Steve 's Profile

Read
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
>
by Mihaly Csikszentmihal first, or
>
Getting Real
>
or
>
Defensive Design for the Web
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by 37 Signals, or
>
The Cluetrain Manifesto
>
, or even Seth's
>
Purple Cow
>
.
>

Brand Hijack,

What they're doing methodologically is very unique in software development and is not yet part of the standard practices for developing social software, although it should be. Embedded observation allows developers to understand culture. They are doing a form of ethnography, the method used by those seeking to understand culture. They understand culture by living amidst the cultural natives, trying to understand practices from the perspective of the people engaged in them. They are trying to make sense of how the symbols came to be and how the culture is maintained. They are doing so in order to understand culture and to help shape the architecture to support the culture.

The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of "flow" to use Cziksentmihalyi's term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

ome people may complain when you change something, and occasionally you might even lose someone from the community, but that it's very rare for someone to stay upset.

I asked if these changes were disruptive or made it harder to use when nothing stays the same, and she gave me that teenage-attitude-eye-rolling-what-a-lame-question look.

is is so kul!!!

the key is to not sacrifice your advanced users in an effort to make beginners feel better.

One of the biggest mistakes I see community builders make (however well-intentioned) is fretting over inclusivity and newbie-friendliness. They want the beginners to feel welcome, and few experiences are more daunting than stepping into a new domain where you have no idea what anyone's talking about. It feels... uncomfortable. Confusing. Discouraging. But in our quest to cut the jargon and perceived (or even real) elitism, we risk ruining one of the biggest benefits of sticking with it. Not only should we allow domain-specific jargon or expert-speak, we should be driving it! We should help invent short-cuts and specialized words and phrases to make communication among our most passionate--our experts--even more stimulating and useful.

Don't get ahead of yourself and definitely build strong foundations.