I am happy to announce a new social media project that Corante is producing, called Operating Manual for Social Tools. Sponsored by ZeroDegrees, OMST is intended to explore issues surrounding the use and utility of social tools, such as social networking applications and other collaboration/communication/community tools that are increasingly social in nature.

Stowe Boyd

[from Operating Manual for Social Tools]

Sometime in the late 1970s, I encountered R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it left an indelible mark on me.

Fuller, a polymath who is best known for inventing the geodesic dome, in his later years adopted a global perspective regarding the challenges confronting humanity, and went on tour, speaking at colleges across the country, enjoying a brief McLuhanesque impact on our nascent ecological awareness.

His basic thesis was that the Earth is a very small place -- a spaceship -- that we share as we move through the cosmos.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

The rest of the book was an attempt to in fact lay out the groundwork for an operating manual for our spaceship: Earth. He attempted to derive an action plan from the mathematical and philosophical principles that he believed underlie our world and our interrelatedness.

In the explosion in social tools use, it has become clear that we are in an analogous situation. Hundreds, if not thousands of social tools are being developed, and millions of people are becoming involved in the processes that these social tools implement. Social networking applications, online communities, even instant messaging solutions are actively rewiring how we interact.

It's a small world, our spaceship earth, and in the roll-out of these technologies we are once again made aware how social networks link us together: for better or worse.

But there is no operating manual for social tools. That hasn't stopped the entrpreneurs and innovators that are rolling out services on every side. And it hasn't slowed the uptake of these tools by the early adoptors, who have streamed into the myriad offerings without a second look.

However, there ought to be an operating manual. Just a few examples of questions that the operating manual might answer:

• What are the rights and responsibilities of the citizens and denizens of social space?
  
• What should the privacy and security provisions for social tools be? How should they be verified, if at all, and by whom?
• Who owns identity, and how is it verified?
  
• Who owns the information that individuals might create or capture in these social tools? Or, stated from a different perspective, who has what rights with regard to the global social network that is being constructed inside of social tools?
  

So we are launching this project, to identify these and related questions, and to develop the operating manual that is so obviously needed. With the generous sponsorship of ZeroDegrees, Corante has created this blog as a forum, so that we can explore the issues and ultimately spell out some answers.

This project is the outgrowth of discussions that I had with Jas Dhillon, the CEO of ZeroDegrees, specifically arising from a piece I wrote earlier this year at Get Real, entitled "The Ten Commandments of Social Networking." In that piece, I only enumerated six commandments, and promised to fill out the list. But, rather than a short list of proscriptive demands, I now believe we need something more. Hence, this project.

I have asked David Weinberger and danah boyd to join me in this project, both Corante contributors to Many-to-Many and well-known writers on social tools and related topics.

There are potential conflicts latent in these questions. The interests of entrepreneurs may at times run counter to the needs of individuals, and vice versa. There are a wide variety of perspectives that can be taken: legal, economic, entrepreneurial, personal, and societal. We welcome the open exploration of these dynamics, and we invite your participation in the forum.

I and my colleagues do not know exactly where this is headed. We have no preplanned agenda, no collection of truisms in a desk drawer that we have been waiting to pull out. We are exploring our own thoughts and concerns, and we are hoping to share that experience. Our hope is that a few months down the road we will be converging on some answers, as well as finding a form for those answers to be captured in.

I am joined in the project by two well-known throught leaders, danah boyd and David Weinberger. I invite you to participate in the forum that we are hoping to develop.