Architectures
for
Conversation (ii)
What Communities of
Practice can mean for IA
(and UX in general,
for that matter)
Andrew Hinton
April 2007
www.inkblurt.com
This is a talk I put together for the Philly CHI group. It’s based mostly on a talk I did for the IA Summit earlier in
the year, with some additional thoughts and refinements.
I’m calling this the ‘oficial’ version, since I think it explains things a little better, especially toward the end!
(SlideShare Readers: if you’re reading this on slideshare.net, keep in mind that some of the graphics may be a
little funky due to the conversion process. Also, my apologies for leaving in so many of the builds, but I think
they’re helpful in constructing the arguments... at least I hope so. Also, sorry too that this basically has to be
viewed at full screen in order to see both the text and slides, but it’s the only way to make sense of this
presentation, which doesn’t have much text in the slides themselves.)
This presentation ‘lives’ oficially on my blog: www.inkblurt.com/presentations/
(Note about photos: many are comp-quality photos from Corbis, some are stills I found online that didn’t seem to
have any copyright statements on their respective sites (the old movie stills especially), and some are just flotsam
from the web in general. If necessary I can track down sources, but I’m not making money on this presentation, so
hopefully this is a non-issue...)

3 Chapters:
A Fine Mess
Communities of Practice
Describing the Damn Thing

Chapter 1
A Fine Mess
Before I get to Communities of Practice specifically, I want to cover the context that I think makes
them so relevant.
Basically, how we have gotten ourselves into a sort of mess. A beautiful, wondrous mess, but a
mess nonetheless.
(I’m pretty sure the film images come from doctormacro.com)

Top-Down Emergent
Command Hierarchy Organic Network
Team/Management/Military Crowds/Friends/Incidental Networks
Let’s start with two patterns. One extreme is very controlled, the other is pretty much anarchy.
To illustrate some key dierences between them, we’re going to talk about assault rifles.

Here’s an object lesson in how design can catalyze change, and tap into latent emergence.
Larry Kahaner explains how certain characteristics of the AK-47 make it more devastating than any
other single weapon in the world, comparing it to the US standard military rifle, the M-16.

Closed Open
Expensive Inexpensive
Complex Simple
Accurate Close Enough
M-16 AK-47
Both of these designed objects look very similar in all the ways that seem to matter. They both look like assault
rifles, and they both work basically the same way. So how could they be much dierent?
>>
The M-16 is designed with a particular philosophy in mind.
- There will always be a proprietary infrastructure capable of manufacturing them and delivering parts;
- There will always be money to pay for them;
- Exactly the right ammunition will be available for it;
- Soldiers will have and take the time to meticulously clean and maintain the weapon. (otherwise it is notorious for
jamming)
- Soldiers using them will be professional marksmen
The design of the device comes with certain implications that it cannot escape --
>> you could say that these qualities are in its DNA.
>> The AK47, although appearances is the same thing (an assault rifle), is almost completely dierent in most of
the ways that count.
- It was designed for easy mass production,
- parts that could more easily be repaired and remanufactured, and retrofitted,
- it’s not fussy about ammunition, meaning it’s easier to get hold of bullets it can fire.
- and while it’s not a marksman’s weapon, it’s close enough.
>>
That means its DNA is dierent enough that it lends itself to latent emergence -- only in this case, unfortunately,
that means political strife, insurgencies, and 3rd world armies.
According to the UN the AK-47 kills more than a Quarter Million people every year.
But the main lesson here is that a few design decisions can make a huge dierence in the impact a designed thing
can have on the world. It’s not terribly hard to draw a parallel with something less lethal, but still powerful.

Closed Open
Expensive Inexpensive
Complex Simple
Accurate Close Enough
>> I don’t know if Jimmy Wales would want Wikipedia to be called the AK-47 of encyclopedias, but in many ways,
that’s what it is.

Instruction Conversation
An essential dierence between britannica and wikipedia is
>>britannica is a one-way medium, handed down from authorities,
>> While wikipedia is conversational. It fulfills more of what human beings want in their daily life.
That’s not to say that wikipedia is better than britannica, or that the old way is evil or irrelevant.
It’s just to say that technology has tapped into a latent need people have to be part of
conversations.

