danielskog.se

Every year the Association for Internet Researchers (AoIR) organize an Internet Research conference, and this year the conference (IR 9.0) will be held in Copenhagen, October 16-18. I’ve been attending the IR conference three times before and I am really looking forward to go there again.

This year I will chair a roundtable on social network sites and online communities together with Lewis Goodings. Other panelists include Nancy Baym, Malene Charlotte Larsen, Amanda Lenhart, Raquel Recuero and Jan Schmidt. I am happy that we have been able to gather these great people and hope for an interesting discussion during the roundtable session.

Here is an extract from the roundtable description:

Life On The Move: Social network sites and online communities

Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are rapidly becoming a popular area of research investigating online ‘communities’. This immediately raises the question of how new SNSs can be understood as a descendent of the ‘virtual community’ that was popularized in the 1980′s (Rheingold, 1993). [...] The purpose of this roundtable is to further discussions on the present shapes of online communities in light of the current trajectory of social network popularity. In particular, to what extent are online communities tied to a particular site? And consequently, how can we rethink notions of community in line with recent trends in SNSs?

[…] The underlying premise is that ‘life on the move’ produces a certain problem for academic researchers as to how we locate the individual (or the community) in such a dispersed social landscape. Therefore, how can we understand community involvement when users are members of a number of different community sites and SNSs and move regularly from one site to another? A further problem here is how we as researchers resist the mundane assumption that inherently complex online communities are only recognisable in terms of the users movement in and out of them, surely there is much more to it than that.

Bilddagboken is one of the fastest growing Swedish online communities. About a week ago they suddenly changed their design and many members reacted with frustration and anger. In one of the discussion boards on Bilddagboken it was stated that the administrators apparently received 18 000 complaints during the first five days after the redesign! The discontent were not only because of the new functionality or the new appearance, it was also coming from feeling powerless. Members felt disappointed about not being involved in the process and were surprised by the sudden change.

The same scenario has been displayed in many other online communities and social network sites. Every time LunarStorm changes its appearance you will find members reacting with frustration and every time Facebook changes some of its features there will be complaints. Online venues like Bilddagboken must continue to develop to keep up with what’s happening around them and it seems reasonable that they will have to change the design sometimes. But wouldn’t it be nice to involve the members in the design process? After all they invest a lot of their time and energy in the community and they want to feel that they have some kind of influence. When the software environment suddenly changes it is somewhat similar to redecorating their living room without asking them. No wonder they get mad.

If you spend a lot of time in online social spaces you need to remember that these environment are privately owned and that you most often do not know anything about their further development or how the conditions for spending time there might suddenly change. If you are managing such a place, remember that the members want to have some kind of influence. They are not merely “users” but co-producers creating an attractive environment. If you want to have a thriving community you need to let go of some of the power and invite the members to participate in the process of developing the site.

[Also posted in Swedish on my Umeå Live blog]

As a doctoral student I now spend 80% of my time on working with my thesis. The rest of the time I usually teach, but this semester I also participate in a project called Umeå Live (the formal project title is Innovation Cultures). Umeå Live is one out of five Living labs in Sweden receiving funding from VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems). The purpose of all Living Labs is to promote user centered services and products in a collaborative process that involves both end users, companies and partners from academia.

Yesterday the site www.umealive.se was launched and on that site we will try to present everything that happens within the project. I will also have a new blog there (in Swedish) and I will probably update it more often than I update this one.