Reinhold Grether on 17 Feb 2001 11:06:21 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Task Force Communities |
[Groups or communities of distributed mobile people can coordinate their endeavours by virtual wireless community platforms like Upoc <http://www.upoc.com/login.jsp> Dan Shafer, Senior Co-editor of the Online Community Report <http://www.OnlineCommunityReport.com/> has labeled those mobile instant messaging communities "Task Force Communities". - To get a more elaborate theory about the "primacy of connectivity over content" don't miss Andrew Odlyzko's fascinating article "Content is Not King" in this month's First Monday <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/> best, rg] Task Forces: A New Kind of Community? By Dan Shafer Senior Co-editor, Online Community Report A family of five goes to an amusement park. Two of the teen-aged youngsters want to go off on their own, Mom needs to nurse the newest arrival, and Dad and the toddler are off to a special ride. Through the course of a day at the park, this family might come together and break apart in various combinations many times for various reasons. It would be great if they could stay in touch with one another to arrange to meet, delay a planned meeting because of a long line, alert each other to special events, and other such activities. The five Women of Westwick are a regular Shopping Dalton Gang. Any time there's a big sale at one of the local department stores, they get together, car pool to the store, carve out territories to attack, and go after bargains with the vengeance and tenacity of Martha Stewart in search of a use for a cut-up credit card. They miss lots of opportunities to buy unexpected bargain items for each other because there's no easy way to communicate while they're on the shopping spree. A new President has been elected and is being inaugurated. A large number of people who believe the election was illegitimate are gathered together in the nation's capital to stage a protest. They are scattered but they want their action to be concerted. They also want to keep track of things like where the federal police are setting up new checkpoints and barricades, where there are concentrations of military personnel, etc. All of these are examples of what I've come to think of recently as Task Force Communities (TFCs): groups that come together around a specific task or cause, work together much like other virtual communities, but disband or go into hibernation between the events and causes that trigger their gathering. And as far as I know, two of the three examples are strictly the conjurings of my own imagination. The exception? The third case involving a group that called itself The Resistance and which used wireless services through Upoc <http://www.upoc.com> where they formed a community. With burst text and voice messaging, they were able to keep a group of nearly 100 protesters in constant contact during the highly fluid situation at George W. Bush's inauguration in January. (See separate story in this issue for more details on this action at <http://www.OnlineCommunityReport.com/features/resistance/> ) I have written in the past about my sense that wireless interfaces don't have a major role to play in the development of online communities. It may well be that in the formation and disintegration of TFCs, we will find the kernel of great utility for wireless access. Notice that in all three of my examples, the members of the communities have some common characteristics: They are not physically located near their computers and keyboards. They are not stationary in one place even during the need for the community. They have a number of things in common but have somewhat different tasks, goals, or agendas. Communication need not be preserved for future knowledge enhancement; instant messaging and chat are perfectly utilitarian vehicles for what they need to accomplish. Group members are part of a community that transcends the place and time where the TFC is useful, yet the TFC is necessary to the accomplishment of some specific and immediate goals. Wireless seems like the perfect choice for these kinds of communities. Some of the cell phone companies have begun to recognize the importance of these groupings by offering family plans and free cell-to-cell communication as a way of supporting and encouraging ad hoc contact within the community. Most of the communication that needs to take place within the context of a TFC is probably very short-duration stuff: "Hey, Mom, can we do this ride once more?" "How long will it take?" "About 20 minutes." "OK. We'll meet you at Atrium C." "Jeannie, do you want one of these sweaters? They're 75% off!" "What are they made of?" "Angora" "Yeah! One blue one, size 3, please!" "Done" "New checkpoint at 16th and L" "How many police?" "Five marshals" "OK, avoid that area." Interestingly enough, Upoc, which positions itself as a wireless online community provider, already has seen some users form groups that consist of kids shopping at a mall and "scoping guys," for example. Casey Van Maanen, senior manager of business development at Upoc, says his team is watching what people do and why they do it to better understand this phenomenon. "There are no rules. There's no right way to do things. We're just making all of this up as we go along," Van Maanen says. Some of the user groups you can sign up for at the Upoc site deal with movie reviews, bands, night clubs, politics, shopping, and even a joke-of-the-day service. Van Maanen says the most successful wireless communities in the near term will be those with a compelling subject that demands or benefits from immediacy, and which are headed by a compelling group founder who is a great self- and group-promoter. Such communities will, of course, be difficult to track and probably impossible to monetize directly. But there are some intriguing possibilities. For example, suppose the amusement park provided wireless devices usable only within the park for families to use as I described above? They could surely find tons of ways to monetize peoples' use of the devices. Similarly, department stores could offer shopping teams (I'm told by my wife that such things actually exist!) a way to communicate while in the store and then push special sales only to those people using them. Convergence is also beginning to happen between these TFCs and more persistent online presence. Not only did Hicks find his group turning, quite inadvertently, into a news service during the inaugural demonstration, but Van Maanen of Upoc points out that a highly popular Web site, dotcomscoop <http://www.dotcomscoop.com> , started as a Upoc group. When its founder, Ben Silverman, broke the story of the Amazon.com layoffs, the group got national attention and started growing. The result: a Web site that augments the wireless community. There's something here. I'd be interested in hearing your experiences, ideas, thoughts, plans and reactions. Dan Shafer can be reached at <dan@OnlineCommunityReport.com>~ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold