LJ Talks to Jill O'Neill and Ben Vershbow
Community, publishing, and the technology that ties it all together
-- Library Journal, 4/15/2008 8:51:00 AM
Jill O'Neill, director of planning and communications for the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, and Ben Vershbow, editorial director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, share their thoughts on successes in community publishing, the notion of authorship in collaborative environments, and the technology enabling these community interactions online.
For more on the changing relationship between users, publishers, and libraries, see the Spring 2008 netConnect supplement to Library Journal and find out what "Content Your Way!" is all about.
Jump directly to a question:
- Question 1: Defining Success
- Question 2: Notions of Authorship
- Question 3: Changing Role of Technology
Library Journal: What is the definition of success in terms of community publishing, and what are some examples of that kind of success?
Jill O'Neill: The most obvious example of success in community publishing is Wikipedia. Whether one feels it can be safely used as an authoritative source or not, the fact remains that over the course of the past decade, it has grown in size both in terms of articles created, in volume of users, and in brand recognition. The established (traditional) publisher who can create a similarly popular and robust community of contributors on the web, developing useful and authoritative content, will have a competitive edge. But as many have discovered in the past decade, a community is not simply created just by building a portal or social network. The technology provides an artificial structure that can support community, but community springs from emotional bonds involving shared interests, common goals, or harmonious daily contact.That will be the challenge for more traditional publishers in this environment, because those who might contribute to a successful authoritative body of knowledge may be fearful of potential exploitation. Scholarly societies might be less affected by such distrust because a society is a pre-existing professional community of shared interests and (one assumes) common goals, but commercial publishers will surely have to find a way to allay such fears. That said, it is the commercial sector that is testing the possibilities. Elsevier announced at the American Library Association meeting in June 2007 that the search engine, Scirus, would launch topic pages created and edited by scientists in the hope of fostering the development of a collaborative environment of shared knowledge. Nature Publishing Group has fostered the development of regional social nets such as Nature Network Boston and Nature Network London. But I think it will be very important to watch these initiatives to see if this direction is one that researchers and professionals find useful. Another dynamic community of publication can be found at ScienceBlogs.com, a network of individual bloggers gathered together under the umbrella label of science who discuss published science and science policy. All of these forms of knowledge community exchange tap into different levels of formality which stresses our ideas of formal publication, but they do represent community publishing in a digital environment. Time alone will really prove the success of each.
Ben Vershbow: It's generally understood that there are approximately 500 hardcore contributors to Wikipedia—500 who are responsible for the majority of the edits and who perform most of the administrative, organizing, and moderation functions that make the site run. And then of course there is the leadership of Jimmy Wales, who arbitrates internal conflicts and promotes the vision of Wikipedia to the world at large. These leadership roles are crucial for the operation to work. Hierarchies exist. It's not simply a vast emergent swarm. However, this doesn't mean that 500 people and Jimmy Wales are responsible for a majority of the content. A few non-scientific investigations have revealed that for your average article, most of the substantive content has been contributed by just one user—in many cases, someone who simply shows up once, does a knowledge dump, and then never edits again. So perhaps there's some truth to the swarm theory after all. In truth, it's both, and therein lies the rough recipe of Wikipedia's success: relatively accessible technology, devoted (if at times over-zealous) oversight by the 500 diehards, and thousands of occasional or one-time contributors moved by the inspiring mission and general utility of the project. Defined in the broadest way, Wikipedia's community is its millions of users, a tiny minority of which deal with the fussy intricacies of running the site, and a not quite as tiny minority of which occasionally is moved to feed back into the general store.
Another example of a successful community publishing effort is the Urban Dictionary, a vast online compendium of slang and popular speech idioms that anyone can contribute to and edit. I haven't looked into the inner workings of UD, but I suspect that principles similar to those observed in Wikipedia are at work there.
There are also community publishing projects organized around a single author's work in progress. Common examples of this are Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog, Larry Lessig's communal revision/update of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Douglas Rushkoff's "open source" community annotation project around his 2002 novel Exit Strategy, and a number of projects that I've led at the Institute for the Future of the Book, notably McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory (in which a community of readers communicated with the author in the margins of a draft manuscript and helped him think through the final stage of revisions) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Expressive Processing, currently undergoing public review on the Grand Text Auto blog and eventually to be published by MIT Press. In each of these projects, the author succeeded in building up a dedicated and persistent community of knowledgeable readers who helped refine the book's arguments and brought new sources and materials to light. In the case of the Anderson, Wark, and Wardrip-Fruin projects, a crucial element was the commitment by the author to being present and in direct contact with readers throughout the creative/review process. Also crucial in all of these examples was having clearly defined roles for the reader-participants.