“If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is
people-to-people . . .
First Web
Tim Berners-
Server
Lee (A “side project”)
. . . but that was what the Web was supposed to
be all along.”
This is the first ever web server.
>> It was in Tim Berners-Lee’s ofice, as a side project he was working on.
I think it’s significant that the WWW was created as, basically, a side project. As we’ll come to see,
side projects are something communities of practice thrive on. In fact, the Web was, to a large
degree, created to support Berners-Lee’s own community of practice.
There’s a lot of hype about Web 2.0, but the web was always meant to be “social.” Recently
commenting on the “Web 2.0” trend, Berners Lee said
>>
“If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that IS people-to-people, but that was what the Web
was supposed to be all along.”
It’s taken us about 15 years or so to get to the Web TBL envisioned, but now we’re calling it Web
2.0.
-------------
TBL Web 2.0 quote from: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060901-7650.html
“This phase allows collaborative authorship. It provides a place to put any piece of information such that it can later be
From the original proposal:
found. Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete information. One should be able to trace the source of information, to
circumvent and then to repair flaws in the web.”
http://www.w3.org/Proposal

“Conversation is king.
Content is just something to talk
about.”
Cory Doctorow
“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
It’s not that content is unimportant; it’s what conversations are *made* of!
But focusing on the content -- or the “information” -- to the exclusion of its use is a mistake.
----
(cory said this on boingboing
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/10/disney_exec_piracy_i.html)

Conversation is the
engine of
knowledge.
Conversation is the engine of knowledge. It’s the generative activity of civilization.
But I don’t only mean just literal “talk” -- I mean conversation in the abstract sense of civic
engagement.
(photo mine)

“Markets are Conversations ...”
“Money talks...”
Money is Language Too
As the wisdom of the Cluetrain Manifesto reminds us, even markets are conversations --
If conversations are purposeful human communication, it’s hard to get more purposeful than how
you spend your money. If eBay isn’t a conversation, I don’t know what is.
Money is language too... there’s a reason why we say “money talks...”
If I tip my bartender with a dollar bill, that dollar bill is saying something.
But even if I buy something at WalMart, I’m saying something there too... I’m engaging in a larger
conversation that’s happening with money.

Group Creation Capabilities
1980 1990 2000 2007
People have gone conversation-happy on the web.
Before the Internet, there were very few ways to create groups: newspapers, local associations,
things like that.
>>
But even by 2000, there were only a few main places online, like E-Groups (Now Yahoo Groups) or
USENET, and the venerable ListServ mailing lists hosted here and there, usually in universities.
>>
Suddenly, in the last 5-6 years, we’ve seen an incredible explosion -- almost any social software
environment has an ability to create a “community” or “group”. I think that’s a big part of what has
caused the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Everywhere you look, you can create a group. It’s become a sort of commodity: people are coming
to just expect to be able to make a group at the click of a button.
And this really is more than just more of the same; I think it represents a cultural shift that has
some very significant implications.

Phase Transition
I think this is more significant than just “the same capability, only more of it.”
I think it’s more like a “Phase Transition” -- the way H2O moves from ice, to water, to steam.
For some things, a large enough dierence in scale results in a dierence in KIND.
Not unlike the teakettle, a designed artifact somehow tapped into an enormous reservoir of
latent emergence.
How can it be that a simple technical design could catalyze such enormous change???
And this brings me to Groucho Marx

“Time flies like an arrow ...
...but fruit flies like a banana.”
Groucho Marx once said this, one of my favorite quotations... Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies
like a banana..

If you want to get fruit flies to show up, you just put out some bananas.
Bananas are an excellent medium for growing lots of fruit flies.

You’d think people would be so much more complex than fruit flies that a trick like that wouldn’t
work for them.
But even though people show up for a good spread and some wine, the truth is people are a little
more complicated than fruit flies.
To keep all this milling about eficient, we’ve had to have stricter structures through much of
human history.
(photo mine)

Traditional Institutions
[Instruction & Production]
?
Organic Networks
[Learning & Innovation]
>> In an industrial society where people are mostly paid to follow directions rather than talk about
their work or innovate, hierarchies made a lot more sense.
>> But the truth is, the looser organic network has always been where Knowledge & Innovation
occur -- in the hidden, unoficial connections and conversations between people. Just think of all
the stories you hear about things like the Lockheed skunk works, or Bell Labs -- situations where
innovation fermented in spite of organizational lines.
>>The big dierence is that the Web has given the organic networks the ability to make themselves
explicit, to come out from the shadows. And it’s a perfect medium for growing them quickly. You
might even say the web is like our banana. >>
>> So, if I can oversimplify things a bit, it looks as if the more organic, semantic way of connecting
things and people is on the ascendant; and that tends to draw away from the power and necessity of
the command network.
Of course it’s still needed for corporate structure and operational eficiency; but it’s having to learn
to share the wealth in a more oficial way with the organic network.
>>
Is it possible for these two to ever play well together? How do we reconcile this tension?

