Architectural Design and Virtual Social Spaces

I feel that the Internet is a great way of getting over physical barriers. I can communicate and cooperate with people from all over the world without having to travel great distances or at a cost higher than my ADSL line bill. Above this I find that it's a great way to meet people who have similar interests to you, for instance, I believe in Free Software and am against DRM etc., locally I may be able to discuss these ideas with about 5 people; but there is a huge community on the Internet which believes the same, so I can discuss with them things I'm interested in.

So, shortly I find these social communities important since they let me traverse physical boundaries to meet like minded people. Physical communities are usually fixed to one geographical area, and thus things like expense of travel etc. may force people within the community to have a certain amount of money to participate. I have no idea how these ideas can be linked in with architecture, sorry.

Tell me if I've misunderstood your question

dylunio

Those are definitely some of the issues that I'm trying to get at. One becomes part of a virtual, social community by participating in an environment such as this. Not only does this allow a person to communicate with a larger group of people, but I'm wondering if it changes the very nature of the communication. Would open source software thrive as much without this sort of open source communication? Is there something in the nature of virtual communication and virtual social structures that facilitates open source software development (how does this site help open source software to develop).

I think it is clear that different ideas are allowed to develop much more freely in open source software than when free participation is hampered (as is usually the case with private software developments). I'm trying to envision a sort of open source architecture, perhaps something where participation by users results in a new understanding of the spaces and even the uses of a building. This might promote further exploration into possibilities that no one guessed existed.

Perhaps the question to ask is: What makes open source software different and better than commercially developed software? What is fundamentally different in the thinking behind the way it is structured?

Firstly I'll have to correct your question, you say: "What makes open source software different and better than commercially developed software" -- the problem with this is that free and open source software and commercially developed software are not mutually exclusive, since companies such as Novel, Red Hat and IBM create free/open source software (FOSS).

So I'll change the question to: "What makes free/open source software different and better than proprietary software"

The difference in thinking is how open it is. Proprietary software is hidden from the user, the user may not see the code and the people that make such software try their best to hide it from you, thus the software becomes a 'magical' black box. On the other hand FOSS is open for people to look at the code, comment on it, modify it, submit bug-reports and patches; thus it is more inclusive than proprietary software. With FOSS you can add a feature if you want it, and everyone else can benefit from it, while with proprietary software the company which creates it decides if the feature you want is worth the hassle to write etc.

Thus the FOSS community allows greater interaction, it also gives a chance of benefit to a small number of people (say only 10 people want a feature, while this is a problem for proprietary software, it's not for FOSS).

Trying to think of these ideas in an architectural sense: you want to use the lobby of the building as a gym, you the user can change that without other people having to consider if it is worth the time to do or not. (I don't think this is the best analogy, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment)

May post some more later as things come to me.

Well, one thing I find interesting, regarding the relation between virtual community experience and "real world" experience and how the one affects another, is that you kind of start looking at people in the real life which you also know in the "virtual" life online a bit differently than you would if you knew them only in "real life". You start associating the person standing next to you with what he said in web forums, via IM etc. where you've already developed a certain picture of him or her.

Overall I think this allows for a way for people to actually get to know each other more deeply, that is, without any presuppositions that we sometimes base on people's looks alone. When we don't actually physically see them and only see their words, that allows us to kind of look deeper into the way they think, which brings people closer together. This said, it seems to me that the ideal way of getting to know people is to both communicate with them online and offline. We get a very interesting and full picture about them this way.

Also one thing to mention is that the internet is kind of a magical place as related to the "real world" where some fun "magical" things can happen as events that may be counted among milestones towards building friendships and various relationships. That pretty much comes down to what they said and how on the web and what did this cause in a community, or even further what did they do and how did that affect the community etc.

It can be a complex issue, but a very interesting one. Overall I think internet has brought more good than bad into the process of building relationships between people online.

Hmm, about the way Free Software (aka open source by some) works regarding these communications, the thing is that they simply have alot more to commune about as opposed to the proprietary realm. They have the source code which everyone of them can look at and comment on as well as influence (help, suggest, submit bug reports) others to change it. It's kind of a central thing around which everyone swarms trying to make it better from their own perspectives (e.g. needs). Common perspectives and needs create groups of people with common goals of development.

