Comments on: Importance of Place and Context in Online Communities

By: My Experiences with the Greatest Open Source Software of All Time « All About Software

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:22:12 +0000

[...] GNU tools and utilities. I was always a big fan of GCC, and it was one of the first things I would install on a new Unix box (from source, because that’s the way real admins installed software). Then there is always the Emacs vs. vi debate. I’m a vi kind of girl, and I still use vi to edit system files on my Mac, mostly out of habit. [...]

By: F. Randall Farmer

F. Randall Farmer — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:06:54 +0000

As Bill Johnston said over on twitter – I’m saying Hello!

Context is critical to the design of social software. I’m so adamant about this position that I’ve been giving a talk lately called Context is King, and with any luck I’m going to turn the topic of social context into a book in a year or so.

You can check out the slides over on Slideshare or on my blog http://www.habitatchronicles.com. I spoke at BayCHI, and they are supposed to put the presentation up as a podcast of some kind, but I have no idea how long that will take.

By: Enzonen

Enzonen — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:05:27 +0000

Thank you for this post (and all the others, as well, I only recently joined your audience and I really love your insights). I like to add one dimension to this post on context. It is not just context, but is as much the role you play when you act as a system admin. As a community manager it is ok to use all the handy tools out there, but as a sys admin, hey, you really should be able to use the command line – how on earth could you do otherwise without being an outsider in the community of sys admins? And who wants to be an outsider in a community? Context helps you to switch to another identity (as social psychologists like to call these role-based manifestations of your self). So when building an online community, context can help you to activate a specific working self of an individual. And indeed, this is a major part of community building, I believe.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:57:30 +0000

Janet,

Thanks for sharing how you use social networks differently based on the context! I’ll be very interested to see the OEN community and how it’s used by OEN members.

By: Janet Johnson

Janet Johnson — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:35:23 +0000

I’m with you, Dawn, I believe people who follow me on Twitter know much more about me and my life than anyone looking through the lense of my blog (mostly business, all the time); my facebook account where I mostly follow the lives of my nieces and nephews; and LinkedIN, where I am completely focused on business.

We’re about to launch the OEN online community, and I’m hoping I’ll be a tad more integrated there, although since it’s a community where I’ll be a member and am serving on the board, I think I’ll be more circumspect about sharing too much of my non-professional thoughts.

It’s funny I don’t really apply that filter to Twitter at all… which is why it’s such a unique space. I’ll be interested to hear more thoughts from your readers – great post.