Starter Ecologies

In 2003, I wrote about a widely dispersed community of users who struggled with a specialty database of traffic accidents called PC-ALAS (Personal Computer Accident Location and Analysis System), detailing the ways that they made sense of the database. At the end of the study, I described what I thought was a way-out solution: an online space that functioned as a starter ecology for users to pose questions, answer each other’s questions, rate each other’s answers, deliberate on and submit requests for features, and even take part in light end-user programming. I called the fictional system Open-ALAS (Open Accident Location and Analysis System) to emphasize the fact that it was an open system, and I cautiously characterized it as utopian. After 5 years, this chapter on Open-ALAS seems embarrassingly naive—not because I was wrong, but because I was right enough that today the solution seems trivial. Someone could put together OpenALAS in a few hours on Ning, via a Facebook group, or via a FriendFeed room. The workers described in that chapter could easily pick dozens of channels for sharing their expertise. Such open systems are now commonplace and have taken on far more variety than what I envisioned in 2003. Here is a brief tour of that variety. Instructional videos are now on YouTube. Software documentation is on Scribd and Wikipedia, and actual-use cases for every imaginable configuration and instance of consumer software are everywhere, written by actual users and accessible via Google searches. Collaborative projects are on Basecamp, Wrike, and dozens of other Webbased project management systems. Web-based collaborative writing software is available for free from companies such as Google, Zoho, and Adobe. When you put a networked computer with a browser on every worker’s desk, suddenly it becomes feasible—easy, cheap—to use shared online collaborative spaces to perform all sorts of knowledge work, including professional communication. This social software drops the costs, increases the scale, and quickens the pace of collaborative work—for good or ill (Benkler, 2006, p. 6). But more changes are afoot, partially because social software has become so commonplace. One is that organizations themselves are changing. Organizational boundaries are blurring (Castells, 1996; Malone, 2004). Journal of Business and Technical Communication Volume 23 Number 3 July 2009 251-262 # 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/1050651909333141 http://jbt.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com