Another thing that binds alot of people in the FOSS community is a sense of cause which includes some basic principles on which this community is built. Since we know that Free Software is not just merely about having the source code available somewhere on the open, but also about freedom to cooperate there is this feeling, some call it the "spirit" of the community, that we should be nice to each other, open minded, accepting rather than exclusive, willing to help rather than just slam the doors etc. From the very idea of freedom to cooperate we have this universal positive feeling that spreads further than software itself into relationships between various people no matter what they do.

Not even everyone in the FOSS community actually develops software. Some just use it and help others use it too and sometimes the only reason why they are actually *happy* to helps is because of this feeling propagated from the core idea of freedom for everyone and because they have benefited from it because somebody else at some point helped them.

This mysterious "spirit" of the community is one thing that differes it from the proprietary software realm. If anything, spaces designed in a physical world should encourage a similar feeling. It could somehow illustrate this bottom up approach of building, rooms would be made for cooperation between people equally rather than hierarchy or something like that. I'm not an expert on building architectures, but that could be the general idea to start with.

There is of course on important difference between free software and free architecture or free hardware - With free software, anyone who has a computer and internet connectivity, which are easily and widely available (let's assume so for the moment at least - I know this is not true in parts of the world whose civilization was destroyed by Europeans without being fully replaces, the so-called "third world"), can tweak the software and test it. Designing hardware is a quite different in that it's expensive to test - making it a more theoretical field for the freedom bit. Architecture is even more difficult - there is no testing.
However, architecture could become more interesting, novel, useful, postmodern with community involvement. A piece of free architecture, let's call it a libre building, can be modified and rebuilt by anyone - If an American architecture team builds a libre building, any architect in, say, the Kongo, given the physical resources, could build the same or a better and/or more beautiful building; These improvements, given a Copyleft license, would be (in part ?) reimplementable in the US during a renovation.
Coming from software architecture, I cannot clearly see the dimention of the benefit

Free architecture would have a flip side - in architecture, the "counterpart" of software "piracy" is a valid problem: you really don't want people to use the plans to ease a robbery or something.
Here, intellectual property translates into material and personal security.

You reminded me of something I forgot to mention, the blueprints of these buildings. They could be free for everyone with know-how to see and modify to make certain improvements that they come up with. These blueprints could be something a community could gather around and share and some of the best blueprints could even end up used for the actual physical building.

The whole process could even stir some novel innovative ideas which is actually one of the goals Andel mentioned.

Maybe one day we will see buildings designed by users of virtual environments such as second life be built in reality. Letting people play in it in a virtual version seems like a great way to test the usability, that is difficulty of getting lost in a building.

I was impressed with the comment about the way online communities allow people to get to know each other. Instead of taking cues about a person from visual and verbal signals, one associates with the content of what they say. It seems much more of an idea based association. In the physical world it is easier to ignore people because one can just remove themselves from the physical presence of the other person. This might be why people don't like to visit certain areas of major metropolitan areas because they feel there are people there that they do not want to associate with.

I guess the question is, are there 'homeless' people in virtual communities, people who want in but aren't admitted? If not, perhaps architecture too can develop spaces that admit everyone. Public buildings are a good example of this but are increasingly off limits to 'disreputable' people. How can spaces be provided for everyone without making some feel uncomfortable. Perhaps the architecture forms new ways of communicating. Maybe there need to be varying levels of interaction. For instance a community center might have two spaces that are visually connected but not physically (like a large open atrium between two spaces). Maybe computers are set up that allow people to communicate across this gap and see each other at the same time. As individuals get to know each other better they could move to another part of the building where an activity unites them (library as an example?). Communication might exclude use of voice (library). This is followed by another space. This allows people to get to know each other in a fully integrated environment.

Yesterday we had a discussion in class regarding this topic. I thought I would post some of the thoughts and ideas expressed in that discussion.

1) Does the virtual world have to be an abstraction? In other words do you always loose something when you move to virtual communities? Do you also gain something by the abstraction?
2) Memory is a malleable thing. Something that we remember one way might change over time and as we associate it in new ways. History is an example of how memory can change on a collective level. Instances are known where governments have altered historical facts to suite their current needs. Eventually it might become very hard to discern between the original truth and the altered event. All history books are an example of this because they give a particular slant to the ideas expressed. How does our memory of the world effect virtual spaces?
3) What new structures of social interaction develop out of virtual communication? Examples of virtual spaces include chatrooms, blogs, IM, Email, gaming environments, simulations (other?).
4) If participation by the community is reflected back in the way the community is structured, does this then effect future participation?
5) In open source software where does most of the social interaction take place? In forums like this or in the actual code of the programs.

More thought later perhaps as I work on this...