BV: Most of our assumptions about authorship are inherited from the age of print. The fixed nature of pre-electronic writing has to some extent created an illusion of monolithic authorship since the social relations underpinning it are obscured, or relegated to footnotes and references sections. The Internet makes these relations startlingly visible, and radically collapses the distance and time lag that long existed between authors and readers. Blogs are the most obvious example of this. They in many ways preserve the single-author, single-voice paradigm of print, but inject it into a fluid social space where readers can respond directly and immediately, and other blogs and web sites can weigh in through linking, quotation and reference. As a result, blogs are more about process than product. Each post is a lump of clay to be molded and shaped by readers, re-shaped by the author's responses, and so on. A blog's authority is not judged by a single post, but by its sustained performance over time and the social currency it generates—by how well and convincingly it weaves itself into the larger networked conversation. This weaving is accomplished first and foremost by the efforts of the author, but also by those of its readers, both the immediate commenters on the site and the other blogs that are reading it at a distance. Blogs are just a hint at where this might be leading. I believe that we're in the early stages of a long-term shift in the role of the author from being a relatively isolated producer of knowledge or narrative toward functioning as a leader of an intellectual or imaginative quest involving other sub-authors or participating readers. In some cases, as in Wikipedia, there may be no authors in the traditional sense, but rather a community of motivated readers working cooperatively to synthesize what they've read. This is not to say that ways of reading we're more familiar with—solitary, immersive, offline—will vanish, they will just be joined (and changed) by new forms.
Notions of ownership are also being radically redefined. Copyright, as a construct, doesn't really make sense anymore. Controlling the right to copy a digital object, which by its nature is infinitely copyable (in fact is copied just by looking at it), is like trying to control specific water molecules in a river. The fixing of writing in material forms has for several centuries enabled a relatively happy marriage between physical and intellectual property. Ideas and expressions could be packaged and sold as print commodities, and as a result, authors and publishers were compensated, and were given social recognition as a professional class. But digital technologies have forced a divorce (at least for the intents and purposes of authors, readers, and publishers) between the material and the immaterial, decoupling information from physical (sellable) packages, flattening the distribution chain, and making everyone, theoretically, an author/publisher. With the traditional hierarchies thus destabilized, suddenly all the traditional roles are up for redefinition.
To date, publishers have expended most of their efforts in the digital arena toward keeping the marriage together, pursuing technologies like PDF and DRM, or dubious miracle devices like the Kindle, that attempt to reproduce the fixity and controllability of print to the electronic environment. Authors too, or at least the successful ones, have generally clung to the traditional models of IP (because it is in their self-interest to do so), but many others have started playing around in the gift economy and are gradually discovering new ways in which their writing can generate social value, if not yet actual monetary value. No one has a good answer as to how writing will be monetized on the net. A few high-traffic sites currently sustain themselves with advertising, but that's not going to work for the vast majority of authors. My hunch is that economic leverage will eventually be found in the contexts surrounding texts, not in the texts themselves. Access to a high-quality discussion or supplementary, para-textual material, or quality filtering, or social services and infrastructures around texts. Helpful services are something people will likely be willing to pay for even if the content is free.
JO: Just as publication is closely tied to the need to communicate information or pursue a specific argument in exploring an idea, authorship is closely tied to a need to give due credit to the original creative thinker or to grant priority in terms of intellectual property. Within the scientific research community, journal publishers have long been accustomed to seeing multiple authors associated with papers documenting very large research projects. It reflects the team approach to doing science that is the modern norm, where different authors may be listed as the appropriate author to contact for purposes of queries about the research, correspondence, etc. We have also seen the concept of institutional entities as authors, as in the case of the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, where the group is listed as primary author and individual names may be presented as secondary authors. In this context, community authorship isn't a particularly new idea. The technology simply offers a new wrinkle to be smoothed out in terms of how best to measure individual contribution to the research itself or to the final documentation of findings.
