Extract from www.technologiesforcommunities.com

Inherent in the experience of community are some fundamental tensions that require inventiveness. Two of them are particularly relevant for understanding how technology intersects with communities.

First, a community implies an experience of togetherness that extends through time and space. The continuity of togetherness is what creates the community but it is experienced by members in a rhythm of specific activities located in time and space. Separation in time and space then creates a dilemma for communities.
How can we experience togetherness even though we cannot be together face-to-face?
How can the togetherness of a few members (a meeting, a conversation) be made part of the experience of the whole community? One critical role of technology then is to provide new resources for making togetherness more continuous in spite of separation in time and space.

A second tension involves the relationship between communities and individuals. Togetherness is a property of communities, but it is something that is generated and experienced by individual members.

Communities experience these tensions in many activities that are often mediated, supported, or enhanced by technology. These include:

Interacting: To discuss issues, agree and disagree, brainstorm, work on tasks, ask and answer questions, etc., members need to connect, in and across time and space.

Publishing: To produce, share, and collect artifacts that are relevant to their practice, members need to organize communal repositories as well as individual access to them.

Tending: To nurture their togetherness, members need to find ways to participate personally as well as cultivate their community. This requires being able to see the community as community:understanding its pulse, its forms of participation, its evolving structure, its emerging roles, and its changing interests and needs.

classified tools into four (classic time/place taxonomy)
quadrants: same time/same place, same time/different place, same place/different time and different place/different time


Configuring technology
Defining a technology configuration for a community is not a linear process that can be prescribed in a step-by-step fashion. It has many loops, intricacies, and iterations that depend on the circumstances and

COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY
What is a collaborative technology?

The use of a technology to support the construction of communal ways of seeing, acting and knowing.

Collaboration allows a community of communicators to reconstruct a shared experience continually in order to produce greater meaning and greater potential for successful future action.

A community of practice has collaborated to generate a common, shared understanding of events and an action orientation for dealing with such events the next time they arise.

A collaborative technology is one publicly used "in a shared perceptual space" to develop shared resolutions to problematic experience. The technology becomes an instrument of mutual knowledge construction for a group of people.

The goal of a collaborative technology: the construction of communal ways of seeing, acting and knowing.

A collaborative technology is a tool that enables individuals to jointly engage in active production of shared knowledge.
Configuration-level considerations. The technology configuration has to reflect the constitution of the
community, its stage of development, and its diversity.

Where are the members located? Over what time-zone spread? How much face-to-face access does
the community have?

What kind of internet access do they have? What are the baseline technologies they already use?

What are the skill levels? How comfortable are they with technology? What is the range?

What are the needs of various constituencies, such as more or less engaged members or members
with different degrees of familiarity with and access to technology? What resources are available for
developing technology skills?

What is the linguistic and cultural diversity of the group?

What is the likelihood that members will form sub-communities and other types of subgroups? Does
this suggest a “space of spaces”?

Tool-level considerations.
Communities tend to engage in a complex set of activities to support the
various ways members learn with and from each other. What is the range of activities the community
needs to engage in?

What types of ongoing interactions? What types of events and meetings?
How much need to bridge between synchronous and asynchronous interactions?
Will interactions be more focused on group processes or on individual contributions?
What artifacts will they share? How will these be organized and archived?
Who will tend to the perspective of the community? What information will they need about the health
of the community? What actions will they need to take?
How will members manage their participation? Find their way around? Connect with others?
Mapping activities to tools is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping. Some activities may require multiple tools; a meeting, for example, may require a calendar, a phone bridge, a web-based presentation, and chat. Conversely some tools may support multiple types of activities, such as polling, which can be used to make decisions, schedule meetings, or reflect on the community’s health. Still, given the breadth of potentially useful tools shown in Figure 3, it is important to conduct an analysis of existing or desirable activities to delineate the set of tools to include.

Feature-level considerations. Not all tools for the same activity are created equal. They have features
that define their usability. Addressing this level of detail is important because usability is key.
What do the features of a tool try to accomplish? How are they implemented? Can the tool be used in
different ways?
Does the implementation of the feature set support the specific way a community conducts an activity? To what extent is the tool adaptable? Can it be tweaked and configured by the user, by the
technology steward, or by a skilled technologist? Can some features be turned off so as to make the technology more accessible in the beginning?

These considerations require an understanding not only of the range of activities but also of how a
community conducts these activities. Again the point is not to go for the maximum number of features, but to understand how certain features meet the needs of a community or how the lack of a feature
constitutes a specific problem because of the way the community operates. These feature-oriented
considerations have to balance functionality and flexibility with simplicity and learnability.

Platform-level considerations. Comparing candidates for inclusion in the technology configuration also requires some analysis of the platform as a product to be acquired, deployed, and used.
How compatible is the platform with other tools the community or its members use?