” frightful feeling.

At the time of writing, the ONet community and our web site consist of 10,865 users, each of us belonging to any number of the 315 groups that are carrying on 5,005 discussion topics, with 92,309 comments and 7,256 workspace pages. Heck, forget deer in the headlights. We’re talking Tennessee Fainting Goat reaction! (Here’s Mark Grimes after coming back to the Ned thread after the holiday break: view Quicktime movie)

We believe community member ONet blogs can help ‘humanize’ the scale of both ONet monster threads as well as provide focused views onto the vast expanse of Omidyar.net site content.

Blogging for Focus

Modern blogging systems — both self-served Open Source platforms as well as the freely available hosted blog services — have a number of built-in features that could help us collectively to mine the Omidyar.net web site to provide individual and group clarity and focus.

Flexible categorization is perhaps the most useful and obvious feature that an ONet blog can provide. For example, the Sohodojo ONet blog reflects our interest in new business models and alternative markets:

Big Ideas (Small World)

• Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystems
• Globalization 3.0 and the Small Is Good World
• Inprosumerism
• Post-Autistic Economics
• Tech Talk

With even just a handful of ONet blogs referencing the Ned Thread, we’d have a variety of topical “maps” each contributing the author’s unique perspective on this huge and growing thread. This would then free the indexing team from the burden to do this task by decentralizing and distributing the process among community members.

But wait. The benefits of ONet blogging don’t stop there. There are at least two more powerful and widely available blogging features that could help us all to better focus on the diverse content at ONet

• per-post commenting, and
• trackback linking

One of the ONet site architecture features that turns threads into monster threads is that we don’t have a convenient way to comment on a specific post. Every ONet comment becomes a new comment appended to the end of the whole conversation. The result is a monster thread for any conversation of wide and sustained interest.

Each blog post, on the other hand, is an item onto itself. As such, it has its own comments. As more and more of us blog our ONet conversations, we are very likely to see the self-organizing evolution of a “cloud” of conversations that reference a core of ONet primary conversations that are more focused and action-oriented. This is particularly possible if we take advantage of another powerful blogging feature: trackback linking.

Trackback linking is a form of remote commenting. Rather than posting the comment directly on Person B’s weblog, Person A posts his or her reaction/thoughts on his/her own weblog, then sends a TrackBack ping to Person B’s blog. Yeah, we’re slipping into tech talk. But all you need to know is that trackbacks are simple to use, and they just work.

ONet Community Implications

As we enter the new year and each search for ways to become more effective Omidyar.net community members, let’s not limit our search for tools and techniques to those we find within the ONet site itself. We believe that ONet post blogging could be an effective tool for helping the ONet community to organize and extend the diverse conversations and projects of the ONet community. Our ONet blogs can be an wonderful source of community self-reflection.

Categorization, per-post comments, and trackback linking are just three of the blogging world’s standard features that could be put to good use by ONet community members. And we needn’t stop here.

ONet blogging could become a vital part of ONet community life if the ONet site development team added post-specific trackback linking to ONet posts! In this way, our ONet blogs could become a truly useful means to evolve and extend our ONet collaborations. And at the same time, our ONet blogs could become a vital and effective means of recruiting new members into our Better World changemaking community.0[

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

A Better World Is a Fence to be Painted

Considering these and related trends, there is no reason that we cannot create a story-rich, game-like on-line experience — NED On-line if you will — where tens of thousands of people are willing to pay, say $20/month, for the sheer joy and excitement of participation in this active, vibrant global on-line community. A place where everyday activity in this virtual world has a Matrix-like impact creating a better world in the Real World.

This membership subscription is not a loan nor an investment. It is a fee for experience, for access, for having a voice in what goes on in this ever-growing, ever-evolving on-line global community.

Once you are a member, it will be up to you to decide how to ‘invest’ your Better World Tokens. Perhaps you’ll purchase two shares of goat wool futures of a herd in Uganda. Later, you’ll lock in an hour of loom time craft futures of a New Mexico weaver.

You don’t do this with an expectation of below market return rates on repayment of a loan to the shepherd. Nor do you do it to own an equity share in Acme Weavers of New Mexico, Inc. You do this to be a stakeholder in the process that brings this wool to market, to have a voice in what the weaver makes, and to what Impact Point the sale of that wool and the weaver’s sweater will be directed. You’ll do it to get to know and care about the shepherd and the weaver as you shift your focus from the wool and sweater of a product-focused supply chain to a people-centered investment-production-consumption cycle.

Next month, you’ll increase your share in wool futures of the goat herd, and lock in 20 board-feet of lumber to be produced by a sustainable forestry co-op in Maine. Your purchases from the NED On-line marketplace over the last few weeks have been rewarded with a stack of additional Better World Tokens that you apply to a community development project to raise a wind turbine in an Aceh fishing village.

Within three months you’ve parlayed your participation tokens into a growing account such that your Impact Quotient has landed you on the Top 10 Rookies of the Month list at NED On-line. You set your sites for Hall of Impact Fame recognition within a year. Even if you miss your personal goal, you’ve had a heck of a creative, fun time helping to make a better world.

Now multiply this hypothetical NED On-line player/character community member by many thousands. With an addictive “serious play” environment and an effective reward system for impactful participation, imagine how many miles of Better World Fence we can paint if we can just learn to think like Tom Sawyer.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–