Glocalized Communities
Danah Boyd talks about G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide:
“…some suggestions that will help you address issues that emerge when dealing with glocalized communities.1) Empower users. Give them the ability to personalize and culturalize their spaces online. Let people create the contexts in which their expressions can occur so that they can help set and regulate the norms. This means everything from hackable HTML to open APIs to open source code that can spiral everywhere.
2) Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things without being forced to face everyone on the system. Let users privatize or wall off access to only certain people for their own needs. Let users see the valuees of being public. Of course, balancing privacy needs with public possibilities with the lack of interest in dealing with the *whole* public is quite tricky. Anyone who can solve this design challenge with a robust system will win the hearts of users and investors.
3) Empower individual users to be cultural spokespeople. Give them the ability to modify the system for their communities and cultural needs. Again, this means openness of software or providing richer platforms to develop on top of.”