Stocks, Flows, and LifeCycles
The jarche.com blog pointed
me to last year's three-part CommonCraft series on Stocks and Flows in
Online Communities.
In brief:
People engage in a flow, like a conversation.
People access a stock, they don’t engage in it. Stocks are generally static and presented when requested, like search results.
Flows come to you, and are timely. This speaks directly to what makes a community or collaboration site successful: people come back to what engages them, which is connection with a flow (weblogs, email, web forums with email notification). However, you want to sediment the flows into stocks, so that stuff may be easily found when needed (web pages, libraries, searchable archives). Both aspects are needed: in fact, most weblog entries (quintessentially flow oriented) include links to web pages (stock), and themselves have persistent URLs (permalinks, purple numbers) so they can be stocked and referred to.
Communities and collaborations have life cycles: they live in the flow, but then need to wrap up and pass their stuff on to their descendants. RSS is perhaps the major flow-enabler of the web nowadays. Complementing that is the need for ongoing automated archiving, with tagging (including folksonomies) being a major player. Having suggested tags come back at you (based on your previous tagging and on that of related communities) for your tweaking might make archiving itself more interactive and symbiotic, part of your lifeflows.
In brief:
People engage in a flow, like a conversation.
People access a stock, they don’t engage in it. Stocks are generally static and presented when requested, like search results.
Flows come to you, and are timely. This speaks directly to what makes a community or collaboration site successful: people come back to what engages them, which is connection with a flow (weblogs, email, web forums with email notification). However, you want to sediment the flows into stocks, so that stuff may be easily found when needed (web pages, libraries, searchable archives). Both aspects are needed: in fact, most weblog entries (quintessentially flow oriented) include links to web pages (stock), and themselves have persistent URLs (permalinks, purple numbers) so they can be stocked and referred to.
Communities and collaborations have life cycles: they live in the flow, but then need to wrap up and pass their stuff on to their descendants. RSS is perhaps the major flow-enabler of the web nowadays. Complementing that is the need for ongoing automated archiving, with tagging (including folksonomies) being a major player. Having suggested tags come back at you (based on your previous tagging and on that of related communities) for your tweaking might make archiving itself more interactive and symbiotic, part of your lifeflows.
Posted: Wed - April 6, 2005 at 02:57 PM
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Published On: Apr 06, 2005 03:51 PM
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Published On: Apr 06, 2005 03:51 PM