DWWS Facebook group
A few days ago, Douglas Vos of Dearborn, Michigan, created a Designing With Web Standards group in Facebook just to see what would happen. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not like he started a group about moss formations or watching paint dry. Doug has read both editions of the book twice, and is a big fan of standards-based design. He started the group because he was interested in web standards and he wanted to understand, from the inside, how such groups function and grow in Facebook.
At this moment, the group has 422 1,142 members, seven wall posts, eleven discussion topics, three photos, one video, and two links. I wrote a post there today about my upcoming web standards talk at BusinessWeek.
I am curious whether the new group will become a passive affinity group or something more.
By passive affinity group, I mean the kind of group people join to show they belong—and then don’t do much, if anything, once they’ve joined. For instance, hundreds of thousands of people joined a Facebook group in support of the monks’ protest in Burma. Everyone who joined supports free speech and democracy, but only a tiny handful of group members create content or begin initiatives. For the few who are active, membership in the Burmese monk support group is an act of political and spiritual engagement. But for most members, it’s passive. This is true of all social groups (online and off) and nearly all human activities.
If people who incorporate web standards in their work join the DWWS Facebook group as an act of affinity, that’s fine and dandy, and it will be in some small way a measure of the progress of web standards as a movement or discipline. But the group could do more. Much more.
For instance, the group could track large-scale conversions to web standards and accessibility among corporate or government websites. It could also track backsliding, such as the infamous British Disney site, redesigned for standards compliance and accessibility by Andy Clarke at the beginning of the 2000s, and then redesigned back to tables and cruft by a successor web agency.
The group could track which schools and universities are using Designing With Web Standards and other “web standards” texts in their design or web curricula.
The Web Standards Project used to keep track of such things when I was running it, and I used to keep track of them here, as well; but I can’t do it any more, and The Web Standards Project doesn’t seem to be doing it either (probably because The WaSP is busy with other activities).
Maybe that’s where you come in.
It’s just a group on Facebook, but it could do some good.
[tags]dwws, designing with web standards, facebook, zeldman, books[/tags]
Filed under: Applications, books, facebook, Standards
28 Responses to “DWWS Facebook group”
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Thanks for this post. I just joined the group. Looks like it could be a good thing.
Thanks again Jeff. I don’t even have a facebook account as I’m not a fan of community sites like myspace. Either way in an effort to expand my knowledge, and share with others, I’ll be signing up.
Once I get off the metro that is. Might be a while seeing that it’s the red line (folks in dc know)
Like I said, thanks for the heads up. I do hope it does not become an object of affinity.
Thanks, guys!
Thanks for sharing this facebook group. I’ve just joined it. It’s only a week old and already has over 490 members. Very nice! Thanks again!
Mmm, sounds interesting. But I fear if I join FaceBook all of my involvement will be an affinity rather than taking part with any kind of passion.
My MySpace usage is definitely just an affinity!
Sadly, you make a good point about The WaSP. Would have likely to see them leading progress on many issues, including recent technologies like CSS Animation which blurs the line between behavior and presentation. Is it of benefit to the web as a whole? Once upon a time The WaSP would have helped develop the communities discussion.
Hi Jeffrey. I grew disillusioned with Facebook some time ago (people just posting nonsense!) and, rather than dropping it, decided to try and encourage the appliance of ‘useful’ content and ideas. The standards group is definitely something that encourages me…
Thanks Jeffrey, I’ll signup. I really don’t like Facebook (I’m 38) so this will be my first real group there. Just bought your book and am finished reading it. It definitely is changing the way I code. Cheers, Mike
Thanks for the information, Facebook is full of random people and groups and numerous ways of getting poked, lost and confused so it’s nice to find something that’s actually useful.
Hm, that is interesting to hear. In my opinion the succes of such group – whether its members will do much for it or not – mostly depends on how the group leaders show their activity and group benefit. If the leaders will stay passive – it definitely wont push it far. At least it has a great role a the first time of group existance.
ps wish you success in this undertaking
Well, I guess since now that you’ve posted something about it, it might get folks off their arse. I joined, but I think most of my contributions are through my site (as may very well be the case for many others). I honestly don’t know what to do on Facebook :\ … I can post a link to my site, but that’s just naughty. In the end, the more people that see it, and notice how large the group is, the more likelihood that they will dig in to see what it’s all about. Everyone need not be a leader.
