EMFA: T3E4 - Expert Systems to Online Community - Dyson

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Theme:  Networking Communities - Essay 4
Author: Esther Dyson
E-mail: edyson@edventure.com 

[Host Note: Esther Dyson is a member of the Markle Foundation's 
E-Mail for All Board of Advisors.  She has a new book out titled
"Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age" - 
http://www.Release2-0.com.]



>From expert systems to online community

In the good old days about 10 years ago - just before
electronic Utopia - many of us in the computer business were
excited about the potential for expert systems that would
automatically assess information and come up with conclusions.
Life could be better, we felt, if these systems were able to make
routine decisions, from the approval of loan and credit lines,to
the diagnosis of hardware problems, to the pricing of airline
seats. But "experts" themselves were dubious: they did not want
to be replaced by any kind of system, automated or otherwise.
Eventually we got smarter, both in our thinking and in our
marketing, and we came up with the concept of "decision support
systems" and "expert advisors". You make the decisions, we said
in effect, we'll just support you. Interestingly, expert systems
are now in broad use, but they don't get much public attention
anymore. They simply do their jobs behind the scenes.

The same thing is happening nowadays as those of us in the
business talk about online communities. To listen to us talk,
you'd think we're all going to slip off into cyberspace and leave
our daily lives behind. People who read about communities in
cyberspace often get online, and then wonder what all the fuss is
about. Yes, there are those dreadful chat rooms, but many of
those are for people who want titillation more than community.
You can't necessarily find community on the Net any more reliably
than in real life. Usually, you get into a community through an
introduction, online or offline. Or you have to take a little
time to establish your presence for others. Even online,
community still consists of the people behind the computers and
the intangible - neither "physical" nor electronic - ties that
bind them.

So let's think of the Net as community support, not a community
(or communities) in itself. The Net can support all kinds of
communities. My communities tend to operate through e-mail. We
use the Net for our communications, for sending and sharing
information, for setting up meetings, for catching up on news.
Other communities operate through the Web, with people posting
and reacting to one another's comments, or even representing
themselves as avatars. People can put up their own home pages
describing themselves, but what makes a community is the
interactions among people, not their mere presence.

Beyond that, I can imagine a lot of physical communities using
the Net in more mundane ways: bulletin boards for teenagers
offering babysitting services, listings of school events, sites
for restaurants with constantly changing daily specials, news of
local sports teams. People in companies can use online support to
share information about sales prospects, competitors' activities
and other useful information; they can also organize company
outings, complain about the state of the bathrooms or recommend
local coffee shops.

But that's not an electronic community, you might say. No, it's
not, but it uses electronic support. Most online communities have
a certain physical component; the members like to meet one
another in real life and get to know one another in different
ways. And more physical communities are beginning to use
electronic support. Families send one another e-mail. A corporate
intranet is another example; so is a corporate extranet, which
ties the company to its customers and suppliers. A typical Web
site offering products for sale, however, is not a community, any
more than a mail-order catalogue is. But a site of football fans
sponsored by a sports-clothes maker may well be if the football
fans start to communicate with one another as well as with the
sponsor. Interestingly, they will soon begin to feel and act as
if they own the site, regardless of its legal status. And they do
indeed constitute the community, whoever owns the electronic
medium and the formal content. 

In the future, we'll take online community support for granted 
just as we do expert systems. Some communities will be mostly 
offline, some mostly online, and people's physical location 
won't matter as much. But that won't be the key thing about any 
particular community. For that, consider another problem with 
the concept of expert systems: they simply follow the rules they 
are given. Expert systems never say, "Hmm, maybe we should 
consider some new factors". Nor do they ever say, "Perhaps we 
should be asking some new question to make a decision about". 
For that, you need a person willing to make a new decision. And 
in a community, you need leaders. A technical system can support 
a community, but it needs active members to lead it, and to make 
it worth joining.


Esther Dyson, chairman		Always make new mistakes!
EDventure Holdings
http://www.edventure.com







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