Interpersonal Content Management

Interpersonal Content Management

a proposal for a 45-minute talk at OSCOM 4

by Shimon Rura and Josh Ain

Content management systems have found two compelling applications. The
organizational CMS focuses many contributors around common business
goals. The personal CMS, typically a blog, eliminates barriers to
individual publishing. While organizational CMS recreates its social
structures based on existing business relationships, personal CMS
leaves its users to develop relationships from the ground up.

Bloggers express these relationships using simple mechanisms like
linking and republishing. Because blogs provide a lasting, personal
identity, they make it possible for social phenomena like reputation
and trust to develop online. These in turn support informal
communities of interest, offering their members ad hoc ways to
collaborate without establishing a typical business relationship. We
call this blossoming new usage Interpersonal Content Management. It is
characterized by a fusion of content consumer and producer roles. By
contributing incremental commentary on others' content--even by the
implicit endorsement of linking--individuals make connections between
their own interests and the interests of others.

Readers already use these connections informally to evaluate the
meaning and relevance of new content. But by designing software to
make the creation and discovery of such connections easier, we can
make interpersonal content management more practical and scalable.
First, users are empowered to quickly bookmark, rate, categorize, and
remix content from anywhere on the web. Second, the associations they
form in these actions are tracked by the interpersonal CMS, which then
automatically suggests ratings and categorizations for new content. By
making personally meaningful judgments about content, individuals not
only prioritize items within their own CMS, but help those who trust
them do the same.

This presentation explains Interpersonal CMS in terms of its
technological features, the relationships it supports between people,
the goals that drive its deployment, and the challenges it will face
in the future. In each of these aspects, we contrast iCMS with
existing notions of personal and organizational CMS. Specific
references will be made to our proof-of-concept iCMS, frassle
(frassle.rura.org), which will be open-sourced this summer.
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The authors are software developers living in Boston, USA. Both
Shimon[1] and Josh[2] have blogs on frassle.

References

   1. http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/index?feed=1
   2. http://frassle.rura.org/Directory/index?feed=31