Chapter 2
Communities
of
Practice
I think that’s a major value of the Community of Practice. So let’s dig in and figure out what one
is ...

Social
Networks
Communities
Communities of
Practice
Just to be clear on one thing... Social networks are a very large category of emergent, organic
networks in general.
Communities of Practice are a subset -- though they do derive some of their qualities from the
parent pattern.

“Domain”
“Communities of Practice are groups of people who
share a concern or a passion for something they do and
learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
“Practice” “Community”
Etienne Wenger
Etienne Wenger, who coined the phrase, defines it like this.
>>
DOMAIN: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections
between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest.
Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence
that distinguishes members from other people. (Wenger)
>>
PRACTICE: Members are practitioners, developing a shared repertoire of resources: experiences,
stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems. This takes time and sustained interaction.
A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights,
but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. (Wenger)
>>
COMMUNITY: In pursuing joint interests in their domain, members engage in joint activities and
discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to
learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or
the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn
together. (Wenger)
There are many qualities to a Community of Practice, but here are a few major points about them.
(photo from etienne’s site)

Many Communities of Practice
Emergent Groups for Learning, Making & Improving
Lots of CoPs
>> The royal society is an old example from 1660 -- amateurs with time and passion about how the
world worked, who got together and might dissect an animal one day and try to figure out how light
works the next.
>> Builders and carpenters learn from one another in groups and in person, in mentorships and
practice among one another.
>> The same goes for stone carvers and craftspeople all over the world
>> This includes tailors -- for example, the area of London called Savile Row -- geographically
colocated tailors for generations.
>> even cheerleaders have a community of practice -- if you watch how they learn the craft, you see
that even though they have a coach and a schedule, they still do much of their learning from one
another, making their craft better as they go.
>> So even in situations where the work is highly structured or even industrial, often we see CoPs
crop up when they’re allowed to, because people have a vested interest in improving the work they
do, and making better things with it.
>> It applies to every kind of work, from the ridiculous to the sublime.
>> A major distinguishing factor is that Communities of Practice are about Learning, Making &
Improving.

How are they different from teams?
One way understand what something is, is to understand what it is not. For a moment, let’s focus in
particular on the distinction between Communities of Practice and Work Teams, since that’s
especially relevant in the workplace.

Work “Team” Community of Practice
Involuntary Voluntary
Product Delivery Continual Evolution
Defined by Mgmt Defined by Group
So let’s look at just a few characteristics of both.
>>
Teams are Involuntary -- you’re assigned to them -- but Communities of Practice are very organic,
and people get involved in them because of their interest, not to fulfill an obligation.
>>
A team’s purpose is to deliver products, on delivery dates. But a Community of Practice’s purpose is
its own evolution -- Learning, Making & Improving -- the continual improvement of practice and
knowledge among its members. There’s no delivery date -- even though the community often may
set goals and work together on meeting them, it’s in the service of the ongoing evolution.
>>
And not only are a team’s members and goals assigned, it’s entirely defined by the organization’s
management structure. Without an org chart, it wouldn’t exist. A Community of Practice is defined
by the aggregate of its members, and whatever domain they happen to share in common.
>>
This means that management really doesn’t have much of an idea what to *do* with a CoP. It
doesn’t fit the MBA concept of a managed organization. Even though, in almost any workplace, they
exist in some form or another, and in many organizations they’re essential to the org’s success.
Does this mean Teams and CoPs are mutually exclusive? No... in fact, sometimes the best teams
have taken it upon themselves to become communities of practice >>
They can work in a complementary fashion -- but often they end up blurring boundaries between
other teams and branches in the organization.
By the way this is something management often doesn’t understand: that when you put something
organic down it tends to grow roots. If you’ve ever been in a team that you felt like you really grew
with, and felt like a community, then were arbitrarily transferred to some other team ... you feel
ripped out by the roots. That’s why.
----
based in part on http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/knowledge_management/km2/cop_toolkit.asp

Top-Down Emergent
Command Hierarchy Organic Network
Communities
of Practice
Team/Management/Military Crowds/Friends/Incidental Networks
Here are our network patterns again. And the spectrum between them.
>> And the particular species of network or pattern we’re focusing on is about here on that
spectrum...
Communities of practice could be seen as a sort of specialized organic network.

