"Activities" or "Gather-ups" as a basic functionality

[Ammar Halabi]

Dear All,

I have been following the discussions and ideas shared here from a distance, and now I attempt to start a conversation about the "social design" in MicroCommunity. Since this is my first post please forgive me if I am off the topics and concerns that you are currently working on, and I appreciate if you point me back to the current main focus.

To start, what I am going to mention here is related to the design of functionality from the point of view of the end-user.

So, after being with Wikilogia for a while, we got some understanding about how groups form, how activities are started, and what motivates members to participate. This understanding comes with the main concepts of MicroCommunity:

• People (at leas in our communities) participate and collaborate better when they are being together, and doing the activity together.
• In the same spirit of the previous point, while being together and doing things together, people produce exchanges, experiences, stories. These form the content that results from social interaction and collaboration.
• We can leverage the energy in the community by enabling its members to easily form micro communities, which makes it possible to address different interests. This also makes it easier to manage and customize these communities such that there is no need for central governance.
  

This is all not new to us.. And to my understanding, MicroCommunity attempts to address these issues by allowing people to come together, create multiple groups, and easily capture resulting content generated from activities and social interaction. Now, what I am proposing here is the following:

we need more support for "initiating activities" and "doing things together"

That is, I think we should emphasize the importance of having an "activity" or "project" or "take action" or "organize a gathering" feature (and associated content types) as basic features along with groups and content holders (such as Wikis and Questions). Why am I proposing this?.. It is because we witnessed it as an effective way to work in Wikilogia:

• Group formation happens through activity: both "Wikilogia Med" and "Open Hardware" groups formed after their themes were presented in the TedXDamascus presentations. Members gathered in the presentations, exchanged ideas, got enthusiastic, and formed their groups. Later, another group emerged from "Open Hardware" ("Fablogia"), which emerged after working on the Arduino workshops. To summarize, this is how groups and activities developed: [TedXDamascus] --> [Presentations (activity)] --> [Forming groups + Forming future Activities] --> [Activities generate more groups + Groups generate more activities]. Therefore, I argue that groups and activities are highly-coupled, and they both need to be supported.
• Enabling members to suggest and organize activities supports ownership: this maybe is one of the solutions to the issue that you are trying to address now. You observed frequently that people are not changing their practices and not becoming more collaborative after presenting the ideas, therefore you are organizing the Hackathons which mix real-time collaboration with socialization and practical activity. I agree that such kind of practical and social activity supports the change of practices among members, but I also think that members can also be encouraged by making it possible for them to suggest and organize activities themselves.. They would then feel that they are contributing more to the community, which is personally encouraging and rewarding.
• Having an activity-related feature helps capturing content about action and progression: this is a bit more clear here.. Clearly, if we have a feature that allows to support an activity, it would help in archiving the activity with its description, location, resources, purpose, participants, outcomes, and associated discussions. Later people could reuse that content to branch the activity, or write a story about what they did..

So, in what form could this feature be? I don't know.. Especially that I am not aware of the technical possibilities and constraints in MicroCommunity. Anyway, if you think such feature is relevant we could brainstorm about it. Otherwise, I would be glad if you give your opinion why it is not relevant for the time being.

Best :)

Ammar