The Elements of Social Architecture, Part One: Identity

This is Part One of a three-part series of posts, in which I'll try to capture some of the foundations of the work I do in social media.

There are lots of smart people in this space, and lots of names for Web disciplines closely related to web social architecture. Among my Seattle friends and colleagues, Lee Lefever describes his work as "social design," and Paul Ingram builds social applications under the creatively self-titled umbrella of "inventrepreneurialism." There are many others.

My goal is to put a little finer point on my own discipline than I have up to now. I work in between the nuts-and-bolts code of community platforms and the finished design, in the typical space of an information architect. But I find the traditional ways of talking about information architecture not quite directly applicable when describing what I do. Social web experiences, in my view, are structurally different from broadcast web experiences. So in this series of posts I'll start to list some of the elements of those structures.

I'm sure I'll overlook some, and I hope you'll remind me. And none of what follows supercedes, only complements, traditional IA practices.

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's famous Venn diagram has more or less defined the field of information architecture. There's a lot of debate about it, a lot of refinements done to it, and a lot of criticism of it: It's been the singular touchstone for the large conversation about "What is IA?" Here's a version of it:

 

I'd like to offer my own take on an emerging discipline, which I call web social architecture. I see it as a new subset of information architecture. You might say it's the practice of information architecture applied to participatory experiences. It exists both within and alongside traditional information architecture as it's been practiced on the web. Obviously, this topic is the focus of this blog, and everything on the blog really is about web social architecture as I practice it in my daily work. So here's a different view of the familiar IA diagram:

 

 

Within each of the three foundational elements, there are a number of areas of practice for Web social architecture. Following is a very rough  overview, and by no means an exhaustive inventory.

Identity

Identity: Attributes

I  posted a bit about this idea earlier in the context of personalization, where attributes attached to identity are matched or correlated to attributes attached to content. This approach, called behavioral targeting, is particularly apropos in dynamic web spaces like communities, and it's an important idea blogged about thoughtfully and thoroughly by Anil Batra.

In a nutshell, attributes are the things that are known about a person (as represented by an identity). Those kinds of attributes break down roughly into two groups: explicit attributes (the things I choose to tell you about myself) and implicit attributes (the things you know about me based on my behavior).

The combination of explicit and implicit attributes attached to identity form the basis for personalization and recommendations--but also relationships, groups, and so on.

Identity: Authentication

Authentication is important from a social architecture perspective because it's an important mechanism for establishing thresholds of entry and participation, establishing identity, and managing permissions. The social architect needs to design authentication requirements that provide easy enough access to encourage the required amount of activity while requiring enough commitment to ensure the site isn't flooded with low-quality content.  

Identity: Privileges

At its most basic, privileges (or permissions) means access. Authenticated users are able to access protected data. Users with higher-level privileges are able to perform additional actions, like add, edit, and delete.

In the context of web sociability, the idea of privilege takes on additional dimensions. In addition to privileges conferred by site owners, privileges can be conferred based on collective judgements, by levels of participation, and more.

Privileged community participants can become key communicators within the community, can assist with moderation, and can help broadcast the community's social contract.

Identity: Membership

Membership is, at a basic level, a persistent belonging. Individuals can belong to communities, to groups within communities, to structured events like live chats, and more. I say membership has a degree of persistence meaning the joining act ion creates a state of membership that affects the experience afterward, even temporarily.

Identity: Profile

There are two kinds of profile: public and private. The public profile is the view of a user that's visible to other users. The private profile typically enables a user to provide and edit information shared with the system but not visible to other users, like credit card details or configuration preferences.

There's a lot to say about the public profile. It's an important component of community experiences. Typically, all contributions a user makes provide a link to the public profile, enabling everyone to see who's talking.

The best public profiles include both static content (the things users say about themselves) and dynamic content (the reflection of users' activities in the community). Static content typically includes a bio, photo, and location. Dynamic content typically includes content uploaded, comments made, groups joined, and more.

Dynamic profiles can be a powerful tool to introduce accountability and broadcast reputation (more on reputation later). If the things you do and say stick to you and become, effectively, a part of who you are, you're a bit more likely to think hard about how you behave.

Identity: Favorites

Our favorites are the things we want to be able to re-find easily. There are two most-important mechanisms to enable re-finding: bookmarking and tagging,

Increasingly, favorites are being made public. Sean O'Driscoll wrote about a concept he calls tag drafting. The idea is basically that if you're interested in the same kind of stuff as another person, you can watch what they tag and get connected with their information landscape.

All kinds of favorites can be made publicly visible and aggregated, and the idea is broadly called social bookmarking or social tagging. Del.icio.us is built around this concept, and Microsoft's Tagspace is a powerful advancement. In another twist, Flickr adds favorites to publicly-viewable profiles as a mechanism for discovery and as a descriptor of identity--you can see the photos I like, and they tell you something about me. If you're looking at my profile because we have something in common or you like my photos, there's a decent chance you'll also like some of the photos I like.

Favorites really belong to all three of the social architecture domains, because favorites are typically media objects with which a person chooses to establish a persistent relationship, Media objects we collect become part of who we publicly are, just as the objects in our homes seen by guests shape their sense of us--in that sense favorites are attributes of identity.

Identity: My Content

My content is the stuff I create. In social media settings, my stuff might be my videos or photos, and they might be incorporated as part of my identity through a profile or, as on YouTube and Treemo, a "channel."

My content is also my blog posts, my comments on other people's blogs, my posts to discussions, the discussions I start, the archive of my instant messaging conversations, and so on.

Increasingly, we're seeing "my content" dynamically included in "my profile," and I think that's a great thing.

