Reef in beta

Reef -- the social software that's a core part of 2People -- has been in beta since early December. I originally released it thinking that it would be only for testing, but then it was stable enough that I started adding real content. Seeing it start to look real is very satisfying.

The thing I'm most pleased about is that I finally understand what it really is. It looks a lot like a custom web app designed to help people collaborate on footprint reduction. And it is that ... but actually it's much more general-purpose than that. It's a tool for creating and sharing content, and creating and sharing different views of that content.

The "creating and sharing content" is what any wiki or CMS does for you. Reef adds some features (page types, especially) that make it especially suited for our collective work on sustainability: todo lists, footprint graphs, etc. This much is pretty cool.

But the "creating and sharing different views of that content" is what is really different about Reef. If you think about online communities that get large, the limiting factor is our inability to stay in touch with more than a tiny slice of it. This limits our ability to really constitute one community. A place like Tribe.net is really a whole lot of smaller communities contained in one web site. I wanted Reef to support staying in touch with the community as a whole. And what's come out of that desire is a tool that lets users slice and dice the content on the site in every possible way. These "slices" are themselves just wiki pages, so they can be created and shared like any other page -- but they constitute different views of the community. Of course, there's no community to view yet, but eventually you'll be able to construct a whole new interface to 2People that's specific to your interests ... say, solar energy in the Southwest. This may sound like narrowing, but it's fundamentally different than the narrowing that happens on Tribe. There, you go inside the walls of your group, and you're cut off from anything else. In Reef, there are no walls. Solar energy in the Southwest isn't a group, it's just a particular view of the whole community.

Catching up ... Imagine Cascadia

Has it really been two months since my last post?! I can't believe it... so much has been happening, but I guess I kept waiting for the dust to settle,... and it never seems to. So, my apologies for suddenly dumping a whole series of posts into the end-of-year bin. And thanks to Paul Bain for the nudge...

My last post was about attending the inaugural meeting of a large bioregional sustainability effort. Since then, I've become involved in the core planning team that's hosting the conversations that we hope will lead to some kind of ongoing "movement" -- though what exactly that looks like depends a lot on who you talk to.

This group is pretty interesting -- there's a desire not to merely repeat what's been tried before, but find a new way to catalyze connection among people and groups to create a new dynamic.

There's a lot of wisdom in this group, but the pace of action is frustrating to me. It's been two months since the first big meeting, and I don't feel we have a lot to show for that time -- though I'm sure that others would strenuously disagree. It's a deep lesson that even among people who find themselves on the core team of an effort such as this we can be so far apart. Nonetheless, we're moving forward, and will hold another plenary meeting (with several hundred attendees) in late January.