Situated Social Software

Some essential reading for all you drupalites, because I think what Clay is saying here may be a definitive advantage for considering Drupal not as a "Web School" portal platform, but for exactly what Dries called it, "Community Plumbing for the Web" ...

Clay Shirky: Situated Software

First published March 30, 2004 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list.

We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large. A reading group works better with 5 members than 15; a seminar works better with 15 than 25, much less 50, and so on.

This in turn gives software form-fit to a particular group a number of desirable characteristics -- it's cheaper and faster to build, has fewer issues of scalability, and likelier uptake by its target users...

Drupal as a 'situated software' framework

Drupal is better than perfect for deploying small-audience applications; we have the trust metric worked out by our role structure and membership schemes, but we can do what the orkut/friendsterite artificial social networks fail to do

in staying small while reserving an ability to step out beyond our isolated portal boundaries (through drupal/jabber authentication from partner sites, although I'd say we need some means of defining drupal-buddy partner sites). Drupal portals can do the blog-comm (weblog communications), the forums, and the polls, but we can also facilitate the rapid prototyping of small apps is relatively easily (it's just a PHP page! ... although maybe we could offer more help as to what functions are actually available to PHP pages), and any such member apps will automatically enjoy the whole of the drupal framework, the member profiles, ratings, comments, mysql framework and a host of other small services these next-generation situated-software authors can draw upon when they craft their simple PHP page.

The only real difference between Drupal and what Shirky describes is psychological; I don't know about you, but before I started working on my local community portal project, I'd thought like Clay, always looking to create the Next Big Thing, and, even when I had all the marketing power of Bell Canada behind me, never really succeeding -- we seek to hold the whole sky, but we never can.

but we can build a rides-board, apartment hunter's hot-tip service, or a shopping pool, or a writer's peer review club ...

Not only can we build any of these new-thinking in-the-small applications, Drupal lets us allow our members to build them for themselves, and that's really future-speak, heading boldly into a world where there are no programming jobs because, as Shirky points out, everyone is a programmer (kinda). Drupal is an ideal platform for encouraging community hacking as much as it is for community chat.

For anyone looking for new frontiers to take their Drupal site, any of the student applications Clay describes could make amazing Drupal modules or PHP-page demonstrations, and what he notes about how the smaller scale and a priori community do for the issues of trust (and forgiveness) are indeed where the old mass-media model of the web application fall into a big black hole of budget shortfalls.

It also strikes me that I have caught myself too many times saying, "This worked back in the good old days, back when there was nobody online but the Fellowship of Engineers ..." --- only this is what Drupal restores to the web, the notion of a trusted community with a suite of applications specific to their needs.

Anyway, I thought you all might enjoy the paper. I did :)