The Virtual Gardener
The place where I explore online community cultivation, propagation and harvesting techniques.
I've been working as head of consultancy at Sift for the last four years. The business supports all organisations looking to respond to a Web 2.0 world and truly engage with their audience - and has been doing so for the past 10 years.
This blog originally started out as a comment on a conference I attended about online communities. I'm now using it as a thought-bin for related stuff. Any gaps in posting doesn't mean I've stopped thinking ...
Day 1: How the dimensions of information are transforming business … and life
This was one worth being here for … David Weinberger is definitely a ‘luminary’ as co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto - a ‘must’ read to get an insight (it’s now 8 years old) into what is happening and will happen to our lives - you can read it for free on line. His 2007 take is Everything is miscellaneous - the power of the new digital disorder (needless to say there was a signing session after the talk).
Notice the “co” or “com” in common sense, conversation, community - a good reason for teaching Latin at school, which reveals the basics that takes a sophisticated conference like this one to articulate - it’s all about ‘together’, as in ‘we’re all in it together’ and it starts (and ends) with conversation, which gets us to community via connection. As Weinberger makes clear, a true conversation is one that is voluntary, not forced, open ended and in your own voice. In other words a conversation with a scary boss is not a conversation!
So here are the Weinberger sound bites:
- Community is a group of people “listening more than they have to.”
- “We don’t often get to invent new ways of talking to each other,” as we’ve being doing the past 10 years.
- “Don’t underestimate the subversive power of conversation.”
- We are coming out of the Age of Information and coming into Age of Conversation.
- The system that works well in the physical world doesn’t work in the online world.
- “Of course we’d rather talk to each other than listen to a bunch of blowhards up on the stage.”
- Thanks to tagging, “users are in control of the organization of stuff.”
- “We will fill every space with conversation … We are an insanely social species.”
- “Conversations are smarter than the individual people having them.”
- “Knowledge is not in our heads … it is between us.”