Community of Practice
Domain
A community of practice is in a sense a hybrid pattern -- it’s informal, emergent, just like a general
social network,
>>
but it has a center of gravity -- the domain -- that acts loosely as an organizing principle.
>>
Members may come in and out, it may shift over time, even its domain can sometimes migrate to a
new focus. Notice the defining circle is dotted -- it’s a soft, permeable boundary.
>>
Sometimes it attracts outsiders who are loosely involved because they have an interest in the
domain.
>>
These people are often part of other practices, and bring skills along with them.
And this is all perfectly OK... in fact, it’s essential. This whole, roiling ecosystem of members and
ideas is part of what helps these patterns thrive.
Now let’s look at a quick case study that helps illustrate some of this.

Xerox
Eureka!
John Seely Brown
Community of
Practice
Domain
>>
John Seely Brown, in his terrific book “The Social Life of Information,” tells a great story about how,
at Xerox, they were trying to figure out how to improve the technical service and support. Evidently
the oficial tech manual -- published from above -- wasn’t cutting it.
So they did an ethnographic study and discovered
>> that the tech reps were talking to each other more than using the manual -- the knowledge was
in the people, and the manual didn’t have what they needed.
>> They were behaving like a community of practice!
Rather than forbidding them to converse, they decided to build a system to support their
community. They called it Eureka.
>>
What’s happening *these days* though, is that the communities of practice aren’t waiting for
management to create something for them... they now have the tools to create the infrastructure for
themselves!
--------
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/01/people.html
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/projects/commknowledge/eureka.html

Traditional Institutions
[Instruction & Production]
?
Organic Networks
[Learning & Innovation]
As we discussed, there’s a tension between Organic Networks and Traditional Institutions, and they
seem in competition at the moment.

Traditional Institutions
[Instruction & Production]
Organic Networks
[Learning & Innovation]
I suggest that the Community of Practice is one pattern for solving the problem of this tension --
because it could help reconcile their dierences. It doesn’t replace either of the other patterns, but it
does help make them more complementary.
It means, however, that the traditional network is going to have to learn to let go of some of its
control, and at least when it comes to learning and community, let the group guide the domain.

They’re Cropping
Up All Over
And really, if you think about it, we don’t have any choice. Because the tools are there and they’re
going to crop up all over whether we want them to or not.
(not my photo; but can’t find where I got it)

It doesn’t only happen in business.
I’ve been working with Breastcancer.org, and one of the things we learned was that the discussion
boards they put up that were supposed to be mainly for informal knowledge sharing and socializing
have turned into a vital community of practice for women with breast cancer and survivors.
>>
It turns out that their forums follow a pattern that you can see in many other similar places -- that
the community ends up being not the secondary resource for knowledge, but for the majority of
regular users, it’s the *primary* resource.
The oficial structure and info on the site serve as a useful anchor point, a framework, for the
community -- but the community is primary for them.
Many of these women instead of going to the oficial part of the site to read an article on something,
will go to the forum and ask “have any of you seen anything on X?”
This makes the medical establishment running the site kind of nervous... but
Once we discovered this, we’re now trying to figure out how to redesign to support it...

Even in multiplayer gaming circles, interesting things are happening.
Joi Ito, the internet entrepreneur, has made a big deal out of his community of practice in World of
Warcraft
>>-- he’s written how in his professional geek circle, people are actually getting recruited and
hired for real jobs based on the qualities of leadership and strategy they display in the game.
He has a bunch of friends who play the game as a sort of team, but it functions more like a
Community of Practice.
In fact multiplayer games are a great place to look to see how people innovate around a practice --
partly because none of the traditional assumptions are in play culturally, and partly because they
tend to be technically savvy problem-solving types.
>>
For example:
Because Wow isn’t the best place for planning and strategy, they’ll sometimes dip into Second Life
to map out attacks and raids, then execute them in World of Warcraft.
-----------------
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/03/13/leadership_in_world_of_warcraft.html
http://www.3pointd.com/20060922/planning-wow-raids-in-second-life/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160442894955175707

So how do you design for them?
So how on earth do you design for such a thing?
Well let’s go back to our banana...

As we discussed ... If you want to get fruit flies to show up, you just put out some bananas.
Bananas are an excellent medium for growing lots of fruit flies.
(image borrowed from thinkingfountain.org)

I remember learning about fruit flies from Childcraft -- a children’s encyclopedia that my parents
had in our house.

It explained how you can create a jar with a particular structure that attracts more fruit flies, and
allows them to thrive.
Creating conditions to optimize for something that happens naturally.
You can *design* for these conditions.
(this image isn’t from childcraft, and now I can’t find where I got it, but it was through google image search before they changed the search
method...)

