Assignment 3: Communities of Practice II

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1. What is the relationship between technologies and community development?

We have to ask how technology supports community development?
The main concept is to understand how communities practice is supported by technology capabilities? What can we gain from the technology in use? - This is the question we have to ask.
Technology has changed how we think about communities, and communities have changed our uses of technology. These evolving digital habitats give us the chance to reconsider what we know about communities and to rediscover fundamental ideas in new setting - to explore and, in the end, to know the place for the first time, once again.
Finally the development of technologies is affected by communities. We cannot separate technology from communities in the current context and we don`t have to.

2. What are the different strategies of integration?

a. Integration through platforms - The digital habitat becomes a source of identity for the community. It creates a boundary that delineates space, access to which can define membership, but also exclude non-members. Self-contained platforms may cut off the community from broader networks and from spontaneous interactions with the rest of the world.
In my opinion Integration through platforms cannot be very trustful beacuse of possible technical issues during usage of this kind technology. And in more reliable systems can we still face the lack of information. Risks from technical integration point of view are too high.
Benefits: Easy to use; Risks: Extendability
b. Integration through interoperability - Interoperability provides technical bridges between tools (and platforms) as opposed to consolidating them. It reflects the integration of a community`s digital habitat in the context of a broader "digital ecosystem". With this approach, communities can extend their configuration and connections, individuals can choose the tools through which they connect to their communities, and communities can interact with other communities across their respective configurations.
Benefits:   Lots of tools, flexibility, Individual contributions           Risks: Connectivity, updating, security
c. Integration through tools - these are separate tools for configuration. Examples include RSS integrators, NET vibe. More controllable by technology stewart(manager).This type of integration assumes a degree of competence and even "technological restlessness" on the part of the community - an interest in the tools and their posiibilities. This flexibility works better for communities that are technically adept and flexible, but less well for communities that lack a critical mass of early adopters or people willing to spend time hopping between tools.
Because this kind of integration assumes competence, simple users may not be interested. For simple users must new inventions stay as simple as possible.
Benefits:   Individual (everybody can design their own config.); Multi membership - makes it easier to deal with this problem.                       Risks: Technical expertise of members.
d. Integration through practice - Writing down the teleconference minutes for example. Integration of tools by certain practices. Example among others also tagging (hush tags).There are limits to what we can expect directly from technology or even from the use of integrative tools. Integration also happens purely through practice. For example, the practice of producing useful notes from a face-to-face or phone meetings for publication in an online space bridges different technologies that really cannot interoperate. The need for integration through practice reflects the fact that the experience of habitat is constructed by the community in its use of technology.
Finally: Consolidating habitats through platform integration starts with a focus on the group around a common toolset, and uses interoperability and integrative tools to expand outward, increase personal tool choises, and open connections at the boundaries.
Benefits: Only way, embedded in practice.
Risks: There is too much work.

3. Give some concrete examples of how technologies are used in communities. How do they impact the duality of participation and reification?

Blogs and wikis are different from each other, but both combine participation and reification in innovative ways by moving from a centralized to a distributed publishing model and including a participative structure around documents.
The hybrid nature of blogs and wikis is reflected in their location halfway between participation and reification. While similar in this respect, wikis and blogs address the group/individual polarity in opposite directions, hence their locations on opposite sides of the diagram`s donut. Wikis represent the voice of the group and the identity of the community. Open, shared editing means that the text produced by the community is the community`s property, with individual contributions melding into one product. After readers stop editing, one can assume the text represents the voice of the community. By contrast, blogs emphasize the voice of authors (individuals and subgroups).
Technology affords new ways to combine participation and reification. For instance, augmenting a phone conversation with a web-based whiteboard supports new forms of co-authorship that casually mix conversations with written words, images and sounds. Similarly the ability to comment on a document adds a conversational dimension to the storage of artifacts.