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 members of these two groups not sharing each other's 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 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 an existing group or community can have 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. The ways of the community having the better automation or tools, can have a negative impact on the other community’s ways – thus the other community does not use these better automation tools, and their group efficiency is lower.
The better group automation or 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 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 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 "different" communities.
With this better group automation there is potential to make one community aware of “stuff” that they have in common with another community, and then for both (or many) communities to leverage this common factor in various ways.
Also there exist communities where “wiki ways” are currently viewed as very strange and foreign. Today’s automated group tools in effect force these communities to make an “all or nothing” choice – and so some choose not to employ or experiment with newer ways. Some trusted persons in these “other” communities try to slowly wean (baby steps) their community’s culture away from older process modes, toward new ones, but the lack of “easy” automation customization makes this weaning very difficult if not impossible today.
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 to appear - how easy it it for one of the community's trusted people to get rid of this 80% "noise"?).
This reflects an unmet market need. Sometimes it is difficult to recognize this need, from the perspective of any particular community, especially ones that already have sophisticated automation tools. Within such communities,“ways of doing things” are viewed from their own community perspective, and then assumed other communities need the same, or at times they “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.
Again, it is being argued that the better group automation or tools would be “neutral”, having a much better ability for different communities to customize automated functions, in ways that any particular community prefers - yet also integrate “invisible” slurping (to a commons) methodologies. MartinPfahler
Perhaps deep pocketed investors, typical of those involved with funding early stage efforts like aboutus, simply don’t see this focus as being a good way to make a lot of money – which might mean this type of “better” group automation will be a long time in coming.
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?