WordPress Multi User and ad hoc communities

The emerging news out of WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco is that WordPress and its Multi User cousin are to merge into one product (further discussion). This makes a ton of sense, and makes it even easier to create a community of blogs. I’m looking forward to this – I could keep my main blog at benwerd.com focused on technology, as it is now, but start a separate blog about my hometown at oxford.benwerd.com, using the same installation. Not a bad deal.

Of course, Automattic also own Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress, which is fast becoming a solid competitor in the open source social networking market. I’ve seen people have some installation difficulties with it (it’s apparently been simplified to a 13 step process), so it would make some sense to include it as an optional piece of functionality out of the box. But most importantly, I think there’s a change in progress, illustrated by the Google Wave announcement yesterday but not represented in this announcement.

Communities are forming around users, not users around communities.

In the web application model we’ve been using for the last fifteen years or so, you would install a piece of facilitative software in order to create a web community. That might be forum software or Microsoft Sharepoint depending on needs and context, but they’re both centralized communities. The user visits them to log in and participate; users swarm around a single community access point.

However, consider Skype. It’s not a web tool, but it’s often considered to be one of the new breed of applications. When you want to share something here, a community is automatically created between users, who can then have text discussions, call each other and share files – not dissimilar activities to those you might find on centralized communities like Sharepoint, but with the following advantages:

  • It’s transient: there’s no need for the community to exist for longer than it has to.
  • There’s no effort involved. Once you’re done with a community, you simply close the communication (but a backup is typically kept, so you can come back and reference the activity).
  • It’s private: it’s very hard to share activity with the wrong people.
  • It’s decentralized: the community is physically hosted between all the involved parties.

Google Wave also shares all these characteristics, and we’re going to see similar functionality crop up in a host of applications over the next year or two. The reason is simple: it’s a better way to communicate communally.

Of course, blogs are usually public entities, and in that sense WordPress Multi User does its job. But it’s tough keeping track of comment discussions, and there’s no elegant way to have a private, communal blog – something that intranet software needs and that tools like Elgg have done very well for years (disclaimer: I co-founded it). But even that sticks to a centralized model, and eventually, those ad hoc, transient communities are going to be everywhere. It’s going to be interesting to see how tools like WordPress evolve to cope.

Comments

4 responses to “WordPress Multi User and ad hoc communities”

  1. […] rest is here: WordPress Multi User and ad hoc communities | Ben Werdmuller You May Like Linking To UsHello and welcome to our blog, you may consider linking to us, because […]

  2. Matt Avatar

    Installing BuddyPress is easy as cake, you can even do it from the one-click plugin installer. Integrating bbPress is harder, that takes a lucky 13 steps.

  3. Suzi Dafnis Avatar

    Hi. I was really interested in your article and the idea of the transient community.

    We are a community of businesswomen located in all corners of a big (but sparse country), Australia. I have played with the idea of creating a place that allows members to interact more… our own social network.

    After looking at these questions:
    ‘Do members need one more place to go to sign in and interact – especially if they are already on Facebook etc.

    “What is that my environment will offer that will keep them engaged?’,

    ‘Can I just let them let others in the community know about the communities they are a part of already? ie. be a conduit for them to connect, but not the place the activity happens’

    … I’m pretty much decided not to develop a community that is persistent, but to create temporary communities around events, discussions etc.

    I don’t think I can create the next best social network. But, I do think that when members come together around an ‘event’ they can get a lot out of that experience.

    We’ve had good success running webinars where (like skype) people come online at a particular time around a particular subject and interact (we open up lines, allow them to chat etc and share resrouces) and then when it’s over, it’s over. We DO send them to a closed door community or forum at that point for further resources and discussion.

    I’m interested to see the evolution of the transient community. I think it is the way to go.

    Suzi Dafnis
    Community Director – Australian Businesswomen’s Network

  4. alevin Avatar

    Ad hoc communities are an increasing part of the mix. As a volunteer organizer, I am very skeptical of predictions that all communities will go ad hoc. There is a need for persistent communities for mentoring, learning, affiliation, communication that won’t go away. We need both.

    The model of centralized community is broken though, it doesn’t model how people affiliate. So we need tools to support decentralized and, ad hoc communities, and affordances to bring some of the coalescing dust clouds into solar systems as planets.

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