Identity: Reputation

Stowe Boyd gave a talk where he called reputation "collective intelligence applied to the individual." Not bad. Reputation is another huge topic, and my aim here is to be in overview mode, so I won't go too deep on this, But I will say reputation is especially important in informational contexts where the expertise of a content contributor is critical to understand, such as in a technical discussion or a question and answer forum. Reputation is the visible artifact of authority. It's credibility that can be measured.

 

Identity is one of the great frontiers of the online world, and there are lots of people out there who know more about it than I do. So, what dimensions have I overlooked?

 

See also:

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Two: Relationships (forthcoming)

The Elements of Social Architecture Part Three: Media (forthcoming)

Comments

[Jay Fienberg]

By "identity," are you describing only an individual's identity?

One of the things about the current crop of "social" applications is that most of them define "social" only in ego-centric terms. More properly, these are ego-centric social applications.

Identity can also be considered in terms of group identity. And, outside of the current crop of social applications, the generally successful social architectures of the Internet can be seen as group forming and group identity architectures, e.g., via mailing lists, discussion boards, some wikis, etc.

I don't know if "group forming" will come in fashion again, or if "ego-centric social networks" will go out of fashion. But, I don't fully buy the web 2.0 idea that the social web now is a true evolution of the social Internet of the past. So, I'd consider group identity as an enduring facet of social architectures.

[Ryan]

A great point, Jay, thanks. I totally agree with you. I think of group identity as living between what you might call culture and the group social contract (whether it's explicit or implicit).

For me, this idea of group identity is best understood as a set of attributes belonging to relationships. I like to talk about groups as structured relationships between individual identities, and the identity of the group as a set of norms, both system-defined (since I'm in your group I can see your contacts) and idiosyncratic (in our group, we don't have to explain the difference between "big IA" and "little IA.")

Ego-centric social networks? Say more.

[Jay Fienberg]

Maybe I can get my point out a bit differently:

What you are describing as "identity" merges a number of different identity-related concepts under one label. Although some of the concepts you are including are human-centric, some are computer-system-centric.

So, group identity is an example of a kind of identity that can be described in human-centric terms, but is hard to describe in computer-system-centric terms.

One of things that's cool about the Internet is that, more or less as a whole, it supports group identity in human-centric terms. For example, a group of people have some group identity, like "begonia fanciers" that lives on the web.

This is different than desktop computer and web site systems which tend to build on the computer security hierarchy that defines the "user" as the atom of "identity." So, from this perspective, you have first a user named Hazel79, who then becomes a member of the "begonias-4-ever" group on MySpace.

You commented: "For me, this idea of group identity is best understood as a set of attributes belonging to relationships."

When you say that, aren't you implying that the relationships belong to the individuals? The individuals come first?

What I am suggesting is that group identity is more like individuals belonging to relationships. The group comes first, in some sense.

Re "Ego-centric social networks": this is the Flickr / Myspace / web 2.0 model where the network is seen principally in terms of "my network" or "my friends." It's the "my" view.

[Ryan]

Jay, I really appreciate the depth of your thinking on this (as on many things). I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but I do think there's room for both "system-centric" and "human-centric" notions in the broadly-drawn discussion of identity in social systems. The social architect deals with both, just as the information architect deals with content at the database / metadata level and the mental model / interface level.

You asked: "aren't you implying that the relationships belong to the individuals? The individuals come first?"

That's a great question. I say, yes and no. In terms of identity online, our relationships can clearly be counted among our individual attributes. And on the other hand, you're absolutely right, as individuals in states of "belonging" we are also attributes of a group.

Both things are true. The question is, in a given context, which item is the object and which is the descriptor? It could be either, and I'd say the site itself can be characterized by the emphasis you choose. This is one way I distinguish between "social networks," which are identity-centric, and "online communities," which you might say are relationship-centric.

Let me know what you think of that.

And, stay tuned for Part Two of my social architecture manifesto, in which I'll explore (more intelligently now, after this conversation), exactly the kinds of relationship and group issues you're raising.

[Jay Fienberg]

I think you're on to something really interesting here, and I am mostly prodding a bit at these broad concepts you're using. Identity, relationship and media each can be considered in terms of humans and systems. And, each term can also be seen as encompassing the other (e.g., relationships are an attribute of identity, or identity is an attribute of media, etc.).

You said:
"I do think there's room for both 'system-centric' and 'human-centric' notions in the broadly-drawn discussion of identity in social systems."

Absolutely. I am just suggesting that, in broad terms, some of the system-centric notions are not aligned with human-centric notions. So, I think there can be important differences between system architectures designed for social uses and social architectures that inform the design of systems.

[Justin]

Ryan,

I applaud your attempt to build your social architecture manifesto on these three tiers. However, I can’t help but resonate with the tension that is surfacing in your comment thread with Jay.

Can identity and relationships be separated? Is there such thing as autonomy in the social web space? Can I be known singularly and not a part of a group?

While these questions may be addressed later in your manifesto, it seems your focus in regard to identity is narrowed to possession, or what a person, as an identity on a website, can claim as his/her own?

Quite clearly, some of these attributes are significantly defined in relationships, like reputation (I can be a good answerer in a forum, but not as good as Jay) or my content (I can create and upload a remixed version of Jay’s flip book PowerPoint in Art of Office), I can still claim ownership as an individual within a group.

I’m not sure I’m making sense here (and believe me, it wouldn’t be the first time), so let me provide some clarity:

Drawing clear distinctions between identity and relationships even within blog posts is a very difficult task. Without relationships, any conversation about identity is like telling only part of the story. (It’s like the second and third Matrix movies: splitting them up makes it easier to sell, but isn’t the best way to tell the story.) And while media is also an important facet within the social media space, the link between it and the others isn’t as strong.

That said, if anyone can split this atom in an eloquent and meaningful way, it’s you. However, I can’t help but hold my breath for the next chapter.