Social by Social

Andy Gibson has pulled together a great list of 45 propositions for those interested in getting involved in social computing. They are all good but my particular favourites are below:

# Empowerment is unconditional. Telling people what they can and can’t do with your platform is like an electricity company restricting what its power can be used for.

# You can’t learn to fly by watching the pilot. If you want to understand new technologies, start using them. Dive in.

# Don’t centralise, aggregate. Do you really need data centralisation? Well do you? Use lots of different, disconnected tools and then pull the content together into a central location.

# Your users own the platform. If they feel own it, they will trust it, help sustain it, and find ways to use and improve the tools; if they aren’t interested, no amount of pushing will help.

Comments

[Andy Gibson]

Thanks Euan - and credit David Wilcox, Amy Sample-Ward and the rest of the SxS team too. I've also just added to my original post that these Propositions (and the final handbook) are Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to re-use and remixas appropriate. (And add to them of course!)