With regard to specific issues of ownership and responsibility, different communities of practice will deal with this in various ways, depending upon the demands on those communities in terms of governmental regulation and oversight, intellectual property concerns, etc. Biomedical research demands one approach to these concepts for the good of society whereas historical research requires something else. Who uses this information and to what purpose? Forces, external to any specific community of knowledge, hold significant power over how those concepts are shaped and expressed to others.
The label "authoritative" as applied to information or knowledge is different in that authority is usually conferred by the community of knowledge itself. Those who are most familiar with a specific topic and discipline are best able to recognize what is valid and what is not valid about a particular piece of information. Standards are set; judgments passed as to whether or not the right sources have been consulted or the right methodology applied in order to justify final conclusions. Standards are set and applied by that community of knowledge because there has traditionally been a recognition that experts can recognize nuances the broader population may not see or note. Authoritativeness therefore is conferred internally by a community which then transmits the judgment to the broader population.
As our knowledge base becomes increasingly complex, so the expectation of what we assume to be general knowledge changes. When we talk about the construction of authoritative information resources, we have to factor in the depth of knowledge required for understanding of concepts as well as the pace of on-going research about the topic. It is then that we seek to measure the contribution associated with specific authorship, whether individual or group, and gauge whether that "author" has the level of expertise necessary to ensure accuracy, reliability and understanding. Again, in this situation, the various publishing technologies in use by communities—whether blog or wiki—are not what validates the content. Creators and users together work out that validation, according to various requirements and needs over time. Publishers will undoubtedly monitor that process and move to implement structures that support both groups.
BV: Too often we see technologies adopted in response to a general trend without a careful thinking through of the ramifications. In the case of wikis, this was illustrated vividly with the LA Times' brief, disastrous experiment with "wikitorials" in 2005, and with Penguin's wiki novel experiment, A Million Penguins, last year. There are many other examples one could give.
Wikis are good for certain things: in my opinion, collaborative writing for small groups with established social relations, ideally with a designated moderator or coordinator. The bigger the group, and the more tenuous the social ties, the harder it becomes to manage, and things almost inevitably will drift toward chaos, gridlock or stagnation. This was precisely the trouble with A Million Penguins. Any collaborative creative project requires clearly defined roles and structures for participation, and ideally involves people with some established social relations and trust. None of this was present in the Penguin experiment. Setting up something essentially structureless like a wiki and asking a crowd of strangers to produce a novel (which is perhaps inherently a uni-vocal form) was destined to fail. Too much emphasis was placed on the technology and not enough on the social dynamics that, if better articulated and managed, might have produced a worthwhile story.
People look at the success of Wikipedia and are convinced that the technology is the secret. I'd say it's the opposite. Wikipedia is a success in spite of its technology. The technology basically sucks. So why does it work? It's the complex social protocols, governance structures, use guidelines, role definitions, not to mention the inspiring mission and general usefulness of Wikipedia—i.e. all the people stuff—that make it flourish despite its crappy technological platform. People motivated by a common purpose can make almost any technology work if they put their minds to it.
So in other words, technology shouldn't drive community publishing, community publishing should drive technology. Technology doesn't magically create communities, communities use technology (and sometimes create it) to pursue common goals. Social innovations are fundamentally more important than technical ones.
JO: Publishers are investigating the technologies and tools to see what might make sense in enhancing their content and service offerings. It is important to remember that these technologies have to attain a certain level of adoption and maturity before implementation makes sense. Aggregators such as LexisNexis and Ebsco are both picking up blog RSS feeds and incorporating it into their content collections. However, they waited to do so until specific markets had indicated that this type of content delivery format was broadly accepted and sought after. It does no good to be too far ahead of your clients and customers.
The questions that publishers have to ask are:
- What can this tool or technology be used for?
- Who, within the community being served, needs or uses this tool?
- How does this tool or this content format fit into the workflow of the community? and finally
- What are the costs and considerations of implementation?
Once those questions have been addressed, then content and technology providers can sensibly develop products and services that meet real needs. Again, it is an instance of broadening the scope of what is meant by the term "publishing."
Jill O'Neilll (jilloneill@nfais.org) is the director of planning and communications for the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS), and Ben Vershbow (ben@futureofthebook.org) is a writer, researcher, and editorial director of the Institute for the Future of the Book
