As we creep ever closer to a full launch, you can imagine the excitement and enthusiasm for the MySpace Developer Platform that is building up around the office. Our team is particularly looking forward to the changes we are implementing over the next week or so. We hope you will be as excited by them as we are.
My personal excitement and enthusiasm for the MDP is an outgrowth of my understanding of knowledge ecology. Within the field of information studies and knowledge management, there is a subfield that uses the idea of knowledge ecology to express a particular integrated view of information architecture, knowledge management, ethics, complexity theory, cultural studies, and semiotics. Essentially, this view comes together under the idea that information behavior is natural and therefore subject to many of the same types of analysis as the natural world. There is a spillover of ideas and metaphors from the biological sciences and information sciences, a blending of principles that has a long history in the fields of computer science and biology. For more on this latter hybridity from a non-specialist perspective, see Nancy Forbes' lovely little book Imitation of Life and Robert Frenay's Pulse, not to mention, of course, the famous Out of Control by Kevin Kelly.
The extension of this thread of mutual influence into knowledge management is really quite amazing. It stimulates those of us working in the field into new areas of exploration, new possible approaches to our day-to-day activities, and new ways of comprehending our goals. Recognizing the complexities of information flow among human beings means not just concentrating on the artifacts that represent that flow, but digging deeper into the underlying environment. Knowledge ecology takes this maxim to heart, recognizing that information flow is not an abstraction, but rather an embodied and situational practice of human communication. Knowledge and information are not things to be manipulated, but rather acts or movements against a meshwork of enabling causes and conditions. Social networking and related endeavors demonstrate this by emphasizing human connection as the enabling condition for information flows. If a flow of information is the river, a knowledge ecology represents the total ecosystem: water, riverbed, climate/weather, fish, plants, etc. Dumping artifacts into the flow or trying to artificially irrigate the system often leads to convoluted, redundant, and ultimately destructive interference with natural efficiencies, discovered pathways, potentiated evolutionary scenarios, and the generation of stable, sustainable equilibria. Traditional knowledge management is susceptible to these errors, especially under a system of top-down administration. For an amusing take on this, see this video. The video does not, of course, reflect the experience of those of us writing on the MDP blog!
Social networking in itself has brought powerful, complex, and culturally transformative changes to people’s lives. Many of these are a result of the avoidance of the above mentioned problems with traditional knowledge management forms. Though OpenSocial may seem like a simple extension of basic social networking ideas, it seems to me to be more than this: it represents a huge leap in possibilities. It allows social networks to become part of an active representation of transactional communication and culture - beyond a simple presentation of identity or information exchange or transmission. Social networking is no longer just about linking nodes, but also about tying knots. MySpace Apps might be understood to represent the same leap made when eukaryotic cells incorporated mitochondria into their metabolism (see also).*
Working on the MDP has also been a pleasure due to our development process. We at MySpace emphasize use of the Agile Development method known as Scrum, about which I’ll say more in my next post. For now, it’s enough to say that Scrum draws inspiration from some of the same cutting-edge science as knowledge ecology, with some interesting differences. The integration of knowledge ecology and Scrum, along with the practices of generative management according to which my team and I operate, has been quite exhilarating. The basic point is that the MDP, like Scrum and knowledge ecology, is about empowering individuals to shape their own environment through the sharing of resources, communication and community. The result is an enriched and dynamic scenario that is infinitely more robust.
This project has been a joy to work on, not just because of the fabulous people who have worked on it, but also because the MDP itself is both significant and intellectually stimulating. I can't wait to share it with everyone!
* An aside: My comrades here claim this last sentence proves my eternal geekdom (exact quote: “holy geeky batman : - ) ”), I say that my love for Japanese pop music is far more indicative of this than my enthusiasm for MySpace Apps-as-mitochondria. Also, Rhonda assures me that being a geek is a good thing, insofar as the difference between geeks and nerds is that “Geeks get it done.” So I rejoice in the label.