"I created the platform, and then I got out of the way.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the way.'’
Craig Newmark
But what does Craig mean by “get out of the way?” The fact is, he’s extremely involved in Craigslist.
He spends many many hours a day *cultivating* that environment, by being a “customer service
representative.”
---------
6. "I created the platform, and then I got out of the way. Sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the way.''
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/10/LVGU693SFD1.DTL
(photo from craiglist)

So you *just* get out of the way?
Not really ...

“As part of my job, I put in
at least 40 hours a week on
customer service. I'm just a
customer service rep. My
two biggest projects are
dealing with misbehaving
apartment brokers in New
York and lightly moderating
our discussion boards.”
Craig works hard to keep things moving well on this platform. But he doesn’t orchestrate
everyone’s actions -- he cultivates.
“As part of my job, I put in at least 40 hours a week on customer service. I'm just a customer service rep. My two biggest projects are dealing with
misbehaving apartment brokers in New York and lightly moderating our discussion boards.”
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/biz2/howtosucceed/21.html

It’s all about Cultivation.
It’s not about organizing things into static structures, but cultivating organic, natural activity toward
some goal (even if the goal is healthy continuation of that activity).
(photo from corbis)

Motivation
=
Cultivation
Moderation
There are tons of great writings out there about the best practices for designing for participation
and groups.
But we don’t have a week to go into that -- so I’ve boiled it down to a nice formula.
Basically, cultivating means finding the balance between encouraging activity (motivation) and
shaping that activity toward healthy ends with moderation (‘dividing’ it, in a sense).
Some research for this section came from these sources:
Communities of Practice: Going Virtual http://www.getcited.org/pub/103396967
Where is the Action in Virtual CoPs? http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~lueg/papers/commdcscw00.pdf
Moderation Strategies Wiki http://social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki/
Shirky on moderation: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky_1.html
Tim O’Reilly’s “Architectures of Participation” post 2004 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html
Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 work: http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/enterprise_20_version_20/
Joi Ito on collaborating through WoW: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160442894955175707
Evolving communities of practice (IBM study): http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/gongla.pdf)
Tons more here: http://www.inkblurt.com/archives/446

Motivation
=
Cultivation
Moderation
Love What You’re Doing
Get Your Hands Dirty
Don’t Try to Fake It
You have to love what you’re doing -- or you won’t be able to care enough to be involved.
You have to be willing to get your hands dirty by getting into the mix with everyone else.
And you can’t fake it -- you can’t assign someone who isn’t invested to be a cultivator.
This is why, actually, it makes the most sense for a community of practice’s members to be the
cultivators... even if there’s a pecking order of some kind (which is fine! hierarchies are helpful at
times in the service of the practice & domain -- but they tend to be much more fluid and
meritocracy-based in CoPs)

Motivation
=
Cultivation
Moderation
Self-Interest over Altruism
Remixability & Presence
Shared Artifacts
Self-Interest: It’d be nice if we could assume people will do things “for the good of the community.” But give it up.
People don’t actually function that way on a continual basis.
Besides, a community of practice is first and foremost PRACTICAL (hence the word ‘practice’ right there in the
name!).
People want to learn skills, get better at them, and get social cred for their chops and contributions. It’s this
collective eort of enlightened self-interest that causes the community to emerge.
So, think about how to best increase chances that people will get that feedback and practice improvement they so
desire.
Remixability: no community is an island. People have multivariate lives, and they’re increasingly expecting to be
able to grab bits of one thing and have it mix into other things. If your community infrastructure doesn’t lend itself
to syndication, mobile interaction, and the like -- it’s risking irrelevance. People want it to come to them.
Presence: Essentially like remixability, but with emphasis on personal “thereness” -- people often want to be able
to contribute to an ongoing conversation throughout the day, and be ‘in it’ whenever it’s convenient to them. (Of
course they want to be able to hide from it when they want too ... and that’s ok.)
Shared Artifacts: one study showed that having shared artifacts was important to CoPs in general, but especially
important for virtual. Having something that everyone can work on together is very important -- which is one
reason why wiki-like functions are exploding for collaboration online.
-----
Communities of Practice: Going Virtual http://www.getcited.org/pub/103396967

