BetterAutomation
People can belong to more than one group or community, whether offline or online. For example you might belong to one group that is highly passionate about gardening, and another that is highly passionate about deer hunting, the other members of these two groups not sharing these passions, and may even view these different activities in hostile ways – yet due to your own range of passions, you belong to both groups or communities.
Also in these groups or communities, for whatever reasons, there tends to be one or more people that are more highly trusted or recognized by the totality of the community members. For purposes of explanation, let us call such entity a “trusted person”
Forming groups or communities is a process that has gone on long before “online” communities came into existence, and these prior community efforts having a trusted person.
In our modern Internet era more and more trusted persons begin to realize that new technologies have potential to make their existing communities function more efficiently, or do bigger and better things faster – that the community values. Thus today the trusted person is often “looking out” or “searching for” new automation or tools that would benefit their existing community or group.
In this process the trusted person runs into an interesting dynamic or phenomenon: For various reasons another existing group or community has much better automation tools than a particular trusted person has assembled for his or her “other” existing community or group. To gain access to this other community’s automation tools, this trusted person is in effect told, “then you must do certain things our way” – meaning the ways of this “other” community. By definition this other community’s ways have a negative impact on the other community’s ways – thus the other community does not use the better automation tools, and their group efficiency is lower.
The better group automation tools would eliminate this process dynamic, so that no matter what a community’s passion or “ways”, each “different” community can utilize or exploit the automation tools in the ways they want.
But this is not enough, for then it builds silos between communities. Thus another critical element of better group automation tools is the ability to cull or filter community activity or information, from all communities, in a way that is really invisible to the members of any particular community, so that in effect they can do things “their own way”, yet still be connected or networked with other communities.
With such “better” group automation tools there is potential to make one community aware of “stuff” that they have in common with another community, and then to leverage this common factor in various ways (and this could benefit more than one community).
Such “better” group automation tools seem to be non existent, at least from the perspective of trusted people in various existing communities, that are not computer savvy. For example one community might want a URL domain name and home page layout or navigation experience to work in one way, yet it is forced to adapt the domain name, or home page or navigation experience (etc.) of another community, if they want to employ the better automation tools (what if one community does not want 80% of the buttons or sidebar info shown on most wiki pages?).
This reflects an unmet market need. Sometimes it is difficult to recognize this need, from the perspective of any particular community, especially one that already has sophisticated automation tools. Within such community,“ways” are viewed by their own community perspective, and then assumed other communities need the same, or they can “push” other communities to adapt the same. It is just human nature that different communities don’t want to be “pushed” by another, so this process leads to lower levels of community networking or collaboration – meaning between different communities.
Again, it is being argued that the better group automation tools would be “neutral”, having a much better ability for different communities to customize the functionally of the various automation tools, in ways that any particular community prefers - yet also integrate “invisible” slurping (to a commons) mythologies. MartinPfahler
Questions related to the above content:
Is aboutus developing these “neutral” customizable automation tools right now, for use by any community (meaning already having their own URL domain name, and not wanting to change it)?
If so what specific tool development efforts are currently underway – and when are they expected to be available for use by “any” community?