Sounds good,i will signup.and wish you success.
As of Sunday morning, Nov 4, 2007, there are 801 members.
I’ve just started a new, and I hope uplifting, topic: “Your favorite creative web standards techniques.” What new possibilities has standards-based design opened your mind to? What techniques do you use, and why? Feel free to link to examples of your work.
Read or contribute in the DWWS Facebook group.
Interesting observation Jeffrey. It seems like this type of “label yourself, but don’t act” attitude is the popular thing to do these days. At least such attitudes strengthen the appeal of real iniatives such as A List Apart.
Similarly, Eric Meyer just wrote a nice post about the mentality of how people tend to think in a binary pattern, then tend to side with one issue or another as a form of self-identification.
The “hey, I’m with it” attitude followed by a lack of action, I think, is actually far more common than most people realize — hence Jeffrey’s excellent post. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one, too.
Nice idea but… Facebook is a proprietary environment, and doesn’t this go against the very ethos of Web Standards? (though I am smarting somewhat because Facebook kicked me off for using my nom d’internet rather than my given name!)
I’m dissappointed to see Facebook as the defacto choice for a group like this. I think DWWS deserves better. I think the group deserves to be open to major search engines. I think the group deserves to be easily accessible to everyone — even those who don’t have Facebook accounts.
This really seems like a bad idea for DWWS. Ideally you want a place where web developers can easily access the information on the site. Facebook is a “members only” kind of site. For all practical purposes, only those who are part of the “club” of Facebook will only ever stumble across it.
For Pete’s sake, DWWS developers should be able to create their own network for developers to interact in!
I teach Web Publishing at Moore College here in Philadelphia and I use a portion of your book along with some or Eric Meyer’s stuff when teaching my course.
Just joined — and participated. Finally, a Facebook group I can actually do something with!
bill: As I noticed above, it looks like the choice of Facebook instead of something a bit more open was more a case of seeing who would join in the first place. If it turns out that there are people there who would do things besides for just joining to show support for it and actually create content & such, even better.
In the meantime, it does make me feel like going and getting a facebook account myself, once I’m home and can reasonably do such things.
@Jake and @BillW: In September, I shared my assessment of Facebook. As I wrote then, the closed network aspect bothers me, too. Except on private intranets and development/ staging servers, web pages should be viewable, findable, and searchable by all. Facebook’s pages are not.
And any modern site or application, unless it is entirely Flash-based, should be semantically structured with web standards (and its authors should strive for validation). On these grounds as well, Facebook is far from perfect.
All that said, Facebook is a great social network and it’s where the people are (or where the smart ones are going, anyway). When Doug proposed creating a Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook, the potential good of such a group far outweighed the bad in my opinion.
Yes, I could start a DWWS wiki and hope people come to it; but the Facebook group is a fait accompli, and it is already working.
People are joining, they are getting excited about web standards again, they will hopefully share creative techniques, talk about other web standards books they like, encourage publishers (who belong to Facebook) to publish more good books about web standards, etc. etc.
You may disagree with my reasons (and I will respect you for your principles), but I’m happy that Facebook, doing what it does well, is enabling standardistas to meet and exchange ideas.
1,142 members as of Nov 7, 2007. Harvard University video posted. New threads begun. Come, join.
Join? OK, I’m in.
@Jake and @BillW: Yes, Facebook isn’t open, and that’s not perfect. On the other hand, it makes it drop-dead simple to easily connect w/other people in many ways (Case in point: I’m member #1216). So a good way for like minds to get in touch.
It shouldn’t be _the_ DWWS watering hole, but I’m glad it’s yet one more point of presence.
Facebook groups are terribly uninteractive. Granted once you remember to check them every now and then, you can contribute with wall posts etc but there are no rss feeds, no email updates, nothing. It’s a vital element of any interactive community – being notified of any change. They just become invisible once you join. For, let’s say, ‘political movements’ they’re about as useful as online petitions. Until they fix that, Facebook groups will continue being used mostly for novelty based groups like “I secretly want to punch slow walking people in the back of the head”.
J.
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