Motivation
=
Cultivation
Moderation
Body Language / Subtle Cues
Tweak-able Architecture
Rich Identity & Connection
Most social software we’re familiar with is on the listserv/usenet model: threaded mail/post discussions.
But there are limits to that model. For one thing, it arose in a very homogeneous community of engineers, academics, etc, who
all knew one another professionally in one way or another, and who had a sort of cultural baseline they were communicating
from. Any further etiquette emerged over time in the online culture (this is all pre-1994 or so). Anyone who was getting on the
Internet in late 80s up to about 93 remembers the tons of stuff the community had you read before you felt like you should
even post! (One origin of FAQs)
Then the floodgates opened, and frankly broke the old model. But we’ve mostly been stuck with threaded discussions or real-
time IRC-like chat for 15 years.
Gradually the more forward-thinking sites started having more nuanced feedback mechanisms, so the community can police
itself to a larger extent. This is just like in real-time conversation, where body language can mean so much. You don’t want to
have to use the baseball bat, when a rolled eye or a crossed brow will do the trick. Software is getting to where it can do some
of that body-language work for us.
Also, the architecture needs to be tweakable -- again by arch, I don’t mean the labeling and taxonomy alone but how they
service the structure and channeling of human activity on the site, as well as user permissions, what is surfaced and not
surfaced by the system (do users see who made negative comments too or just the positive ones? is karma score made
available for everyone to see or is it a private score for the user’s eyes only? if someone adds a friend do you let everyone see
they were added or is it just between the users? what algorithm is in use for determining karma?) All these things need to be
able to be adjusted as you get to know how your particular community works in it over time -- because they’re all different
culturally and personality-wise, as well as the kind of work they do.
Also, Rich Identity/Connection is important: the more invested someone is in their identity within the community, the less likely
they will be to act like a jerk and lose credibility. Their ‘avatar’ (usually just a profile page!) needs to allow for enough rich
connection and identity expression that they can invest deeply... and feel a connection to the avatar that they don’t want to
disrupt.

This is Clay Shirky’s moderation patterns wiki. It’s one example of how people are still trying to
figure out what works and what doesn’t in what situations ... most of the discussions and
disagreements here, it seems, are about how certain rules of thumb are only good in certain
contexts. I think this needs to be a much wider conversation, though -- and he agrees. (or rather I
guess I agree with him?) ....

"We are literally encoding the
principles of ... freedom of
expression in our tools. We need to
have conversations about the
explicit goals of ... what we are
trying to do, because that
Clay Shirky
conversation matters."
Exceedingly important conversation!
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky.html

So, is Information Architecture a Community of Practice?
This is where I get a little specific about IA -- I debated taking this out given our venue here, but
the truth is everybody here engages in practicing Information Architecture at some point, and I
think that looking at IA as a practice will help us understand all the various related practices.
(this was the comment I gave to the more general PhillyCHI audience)

Chapter 3
Defining
Describing the
Damn Thing

IA Community of Practice
Computer-Human
Interaction
Graphic Design
?
Domain
Library Science
For years there’s been talk about how IA is or isn’t a “real discipline” because other disciplines do
many of the same things we do.
But if you get out of the mentality of “Disciplines” and back into the idea of “Practices” it helps
assuage a lot of this anxiety about shared tools and methods.
>> Just like in the previous diagram, we also have people here, in the room, who consider
themselves primarily belonging to some other practice -- graphic design, computer/human
interaction, or library science are just a few examples. This should be of no concern ... it’s actually a
*GOOD* thing!
There is a remaining question, though: if what makes us a community of practice is a shared
domain -- and that domain is somehow distinct from the domains of other practices --
>>
then what on earth is our domain? We’ll get to that in a bit. But first, I want to dig into what
dierentiates a discipline from a practice, and how they relate to one another.

Practice
Domain
Socially shared domain (context of need).
Emergent from the bottom up.
Tools
Discrete tasks and methods and materials.
Not necessarily exclusive to any particular Practice.
As we’ve established, a Practice organizes itself around a socially shared domain, and it’s an
emergent, bottom-up entity.
>>
A practice, by its nature, has many tools at its disposal. And it’s VERY important to note, none of
these tools is necessarily exclusive to this one practice.

One Tool
Many Practices
A Practice is Not Defined by its Tools.
To illustrate this, let’s look at the lowly shovel.
>> Our flower-planting friends from earlier use a shovel for their practice. But it’s not an exclusive
tool for gardening.
>> This same tool is useful in many other practices. From farming to firefighting to sandcastles and
shoveling snow. The kids gardening aren’t going to beat up the kid in the sand just because they
think he shouldn’t be using a shovel too.
>> A PRACTICE is not defined by its tools, only by its domain.
But of course this is harder in user-experience design, because we all work together and our work
overlaps so much.
So the question for us shouldn’t be “who” does wireframes, but why. That is, what is it about our
domain that wireframes as a tool helps us to figure out.

