M’good ambient chum Emma, aka Editorialgirl, wrote a great post about how a lost camera was reunited with its owners thanks to the massed efforts of various communities on Flickr which she titled Why I Love Flickr: A Detective Story. It’s worth reading before you go on with my post as she covers all the bases and, let’s be frank, tells the story much more concisely that I could.
Now you’ve done that I thought I’d go through her account and add a few notes on what I think actually happened here and what it means.
Rhonda posted a note in the Flickr help forum. The Flickr community jumped on the idea. Yes, it was okay to share the photos in the name of investigation, so she posted the whole lot onto her photostream.
Note that she didn’t decide on the course of action and then approach the community. She asked the community how best to proceed. Each online space has its subtle rules on how things should be done, even if the members aren’t really aware of them, and getting them to set the terms of engagement, as it were, is key to getting them involved.
Someone from the help forum spotted a car number plate with a Birmingham prefix outside the house, so Rhonda joined the Birmingham Flickr group and started a new discussion topic. “Does anyone recognise the road, she asked, “or even the people?”
A breakthrough. A man on the Birmingham group, known as Capo2, recognised the house as being typical of the area where he’d spent the first few years of his life. Not Birmingham, though. Aberdeen.
I particularly like this part because it seems so random but illustrates an important point. We are more complex than the categories you find us in. Sure, people in the Birmingham Flickr group will have Birmingham in common but they also have other interests. So when you ask a question in the Birmingham group you’re actually asking a widely diverse bunch of people. Off the top of my head you’ll get historians, teachers, rockabilly fanatics, human rights campaigners, lawyers, computer programmers, artists, musicians, nurses, botanists and, my favourite, a scout leader. And that’s just the ones I know well enough to have asked. Not a bad pool to pop a question to.
That’s the thing about niche online groups. They bring together people who wouldn’t normally interact in “real world” social environments and that makes things really interesting on all manner of levels.
It was on the Scotland Flickr group that things got really interesting, really quickly. Flickr member Greg Kael recognised the road and, the next day, drove down it to make sure. Amazingly, he was able to pinpoint the house in the photograph and gave out the address in the thread. Another Flickrite, Andrew, googled the address and found a planning application for replacement windows on the local council’s website. (I know. Isn’t it mad?) It gave a phone number for the council member dealing with the application.
The obvious question here is “why?” What made Greg drive to a road to check it matches a photo for no personal reward? That’s for Greg to say for sure but I’d hazard a couple of guesses. Firstly this has become a game where the prize is being proven right. This is no longer really about getting the camera back to the owner – that’s just the excuse. What really matters is the game. This is important. People like games, especially team games where they can be useful.
(As an aside, when Flickr first came onto the scene one of the most interesting articles written about why it was different from every other photo hosting site was Flickr is a game which it was, and to a certain extent still is.)
The second guess, which applies more to Andrew and his web-fu, is that it was no biggie. He spent a few minutes chasing up an idea (which was probably planted in his head by something someone else said) and passed the results back to the group. While the organisation of all this is pretty chaotic it might help to put a bit of structure to it to illustrate what I mean here.
In the middle you’ve got Rhonda. She’s the uber-passionate one driving this game and spending a fair amount of time on it. Around her you’ll have a small group of people who are supporting her all the way giving leads and co-ordinating information. And then you’ve got everyone else, the thousands of individuals who take notice and, if they can help for five minutes in their lunch hour, chip in their collectively wide-ranging skills and knowledge. Rhonda is the only person who’s potentially being inconvenienced by all this (and she’s having a blast so doesn’t mind) – everyone else is predominantly on the sidelines but, thanks to the tools provided by Flickr, able to help out with the minimal of effort.
And that’s why I love Flickr.
And so the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. Everyone involved with this, even if they just read the threads and followed the story, gets such a warm and fuzzy glow from the experience that the next time something like this comes along they’ll jump at the chance to help out.
And that’s what the Internet is all about.