The Call of the Community

All of these are starting off at the personal end, and slowly moving on to becoming powerful workplace tools. The instant messenger and other messaging and collaboration tools are the best examples of this transformation. The online forum and blog could well become the next, finally delivering on a much hyped and much misused concept–knowledge management.

These are not the only instances of community computing. Open-source software development is a very strong and powerful example of community effort, which even predates the messengers and collaboration tools that we have been talking about.

At the other extreme, grid computing is but another form of community computing, the big difference being that you are calling upon a community of computers, rather than one of users to contribute to the effort.

OSs that are currently under development are building in community tools. Instant messengers are already a part and parcel of OSs. Blogging tools are being built in. On the server side, forums and Wiki are getting integrated into many enterprise class apps. Many such as Oracle are already making a play in the grid computing space.

So far so good. But, community computing has its ugly side too. Like e-mail that also leads to spam and like instant messengers that can also lead to productivity and bandwidth losses, community computing also has a seamier side that can be the bane of the organization implementing it. Peer-to-peer networks can sap your bandwidth, if they are used to download bootleg movies. But, in a larger network, peer-to-peer is a workable system architecture. Online forums can be good knowledge aggregation tools on the intranet and very good support tools too. But, what if they degenerate into discussing movies and music only?

Community computing is here to stay. Like with everything else, it is up to us to ensure that using community-computing tools, methods and processes deliver more benefits than there are downsides.