Practice
Domain
Socially shared domain (context of need).
Emergent from the bottom up.
Tools
Discrete tasks and methods and materials.
Not necessarily exclusive to any particular Practice.
Now back to our diagram.
As a Practice sticks around a while, it may want to seek professional legitimacy in the marketplace.
>>
Business and Academia, being entities that are highly structured and standardized, look for those
qualities in the professions it chooses to accept. But a Community of Practice is much more an
organic network than a command network.

Discipline
Established standards, definitions & curricula
Planned from the top down.
{ }
Practice
Domain
Socially shared domain (context of need).
Emergent from the bottom up.
Tools
Discrete tasks and methods and materials.
Not necessarily exclusive to any particular Practice.
So a practice that yearns for that acceptance tries to establish some kind of “discipline” to give it
that structure. A discipline establishes standards and definitions, creates curricula, and plans things
from the top down.
Because of their dierent natures, there’s always some tension between a practice and its discipline,
but in the best circumstances it can be a productive tension. And the discipline then gives a sort of
mantle of respectability to the practice; but also channels money, resources, attention and lots of
other good things.
IMPORTANT distinction: Definition vs. Description -- When we want to define ourselves, we’re really
yearning for that legitimacy and structure. But you can’t Define yourself before you can really
describe yourself.
It takes time ... all disciplines emerged from practices. We only just got started with this stu about
12-15 years ago.
To be a traditional cheesemaker in France, you have to apprentice for anywhere from 10 to 12 years.
And that’s making *cheese!*
>>
But even once the discipline provides a definition, it doesn’t replace the practice. The practice and
the discipline continue influencing one another in a symbiotic relationship.
In fact, the best thing the discipline can do is provide a nutritious medium for us to grow and
thrive ...
>>

Discipline
Established standards, definitions & curricula
Planned from the top down.
{ }
Practice
Domain
Socially shared domain (context of need).
Emergent from the bottom up.
Tools
Discrete tasks and methods and materials.
Not necessarily exclusive to any particular Practice.
A discipline should be our banana.
(Or better yet, the nicely designed jar for our banana -- but it doesn’t look or sound as fun as just
‘banana’.)

A Discipline is something you follow.
A Practice is something you do.
Neither defines what you are.*
*Especially these days.
We tend to refer to IA and other UX practices as “disciplines” -- but I think it’s a tricky term.
Personally, I think a Discipline is something you follow, and a practice is something you DO.
Neither of them is something that you ARE.
And that’s an important distinction.

So what’s the Domain for IA?
So the question remains, what is our domain?
What shared concern caused our community to coalesce?

I think it has to do with something new in the world that just didn’t exist before.
Not long ago most information systems were isolated.
>>

But then they started being connected together. Still this was somewhat isolated; only certain people
had access, and even fewer could change or write to the system.
>>

Computer-Human
Interaction
Graphic Design
Library Science
The practices and disciplines in existence emerged in this and prior paradigms, and they handled
quite capably what most of what these systems did.
Mainly specialized applications for trained users in operational environments, and some consumer
devices and products.
Here’s an important point: the structure of these spaces was mostly a given. It came with the
infrastructure, administration rights, etc. These structures were essentially “designed”
whether intentionally or not by sysadmins and TCP/IP engineers.
But then something extraordinary happened.
>>>>
[Note: this, and other diagrams, are not meant to be taken literally, only figuratively. i.e. I’m not
saying Library Science was only relevant to one and a half digital networks. I know I shouldn’t have
to put this disclaimer here... but then again, I know I have to. :-) ]

The Web happened. And it brought something new into the world.
Anybody could link to anything they wanted. And over time, more people had access, and suddenly
whole crowds of nontechnical people were structuring this space.
You can look at this and say “my god what a horrible mess!”
But if you think of each of these white lines as a conversation, it actually looks kind of beautiful.
I think the IA community is full of folks who, in a very well-meaning way, want to take this
mess and *fix* it. But we’re all having to learn now that our real work is in how best to
*channel* this rich activity. To create the right structures for cultivation.

