The Problem

“Communities” seems to be the buzzword of the year as we see more and more “social networks” and large scale online communities begin to dominate the marketplace. We’ve watched as Facebook went from local university community, to national college-based community, to world-wide software giant-in-the-making, but who is really benefiting from these communities?

Isn’t it the point of a community that with each new participant the power of the community as a whole grows? Why does it seem more and more that the only one’s benefiting from the growth of these communities are the business people reaping the ad-revenue behind them? It’s because that is exactly what is happening. The online web communities we have come to know and love are becoming less and less useful to us and more and more useful to the people who run them.

When Bigger isn’t Better

We need to move away from our infatuation with these over-inflated communities and towards a respect for smaller more specialized communities. When your talking about large scale communities like Facebook, the potential benefits for local communities are dwarfed.  How much do you actually care about Facebook when your using it? I bet you barely even give it a second’s thought, you’re just looking to see what you’re friends have been up to. We as web developers need to begin developing communities for smaller localized groups that actually care about the community as a whole.

If we begin to develop smaller communities with a larger focus on physical presence we can develop communities of people who actually care about the group as a whole and actually want to put forth effort to improve it. (I’m avoiding examples here on purpose, I want you the reader to apply these thoughts as you see fit but I have presented many examples in past blog posts).

We’ve seen this trend many times before. Take corporate America for example: Big companies are full of people who work for money and care/know little about the larger entity they are a part of, while small companies are full of people who work passionately day and night for the growth of the company itself. Our obsession with big in the past few centuries has left us with less and less people who actually care about what they are apart of.

Large communities in turn are not able to offer the sort of specialization or quality of service that a more direct and localized community can offer. There is still an important role these large communities will play in our future, however, it will be the large communities that are built on a network of smaller more specialized and localized communities that prosper. Facebook’s social cause and donation applications have shown us how the massive size of a community can be harnessed for powerful positive influence on our society, but without the smaller focus of localized communities the larger community is nothing but bloated hype.

A system that could properly integrate smaller communities with one another to develop larger more powerful communities could be one of the most influential pieces in the puzzle we call our future.

Technology has become the catalyst for the world civilizations undergoing a slow but vast revolution in thought, ideals, and practice. We are moving from a proprietorized world where money defines the amount of information we have access to, towards a democratized realm in which information is as free as the people who use it.

As technology takes over more and more of our life it is important for us to take full advantage of the benefits it can provide. Not only as individuals, but as a society as a whole. Wikipedia is the perfect example of people taking advantage of the power of technology for the benefit of society as a whole. Each individual contributor is taking part in something bigger than themselves, an organic growing collection of information for us by us.

Proprietary Information - Print-Based Dictionaries, Encyclopedia, Newspapers, etc

• All written by a collection of authors chosen by a select group of “qualified” individuals

• Information was limited to the knowledge of a handful of “experts” and mass distributed to millions

Organic Community Based Information - Wikipedia, Digg, etc

• The power of information is taken from the handful of “experts” and placed in the hands of millions

• Regulation comes in the form of a community, constantly updating and adding input while checking and balancing the information provided by others

• There is a direct correlation between the number of users and the quality of information, the more people using the more viewpoints, perspectives, and ideals are incorporated

• Effectively takes the power of information from the “experts” and “qualified” individuals to the people

All of this is nothing new. Long before the likes of Wikipedia and Digg open-source advocates preached the power of collaboration and freedom of knowledge. But it is not until we saw widely accepted implementations of this sort of collaboration did the possibilities become evident.

Why can’t we apply the same techniques and ideals of open source ideology and organic community based information stores and apply it to the education system. I have been outspoken on my bitterness towards the education system in America and its growing obsoletion as any of my colleagues or friends will tell you. Over and over again I finish my lecture on my beliefs, and I’m met with both faces of intrigue and confusion, but the resulting question is almost always the same — How can we do it better?

My inability to answer this question confidently often nullifies my argument in the eyes of the listener and leaves me in a state of deep thought pondering the very question. I have come up with several theories and ideas, but they were often incomplete and/or impractical.

Recently my partner introduced me to a new project in which we will apply the ideals of Digg/Wikipedia and organic information growth to education. After a brief period of meditation this morning my thoughts and emotions on the projects fell into place in the form of a vision for the future of our education system.

Combine the social integration of Facebook with the informational collaboration of Wikipedia and the community style regulation of Digg and you get our new concept (for development purposes I’ll call Project Ed). I will write more in regards to the specifics in the near future but for now I’ll keep it general for the purpose of conceptualization.

The initial goal of Project Ed is to supplement the educational system by offering a set of collaborative tools integrated with a social network to enhance your educational experience. Our underlying greater vision is to replace the educational system (at the risk of sounding too Dr. Evil, or Bill Gates, I say this loosely with a tinge of humor).

The project begins as a supplemental educational community, but just as Wikipedia has shown, the more users we are able to attract the greater the potential of the community. By collecting and organizing information from classes and universities we can kick start the growth of a virtual organic wealth of information geared towards students. Want to learn Calculus but can’t understand your teacher’s broken English, or just plain can’t stand him? Or maybe you really just don’t get it and your 60 year old teacher can’t fathom your perspective to even begin explaining it to you… why not turn to hundreds and thousands of students just like you for help?

Lets take the power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students where it belongs. Take the power from the few and give it to the many. I believe this will be an ideal we will see more and more of in the future.

Expect to hear much more about Project Ed in the near future, for now — Peace.