I'm not doing a great job at blogging the eTech conference in San Diego. I just had to prepare my talk, get used to the emptiness of the streets and to the food, the huge amount of food we're being served five times a day. I've been to very few talks but i liked most of them. Ok, here's my notes on a first one.
Danah Boyd, G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide or The Ugliness That Ensues When You Shove the Global and the Local Together.
Glocalization is a grotesque word, it comes from various disciplines and for each discipline it gets a different meaning. What does it mean to connect global with local and how does it affect design? Most people do not live in a global environment, they are more concerned with their local values.
Culture is embedded into objects and frameworks. What's important is what bounds people together (Jewish culture goes beyond geography, same goes for the "geek culture".) Culture is made of values, and norms, and artefacts. Not just languages and nationalities.
Go on reading...
When you first arrive to work for a new company, you have to adapt to understand what's going on there. You need time to assimilate the culture of that company. Same goes when you go on vacation, you're confronted with what can be an entirely different culture.
Danah Boyd went on by analysing 3 social software: Craiglist, Flickr and MySpace. When Craiglist began, it was just Craig and his friends, the community grew and grew. Craig, the founder, started hiring employees, but he's still very concerned with the users and the platform is still infused with his own personality.
When flickr started Catherine was welcoming every new user personally. Now there's a big staff to answer users. But when something goes wrong, then Stuart writes something personal, saying how much he's sad and he apologise for the inconvenience. And he really means it.
With MySpace, users are given a friend, Tom. Tom really exists, he posts messages and he's also deeply involved in the websites, he pays attention to people's feedback and feeds it into the design of the platform.
What these sites have in common:
- passionate design and users,
- integrated feedback loop,
- organic growth,
- public personalities,
- emergent cultures.
You feel the culture whenever you enter there. Best example is MySpace, parents are horrified when they first come upon it, but that's part of the culture as well.
The developers of MS, FL, CrL recognize the importance of user feedbacks. They didn't built an unmovable map. The sites get updated constantly.
Embedded Observation:
- live within the culture of the system,
- watch, listen, learn,
- flexible design based on users,
- support and engagement with the culture,
- nudge the culture, don't try to control it.
The developers make sense of the culture by living inside it, just like anthropologists would do.
Challenges:
1. design sanity:
- passion means overworking: none of them has a 9 to 5 schedule and forget about their work once they are home. It's not just a job, it's a belief system. They live and breath their site 24/7.
- it's hard to maintain the culture embeddedness.
If people get tired, the community dies. How can you sustain the passion?
2. Scale
- cultural diversity: millions of users who do not know each other nor the founder of the website. It's not possible to pay attention to everyone, so they work with patterns.
All of them have to deal with porn, unpleasant comments, hate speech. That's hard to stop. MS and CrL got sued because of their userss behaviour. You've got to understand the different cultures.
- linguistic diversity. When Brazilian "invaded" Orkut, the developers couldn't understand what was going on, they do not speak brazilian so they couldn't see what was coming.
Design through embeddedness:
- passion is everything,
- you have to protect people from burn-out,
- diversify your staff (if your community takes off in Sweden, hire someone from Sweden!)
- enable and empower, don't control, stay flexible. You can't predict what people will want and will do.
- do not overdesign. No one can design for perfection. You should be able to constantly respond to users' feddbacks and update your site accordingly,
- integrate design and customer support, they have to communicate with each other,
- stay engaged with the community,
- document cultural evolution (how your decisions on technology affected the community, etc.)
Why public?
1. Synchronicity
2. familiar Strangers (a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay)
People are drwan to people who are like them. Most people go online to chat with the friends they already have (except in some cases, like dating).
Opportunities for accidental interaction occurs: two people on flickr feel connected because they have taken a picture of the same objects)
Familiar Strangers: people take the same bus for years and never talk to each other. Till one day, they meet each other and start to speak. About the bus.
The notion of public doesn't include the whole world.
Language, technological solution are investigated to solve the language issues.
Youth language. If one would translate youth language some of its cultural aspects would be lost. What teens do with culture is fascinating. They are personalising their language. They know how to write properly but want to give words new meanings.
Culturally specific phrases. E.g. niggers! We don't use it but keep finding it online.
- little negro: in some places it's a welcoming expression. It's also the name of a popular chocolate for kids.
- between black people, "nigga" is an accepted word (urban speak)
- but it can also be used in a very racist context.
Difficult to know the context of their use. A translation might destroy those language norms.
"speaking in Dude"
The characters know how to interpret what's being said.
How can you deal with porn?
- follow the politics of "I know it when i see it."
- but obscenity is something cultural as well. American culture is shocked by the sight of nipples but in Brazil they are everywhere.
In other places belly buttons are regarded as horrifying or ankles.
If there's obscenity, users are offended, advertisers do not want to buy ads anymore, etc.
How do you balance such norms?
Building technology to remove porn doesn't remove culture diversity.
Economic norms. Whose definition of morality are you working with?
Designing for G/Localization?
1. Empower the users to personalize and culture-ize; control access of their expressions; be cultural spokespeople.
2. Let users manage private, public and opportunities for synchronicity.
Let people feel like the community in their place.
Thanks for sharing points from her presentation. I was wondering what it was about and it looks like decent pointers on building online communities based on three case studies. When they say Passion is key, they live it!