Here’s the video from TED:

Ethan [posted the text of his talk](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/07/14/a-wider-world-a-wider-web-my-tedglobal-2010-talk/). Here are some choice quotes:

>It’s data like this that’s leading me to conclude that the internet isn’t flattening the world the way Nicholas Negroponte thought it would. Instead, my fear is that it’s making us “imaginary cosmopolitans”. We think we’re getting a broad view of the world because it’s possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents.
>
>When we look at what’s actually happening, our worldview might actually be narrowing.

on filtering:

>We tend to use two types of filters to manage the internet – search, which is great at telling us what we want to know, and social, which promises to tell us things that we don’t know we want to know. There’s a lot of people trying to engineer serendipity by taking advantage of the fact that not only are you on the internet, your friends are also on the internet. And if your friends – or just someone with similar interests – finds something that’s interesting, it might be a serendipitous discovery for you as well.
>
>There’s just one problem with this method. Human beings are herd animals. Like birds of a feather, we flock together. And so what you see on a site like Reddit or Digg – or what links you get from your friends on Facebook or Twitter – is what the flock is seeing. The flock might help you find something that’s unexpected and helpful, but it’s not likely to find you something from halfway around the world.

This set my PLN radar pinging. The talk of crafting the personal learning network/environment, to harness network effects, etc… is the explicit construction of flock-powered echo chambers. We choose to include people whom we mostly agree with. Everybody gets a group hug. And we slowly shrink the subset of the world to which we pay attention.

on the power of bridges to connect different communities and flocks:

>For a wider web, we need this third form of filtering – we need search, social, but we also need these shepherds to help us break out of our flocks and find different voices.

and

>If we want a wider world, we need to celebrate, recognize and amplify the influence of these bridge figures.
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>And we need people to walk across these bridges.

and finally

>How do we cultivate xenophiles, celebrate bridge builders and rewire the media so we’re experiencing a wide world and not just our flock?

Xenophilia. An affection for the unknown. The people that seek to connect different communities, cultures, flocks, etc… This is what’s needed – but not for some magic individuals to step up and take the role. We need to support and foster xenophilia in everyone. It’s the only way to break out of the insular withdrawal that results from flocking filtering.

from *[A wider world, a wider web: my TED Global Talk](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/07/14/a-wider-world-a-wider-web-my-tedglobal-2010-talk/)* by Ethan Zuckerman

My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.

My second reaction was that I should whip up a new site in Drupal to host the online portion of the communities – discussions, notes, questions, presentations, etc… I’ve even deployed the site and begun to craft it to reflect where I hope to help steer the communities.

But then, after thinking over Cole’s post, I started thinking that the right tack would be to just have the community members publish wherever they like (with a few suggestions offered) and pull their various bits back together in one central aggregation site to help them track the activities. It provides much more flexibility, and each community would be able to draw on any tools and resources they wished to use.

BUT.

After thinking some more, I realized that most people aren’t in the same headspace as the edtech geeks like myself. They don’t get eduglu. They don’t get distributed publishing. They don’t get aggregation. Or tagging, or rss, or rip-mix-burn. And, quite possibly, they shouldn’t have to. I take a fair number of things for granted in how I interact with various resources online. Most people don’t have the context to make sense of this, and forcing them to jump into the pool without first sticking their toes in is not productive – people will be overwhelmed, overstimulated, and alienated.

They’re in a place where they need some guidance. Not authoritarian mandates, but simple guidance. They need constraints and limits, because without them all they’ll see and hear is noise. They won’t be able to participate effectively in distributed conversations, because they will have difficulty even finding the various threads.

There are a few parameters in how a community can select resources, and I think these parameters also reflect the style of the community itself. Here’s a grossly oversimplified 5-minute diagram to help illustrate:

What we’re trying to do is hit the sweet spot, where a community resource has enough flexibility, support, control, and ease of use to enable a high quality online experience to help extend the community.

I’m now convinced that my initial draft at the centralized website resource “hub” for the community is the right approach. I’ll be providing means for the individuals within the community to basically do whatever they want to, to create their own groups (both formal and ad hoc), and to publish whatever they want within the resource. But – they won’t be required to use this website. If they want to move into a WikiSpace, or start up a WordPress blog, or any of a billion other options, they are free (and welcome) to do so. But by starting things in a more centralized and safe place, there is less risk of leaving people out in the cold by forcing them to move too quickly.