This is a response to Cole Camplese’s great post “Should it all be Miscellaneous” – which was, itself, a response to the Penn State Web Conference (which, in turn, sounds like it was a fantastic gathering of PSU folks).
Go read Cole’s post before reading any further. It’s worth it. I’ll wait.
Really. I’ll wait. Go read it. Seriously.
OK. You’re back. Took long enough. Great post, eh? Here are my thoughts in response:
- Content management is not the problem – overly prescribed, rigid, and enforced application of content management is. One-solution-fits-all “solutions” that are applied as universal hammers are the problem. If people are free to choose the right tool(s) for the job(s) – and are aware of available and relevant options, they should be free to choose whatever tools fit best. Sure, some options might have different levels of support, but that will help inform an individual’s decision – don’t need support? choose whatever you want. Need lots of support and training? Choose one of the institutionally supported options.
- Does the act of management interfere with the natural flow of content through a community? Does it interfere with the connections and links between people, concepts, and bits of content? Does cramming content into a predefined taxonomy and/or site structure affect the content, or the utility of it? Does a community (and its content/context/information) become subtly altered through the process of trying to manage it. Do we kill the community/content when we stuff it in a content management box?
- Efforts to “manage everything” have typically failed. Miserably. Remember learning object repositories? They started as a small-scale effort to organize some content, then ballooned into massive, interoperable, enterprise-scale metadata storehouse and indexing systems, complete with multiple specifications, namespaces, and taxonomies. Content (and people) fell by the wayside. Fail.
- Cole’s thoughts triggered images of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. DIY. Edupunk. Control isn’t necessarily bad – control helps keep focus and direction. Some level of control helps maintain group cohesion and productivity. But the locus of control must be the individual or workgroup, not the institution.
- I’ll take you up on the beer. It’s been far too long.
I’m in the early stages of planning what could turn into a pretty large scale community project on campus. My gut reaction was to craft a website using our CMS of choice. I wanted to keep it as organic as possible, letting people in the community do pretty much anything they want with it. But, now I’m seriously wondering if even that would be too constraining. I’m now thinking about just having individuals and groups set up blogs wherever they like (with several suggested services provided to help guide them) and let them publish whatever they want, however they want, wherever they want.
The downside of that approach is that it’s difficult for people to get a feel for the activities of the community at a glance, or for new people to get up to speed. It’s messy and noisy, but that’s one of the reasons the approach is attractive. Maybe I try rolling out some form of Eduglu service to pull the various bits back together in context, and track links and conversations? hmm…
Hello, D’Arcy,
A quick post here, as it’s late, I’m tired, and sleep sounds real nice at this point in time —
RE: “My gut reaction was to craft a website using our CMS of choice. I wanted to keep it as organic as possible, letting people in the community do pretty much anything they want with it. But, now I’m seriously wondering if even that would be too constraining. I’m now thinking about just having individuals and groups set up blogs wherever they like (with several suggested services provided to help guide them) and let them publish whatever they want, however they want, wherever they want.” —
While a central cms will definitely be constraining for some (and unnecessary for others), it will be useful for some people. Fortunately, as you point out, it doesn’t need to be an either/or, and you can blend both approaches. About all that’s needed for any of the publishing platforms is an rss feed —
In your response to Cole’s post, you nail the core issue — the problem isn’t the cms, it’s an artificially imposed structure. Depending on the tool/cms, that artificial structure can be inherent in the design, but that’s a separate discussion.
A central aggregator would go a long way toward restoring/creating a community feel to a distributed publishing network — Eduglu away!
Depending on what you’re using it for, you may want to consider the new Automattic project, BuddyPress (http://buddypress.org/) – it’s a set of plugins for WPmu that lets you set up a social network-like site, with each person getting their own subdomain (like usual with WPmu), but with interactivity features.
I think the notable contribution of Cole’s post to the discussion is the notion of a Wikipedia style governance model… One that lets people know how they can participate in the campus framework both technically (RSS, maybe even tagging suggestions) as well as guiding people to how work can be judged and how it may be republished…
I don’t know where to begin in terms of how to develop such a model, much less how to get buy-in… And if people are still pushing a repository model in 2008 I fail to see how a solid governance model will assuage them. But it’s got me thinking…
I’ve been thinking about the whole forced-centralization vs. encouraged-decentralization issue wrt the project I mentioned. I’m now pretty sure that my first reaction – to build a centralized but loose and individually-managed website to reflect the face-to-face communities – is the right approach. I’m working up a blog post in my head at the moment on why I’m now sure this is the right thing to do…
D … I appreciate the link and more importantly the thoughts. I want to echo Brian’s comment that my real thrust is around a new way of thinking as it relates to governance. All of my recent thinking has been around changing the discussion to encourage more open content on the way in — I am not in place where I think open courseware (as an example) will be accepted. The discussion I want to have is about the open availability of the production and evolution of Institutional knowledge. I am at this moment very excited about the way wikipedia manages that approach. Reading Brian’s quick thoughts here I am struck by what appears to be an even more inclusive approach — one that not only promotes open contribution in a single system, but provides a framework (RSS and Tags) for contributing in other ways.
Cole, I agree that the community governance model is the more critical thing – but if we have a wonderful, powerful, flexible community that gets hamstrung by the tool(s) that are available, there will be some clipping. I’m really loving Brian’s thoughts on the inclusive approach (see my latest post… 😉 )
I’m not sure I see the difference in what we are saying to each other … governance isn’t a rigid set of laws in my mind — it includes a(n open) framework that describes how to share. Inclusion is the key and the word governance (in my use here) assumes there will be an agreed upon set of guiding principles to empower users. Is that any clearer?
ah, well then Bingo! 🙂 I was just trying to get at what could happen if an openly/flexibly governed community had to get squished into a rigid/confined CMS…