Drupal as a Catalyst for Community and Change

Alex UA — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:59:50 -0600

This piece was written for the February issue of the Drupal Newsletter

Nick Lewis wrote a great post last month about six conditions that lead to the formation of online communities. These conditions were, in short: a meeting place for people who didn't have one, a sense of shared ownership, at least one strong leader, a shared identity, an opportunity for personal gain, and entertaining conversations. While I generally agree with this list, Nick conspicuously leaves out one of the most crucial conditions that leads to the formation of online communities: the technology that the community uses to communicate, organize, and coordinate. While this might seem like a minor oversight, it is, in my eyes, a major one. There is a revolution afoot, and Drupal is one of the vanguards of this movement. But, I sometimes wonder how many of the people who are involved in the Drupal Project fully appreciate the truly awesome role they are playing in this changing world, just as the inventors and early proponents of the printing press probably didn't anticipate that their invention would supplant monarchies and the Church with Democracies, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc.

The consequences of new technology can be usefully thought of as first-level, or efficiency, effects and second-level, or social system, effects. The history of previous technologies demonstrates that early in the life of a new technology, people are likely to emphasize the efficiency effects and underestimate or overlook potential social system effects. Advances in networking technologies now make it possible to think of people, as well as databases and processors, as resources on a network.

...These technologies can change how people spend their time and what and who they know and care about. The full range of payoffs, and the dilemmas, will come from how the technologies affect how people can think and work together--the second-level effects" (Sproull and Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, 1991: 15- 16) Quoted from John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Cyberwar is Coming!.