Wow, this is such a fantastic group assembled here, I decided to jump in too.
My name is Tia Carr Williams, and I work as a Social Media Consultants, facilitator/ moderator for online communities and Im working with the Novum Institute to bring education online to a global audience whether business or institutional. I coach developing entrepreneurs and business owners who are using web technologies to grow and develop client, customer and staff engagement.
How quickly did that three weeks go! It never ceases to amaze me how fast the sessions pass. Everyone has contributed very eloquently and Ive really enjoyed the Elluminate sessions.
I will post a couple of final links. I particularly liked this one as it adresses several of the issues that were concerns for us in this topic:
http://www.bewebaware.ca/english/CyberBullying.aspx
More in the morning for a final round up of comments.
I do understand the difficulty of shifting behaviour from a realworld reserved disposition to becoming a more open, receptive virtual one. However, the opportunity to be willing to welcome a new connection is, of course, a critical element of virtual world socialisation.
Every week I augment my network with new connections. People I wouldn't have met otherwise. Therefore, I have shifted my normative 'conditioned' social cues in order to capacitate what must be in order to build organically iterative hubs of interlaced nodes (people) who potentially may find value in me or one another. I also make several new introductions between people who I perceive will be able to do business between one another, and this over international boundaries. I have only yesterday introduced Truls, CEO of www.EctoLearning.com with Henry, CEO of www.Trudox.com and so it goes, week in and week out. Its a new world online and a new way of engaging. I usually use some quite formal introduction language to allow each party to 'feel' as if they have been formally and properly introduced and this seems to help smooth the path.
Deprived of the normal visual cues, other than a static picture, we are often reluctant to form new alliances because we cannot build sufficient data to ascertain the 'raison d'etre' for this person in our world. Ive seen many people think that networking 'does itself' ...alas not the case. Someone must hold out a hand and another must grasp it. Not in all cases, but more often than not.
By Michel Bauwens, michelsub2003@yahoo.com, http://p2pfoundation.net
The emergence of distributed networks, defined by capacity of agents to freely determine their actions and relations, and of the internet and the social web in particular, have created a new set of technological affordances creating a broad range of open knowledge and open design communities functioning according to a ‘peer to peer’ social logic. These communities have set in motion a new set of social processes for the creation of value, which we could summarize as peer production (the ability to produce in common), peer governance (the capacity to self-organize) and peer property (the capacity to make common production universally available). The social web has created the possibility to create complex social services, and ‘productive systems’, through the global coordination and scaling of small group processes of mass participation, moving them from the periphery of social life to its very center.
The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of this new social process, and to see how they are specifically related to the issue of human happiness.