Massively shared, persistent, digital-semantic space.
Infospace.
Massively shared, persistent, digital-semantic space.
Massively shared means that, whereas in isolated systems what you did could only mean something
to a few people, on the web it can mean something to everyone. It becomes a lot more like
geography.
Persistent means that the things you do there stay there.
Digital-semantic meaning that it’s not made of atoms, it’s all made of language, and relevance.
For the sake of brevity,
>>
I’ll call this InfoSpace.
(I did not make this term up -- I’ve seen it around... it’s essentially cyberspace, but that term is so
misused in a scifi kind of way that it’s become useless, although this is essentially how William
Gibson now thinks of ‘cyberspace’ himself -- not so much like “second life” but more the digital-
semantic massively-shared layer of reality that is the Web. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/
2007_03_01_archive.asp#8519138918500252617)

Massively shared, persistent, digital-semantic space.
Made of
Like Geography
Language, not
Global / Cultural
Atoms
Infospace.
Massively shared, persistent, digital-semantic space.
Massively shared means that, whereas in isolated systems what you did could only mean something
to a few people, on the web it can mean something to everyone. It becomes a lot more like
geography.
Persistent means that the things you do there stay there.
Digital-semantic meaning that it’s not made of atoms, it’s all made of language, and relevance.
For the sake of brevity,
>>
I’ll call this InfoSpace.
(I did not make this term up -- I’ve seen it around... it’s essentially cyberspace, but that term is so
misused in a scifi kind of way that it’s become useless, although this is essentially how William
Gibson now thinks of ‘cyberspace’ himself -- not so much like “second life” but more the digital-
semantic massively-shared layer of reality that is the Web. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/
2007_03_01_archive.asp#8519138918500252617)

IA Community of Practice
Computer-Human
Interaction
Graphic Design
?
Library Science
So what is the domain of our community of practice?
I think that when the web happened, some of us in dierent practices felt something was missing --
that something behind the interface and behind the surface interactions needed shape. That’s why
we coalesced .. and that’s our domain.

IA Community of Practice
Computer-Human
Interaction
Graphic Design
Infospace
Library Science
>>
I think it’s about infospace. And I think it has a heck of a lot in common with “physical” architecture.
Because architecture is about creating structures that enable people to better inhabit spaces.
Now, am I saying that IA can’t be practiced anywhere but the ‘Web’ or in Digital environments?
No... not really. We just have to realize that the skillsets, mindsets and culture we developed in this
community of practice isn’t a panacea. In fact, a lot of what we think we can bring to the ofline (and
non-massively-shared webbish) world is already being covered by other practices.

IA Community of Practice
Industrial
Design
Informatics
Infospace
Other stuff ....
Architecture /
Wayfinding
We need to keep in mind that it’s not just our community interested in these things.
There’s nothing wrong with that of course!! It’s just important to keep perspective -- because IA
isn’t about *everything* and can’t solve all the problems in the world.
This practice has a lot of valuable stu to add to the ongoing conversation, as do others. And the
more converged the world becomes, the more we will all have to get used to not having such firm,
“permanent” silo walls between our communities and what we do.

DigitalSemantic
Physical
I think IA as well as other UX practices are becoming more and more relevant in physical spaces,
though, with the advent of ubiquitous computing.
>>

DigitalSemantic
Physical
>>
We are increasingly walking around not just in physical space, but in digital semantic space
simultaneously. That’s a big design job!
I find it a little odd that people feel this is somehow constrictive... it’s increasingly important pretty
much everywhere.

User
Experience
User Experience as Meta-Practice
What are we to make of this, then?
Here we are, in this weird cluster of practices that for some reason in the last 15 years have all had
to start working together a lot more closely than perhaps we did in the past.
I think that the advent of Infospace has done more than just emerge a need for a new practice on
how to structure it. It has caused all of us to have to rethink how we work and why.
Much like it’s done to corporations and organizations all over the world, it has forced previously
siloed, insulated communities to collaborate in very new ways, and to question and adapt the
boundaries of their disciplines to some degree.
Now we’re struggling with this issue, in a really exciting period of foment. But rather than seeing
these issues as negative, why not see them as positive?
>> The way I see it, we’re smack dab in the middle of a Meta Practice that we’re calling User
Experience.
This doesn’t take the place of the related practices in any way. All of them are necessary -- and
undoubtedly more of them will be in the future -- in order to support this highly complex, new-in-
the-world activity.
It’s not definable in a sense of “discipline” and it’s not going to hold still for that. In fact, all of us
are going to have to get used to our previously neat and tidy “disciplines” being a lot messier. But
also a lot more exciting. The world is changing too fast to do otherwise.
Welcome to the User Experience MetaPractice. Let’s continue the conversation!

Thank You
Andrew Hinton
inkblurt@gmail.com
www.inkblurt.com