Objectives, motivations and courage

Probably the most daring thrust forward on the Internet has been the concretization of the idea of sharing. It didn't start with Wikipedia although that online encyclopedia is the most visible tangibility of knowledge sharing. A while ago, I touched with some person I am familiar with about my failure at trying and gather interpreters under some kind of guild for sharing advices, knowledge and thoughts. He told me that it is maybe because privacy is such a concern with interpreters that they are not inclined to share. I was not convinced at the time, but thinking again about this, I am now perfectly convinced that privacy is a false but convenient issue justifying the silence. I think that the single reason for not sharing is not the uncertainty of the value that could be yielded out of sharing, or the risk to spill customers' name. It's more simple than that. The reason there is no sharing is because ... the actors do not want to share. Sharing without the safety net of knowing that you are sharing in an environment that may come with authority or none is a bet into the future. Few want to bet anything except consolidate their present.

I would like to go back to AJATT because it has kept me busy thinking these days, not only about the perfect school, but to a larger extend, what a non-official, non-notorius gathering can turn into and the dynamics it may generate. I used to quip at the commentaries that come to most of the site author's articles but no longer. Besides the waxing and punning of these commentaries, they tend to show a common and strong thread of gratefulness. Most share a common goal : learning alone Japanese (or another language). Most recognize the value of the method offered. Most come back and seek for reassurance and courage to go on learning. The author delivers the gospel with a very clever and funny fashion. The echoing between the learners vibrating to a new piece of writing is at times almost touching.

It may tell a story about some ingredients that come lacking in models of social networks. The first thing is a common goal, meaning momentum into the future. A social network may be a location for gathering, but there is usually no common goal, no momentum into the future. The interesting thing about that common goal is that it exists before and beyond the location where people meet. After all, AJATT is nothing but a blog in terms of format. But you have all those individuals sharing a commonality of individual goal : that of learning Japanese. There are many goals with each members of a Facebook or equivalent to join, but once online, there is no goal that is both at the same time individual and common. The AJATT site has been the serendipity factor that happened to bring together, through silent reading or as commentators, people that happened to share a personal goal set into the momentum of required learning that happen to be a goal shared by other people. Also, competition does get into the picture and keep the place pristine, a fact that calls for more examination.

I think it is in contrast the lack of a common factor set into a shared and perceived momentum of growth into the future that killed the trial at creating a community of interpreters here, or the still valid freelancers social network I launched a year ago that is dragging feet. Here too, the common factor in terms of momentum is extremely feeble. Being a freelancer is a static raison d'être. Gathering mostly for the perceived benefit to be listed under the freelancer banner is no momentum.