Group work
Originally uploaded by saralparker.

There is celebration around Ning for many right reasons. They provide many of the building blocks necessary to build your own social network around events/activities that interest you. Once you go through multiple steps to create your own network, you get to add your own event calendar, discussion groups, blog posts, photos and videos etc. But I think, they are missing something more fundamental.

Although they give you the flexibility to add building blocks as you wish, they don’t make this process participatory. A group sharing common interests needs to negotiate its trajectory and destination, which means all the group members are stakeholders in the group. Wikipedia, for example, uses wiki-editable policy to help up shape the evolution of articles. All registered users get to contribute to this changing policy. This might be a tad too much of overhead for groups on Ning, but the point is — a sense of participation helps.

As a result, I see many users creating their own groups around activities they are interested in. This can serve no one’s interests as groups tend to be sparsely populated. (I am reminded of many of those virtual worlds which look like ghost towns). Users who stayed back and cannot add events to the events calendar have to use forums to post about any additional events they want to host, which greatly reduces findability.

Ning has many of the building blocks right. I wish they get group dynamics right too.