Building Internet communities has been hailed as one of the major strategic innovations of the New Economy, both as a stand-alone model or as a supplement to sustain competitive advantage for normal business models. Community based business models aim to profit from the value that is created when Internet communities solve problems of collective action, by controlling access, aggregating data, or realizing side-payments.The current literature on community based business models relies on methodological individualism to explain why members join and leave Internet communities. However, such an approach cannot sufficiently describe and explain communities because they are by definition more than an aggregation of its members.We, on the other hand, offer a metaphorical approach to conceptualize communities. Metaphors have a double function for communities: to explain the community to its members and thereby legitimize and reproduce it, and to describe the belief of community members to outsiders in order to operationalize it.With the metaphorical approach we develop a framework to build profitable Internet communities. If an internet community can be legitimized and reproduced community-value is created. However, that does not yet mean that it can be translated into profit, as many I Internet entrepreneurs had to realize. To translate the community-value into profit, the communal entrepreneur must position it in its competitive environment.

It is impressive to see, how the idea of building communities online has been mainstreamed in only seven or eight years and what valuation community platforms have achieved. However, it is also impressive in how far the question of positioning a community in its competitive environment has not been solved. Will online community building continue to be the fashionable thing? And will somebody be able to skim the profits of such ventures? – If you want access to the underlying article, please do send me an email!

During Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review, some of the staff began to fantasize about reinventing social services to create “the Department of Mary Jones.” FACEBOOK can make that fantasy a reality. This could bring unity to the most dispiriting, inefficient stovepipes/silos* in American government today.

The idea behind “The Department of Mary Jones” was that the organizing principle of social services should be the client, not the providers of health, welfare, housing, education, etc. We were ‘reinventing government’ back then, and what would make more sense?

Our “Department of Mary Jones” (for I was a Deputy Director of the NPR) would have provided immediate access to all of the information about Ms. Jones, and encouraged/facilitated/mandated coordination among her contacts with food stamps, Section 8 Housing, the police, the juvenile justice system, her welfare case worker, the guidance counselors at her children’s schools, and so forth. Such a system would enable the social worker to find out if there was a problem with food stamps or housing, and the school guidance counselors to notify the social workers of suspected abuse within minutes of seeing a bruised child.

Last year my wife and I became CASAs – Court Appointed Special Advocates – for a dysfunctional family with six kids. They absconded from Maryland and are now four hundred miles away, in a different state. Recently my wife took a call from the principal of the “special school” where the eldest boy is now enrolled. The principal was trying to get in touch with the family’s Children and Family Services caseworker. The principal and the caseworker are less than fifty miles apart and in the same county, far to the west; my wife was in Annapolis, MD. What’s wrong with this picture?

This inability to communicate and collaborate across agencies (and within them!) is neither new nor novel. Kids can get killed because information and actions taken aren’t shared. For just one example, see “Review Finds Agencies, Nonprofits Failed to Coordinate in Jacks Case” (Washington Post, April 2, 2009), and the underlying DC Inspector General’s report.

FACEBOOK could be the solution to this problem, in so many ways. First, if everyone involved became a “fan” of Mary Jones, then whatever they posted would be instantly and automatically available to everyone else. A quick review of her page at any hour would bring each worker fully up-to-date. The caseworkers’ workloads would be more easily (and quickly) accessed, from their FACEBOOK homepages. Supervisors at each agency, also enrolled as fans, could check on their workers’ efforts just as quickly and easily. All staff could work from anywhere that has Internet access. Such a system should be both more effective and more efficient.

There are now over 200 million users of FACEBOOK worldwide, so there’s unlikely to be a learning curve for many workers. If you’re a user of FACEBOOK, you can readily imagine how such a system would work!

What’s not to like? Well, there’s the privacy issue. In practice, it would be trivial to put the FACEBOOK software onto secure servers, and the information could be made as secure as anything that the Central Intelligence Agency is involved with. Caseworkers already work with a great deal of confidential information.

Also, recent attempts to create an integrated case management system in Fairfax County, Virginia, have foundered on both the data sharing (privacy) issues and because “the rules” do not permit commingling administrative grants across TANF, Food Stamps, etc., to pay for an integrated system.

It would be nice to think that all we’d need is a few “Yes Lawyers” rather than all the “No Lawyers.” In fact, both the data sharing issues and the commingling of grant monies would require changes in legislation as well as policy and regulation. But the vision of a FACEBOOK-driven integrated services delivery system should not be hard to sell in an Administration as “wired” as this one!

Of course, it might be an incentive to know that Canada (and other countries are well on the road to developing such systems, with or without America’s “high tech” Web 2.0 services, such as FACEBOOK. IBM’s Center for the Business of Government published a research report in 2008 entitled Integrating Service Delivery Across Levels of Government: Case Studies of Canada and Other Countries.

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If we really care about children and families at risk, we need to solve the problem of coordinating multitudinous agencies and workers. FACEBOOK could make it happen, in a New York Minute.

Robert A. Knisely robert@knisely.info

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*As we now know, only on the East and West Coasts do we refer to “stovepipe” agencies. In the Midwest, they’re known as “silos.” We can’t even agree on the same terminology for the vertical focus of most government agencies. We’re caught in the same trap!

Also on his profile he announced that classes were suspended, however, that the exams would take place in early May. A lively discussion developed on what to do about the knowledge the content that the students were not able to learn, because of the missed classes.

Early last year, when he had hit the magic 5000 friends mark, he started a fan-page, and asked us to un-befriend him, but of course nobody did.

….Think about, what a powerful leadership tool social media has become in the last 24 months, imagine how much we need to learn about holding socially mediated leaders accountable, imagine what types of knowledge platforms we can can create, when we start to re-think the university, and imagine what we can do for life-long-learning. Let us take this seriously.

I spend far less time on Fbook as a result of my Twittering. I trade out of my home office and like having an outlet to the outside world during the day. Comment by Dave — March 11, 2009 @ 2:11 am

I use http://www.twitterfeed.com to RSS my Facebook status to Twitter, 2 birds with 1 stone. Now the real question is, where does Facebook time come from? Although as a telecommuter, it’s not much different from water cooler time in a normal workplace… Comment by Patrick G — March 11, 2009 @ 2:45 am

I pretty much stopped checking/using Facebook, so that freed up some time. Also, I have TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry that I can check during class or while walking/traveling after I check emails. I would imagine a lot of people make use of Twitter on-the-go through a client or SMS. Comment by Geoff — March 11, 2009 @ 7:01 am

Clay Shirky makes a slightly different argument, taking a macro-historical perspective:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

So the question is, is twitter the gin or the museum?