Web City: visioning our Web presence?

It's a truism that the Web has changed everything. From its humble beginnings as a network of hyperlinked resources scattered among distant outposts, the Web has grown extravagantly in size, sophistication and effect. Complex technical and social structures have emerged that unite geographically dispersed people and small groups into communities of content and purpose.

The Web changes lives and society, and we in turn change the Web. We no longer control the rules of engagement, nor is it any longer desirable to do so (Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromlittlethings/); but the Web is influenced by the experience we design into it. Web City has sprawled and merged the old isolated outposts and gated network communities to nearly cover the entire earth, into a giant city that never sleeps.

We know that, already. Or do we? A map of the community of Web workers at Penn State still looks like we're scattered among lonely outposts. Sure, we party and show our stuff at conferences and lunchtime gatherings - and that is a good thing. But after the event, we return to our solitary routines and do the best we can; which is pretty good; well, ... it's not bad; but it could be better.

We could have a Web czar. If she's a good czar, she will rally and exhort and inspire her subjects into alignment and cooperation, produce creative strategies to ramp up economic exchange and tourism, and generally have a strategy for the many communities that live in her City.

But we don't. What we do have is a community of skilled people.

How can we manage ourselves without a czar?  Let's look around and find examples of communities of people, geographically scattered, that produce valuable and useful products for: artistic and scientific content; scholarship and teaching; degrees and certifications; software and services; collaboration and project management.

I think that the best examples are successful open source projects: a community of highly skilled designers and engineers geographically dispersed; working collaboratively and with agility towards a set of common goals; using tools and techniques that support collaboration and quality; self-organizing and self-governing where leadership emerges from within the community.

Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Python, Plone, Drupal, OpenOffice, etc. It's a very long list.

We use the products of open source development every day. In fact, we absolutely depend on it. When we browse the Web, we use an infrastructure that is largely open source. The many successful projects  have evolved remarkably similar sets of tools and processes that embrace the best characteristics of collaborative development. Based on my own experience working with open source, the personal lessons and rewards of "membership" are as important as the functionality they provide.

Here's a snapshot showing how open source-style collaboration at Penn State could work: I have a passion for accessible web design. There is an emerging assistive technology called ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), and I'd like to explore its application and adoption at Penn State.

I have gone to a list of collaboration / presentation topics at the PSUWeb community wiki (https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/psuweb/presentationtopics). I add the description of the topic by following the examples already on the page, and then I claim responsibility for that topic. That means I communicate my intent to facilitate a group to develop a project plan, vet the plan with the PSU Web community; begin the planning process; sponsor one or more hands-on design and code sprints; maybe create a presentation; start a list discussion or forum; start implementation of ARIA in an application that I'm working on - all with an overarching goal that we learn as a group by doing and sharing hands-on work.

I am especially mindful to make the space for others who want to join, or wish to have a leadership role, because I need their help, expertise and point of view.

Our special group on ARIA technology quickly discovers the need to have in place the tools that help collaboration. I like IRC, personally. But if others want to use the tool they already know - twitter - OK, then we use twitter, and we standardize on tags #psuweb and #aria to aid communication.

We also need to share code, and email just won't do it. I use the subversion code repository, but nobody else uses a tool  to share code. So, I'll teach them how to use Subversion. We'll quickly be at the point where we can start real work on the project. Months later, somebody may present a prototype template and lead a discussion at a hastily planned birds-of-a-feather session at the Web conference. Somebody else may present a (also hastily planned) lightning talk. This is agile, and it's all good.

Web City at Penn State: an agile, social and collaborative response to the continuing challenges that confront our Web presence. This is how open source communities do it, and prosper. This is how we could do it, too.