Library clips

A lot of people I have spoken to want one place (community) for all discussions about a topic. They are averse to overlapping topic communities, and feel that a conversation in one community should actually be happening in a more appropriate community.

That would be nice, but this is really hard to control. Sure it would be easy for consumption and seeking, everything nice and neat in the one place, but it aint like that, the world’s messy, and so is social computing.

It’s true that social computing is still islands, just like email and documents, you will have blogs and wikis all over the place, and sometimes in the confines of a community.
The point is that it’s not closed silos like email. Instead, being open allows for discovery, conversation, evolving of ideas, re-use, new relationships, collaboration, emergence…knowledge is flowing.

This is the real value, who cares if it’s messy. In fact that’s not even a question, it has to be messy, otherwise it’s not real or authentic.

The fact of the matter is that we participate where and when we feel comfortable, and for self-interest…also in knowing that your network will reciprocate their know-how. Once we form a natural network with people we trust and have an affinity with, knowledge starts flowing like a waterfall.

There’s a lot of human behaviour to consider behind the act of knowledge sharing, and what is needed is to cultivate these conditions for it to happen naturally…if volunteering starts happening, it means the conditions are right. eg. a flower that has enough water and sun, and perhaps appropriate soil and shade.

Quite often people will take part in the individual centric ecosystem of a social network as they can choose who to network with (this makes them feel comfortable and connect with who they like)…just like in the offline world. From this we hope that meeting like people may extend their shared interest into a naturally forming topic hub.

In this respect social networking is similar to the adoption of email and IM, as it’s in tune with human nature…as mentioned before social networks (profiles with blogs, etc…) go farther as they are open, providing discovery, and connections to the rest of the organisation…something email and IM don’t do.

When you think about it, social networks are bottom-up by default!

As for communities, forcing people to talk about a topic within a specific community is not going to be effective, rather it’s about the people first, the topic second…people will only contribute if they feel comfortable.

So you either go with a bottom-up messy approach with lots of participation, or a top-down controlled approach with low participation (but high email traffic to compensate).

Further to this, when we have offline conversations with people it happens everywhere:
- in the coffee room, at my desk, in the elevator, in a meeting, at reception, on the phone

I’m not refrained from talking about a topic because I’m in the coffee room, rather than in a meeting (confidentiality aside)…that’s crazy. I have a thought, or I bump into someone, and we converse about any topic…it doesn’t matter where I am when we have this conversation, what matters is that I’m having it.

Life is messy, and so is online social computing, we converse about a topic in any place…this is a natural happening.

There is a time and a place to have some conversations, but what I’m referring to is being restrained in having a conversation, not because of privacy and sensitivity, but just controlling all conversations about a topic in one area, so it’s easier to keep track of and seek. More precisely only creating one place to have these types of conversations. This obviously doesn’t work in the offline world as we can’t mind control people, and it shouldn’t happen online by controlling spaces to converse in, rather than bottom-up creation of communities, and social networks.

Now in saying this I understand that when I create a blog post I will choose the right community…but there is only so much control you can have of what life offers. If we go off on tangents, then so be it. That’s the beauty of hyperlinks, we can point to stuff that has happened elsewhere. Also the job of a facilitator can re-direct conversations after the fact, kind of like a groundskeeper.

To conclude it’s not about doing away with islands, it’s about creating conditions for conversation to happen out in the open, and they may happen in places where you least expect it. I could have a conversation about “social computing” lining up for tickets to the cinema. The important part is that these conversations are happening.

People that want to know all information on a topic will have a hard time here, but the only way is to jump in and build a network, from then on your trust filter will bring you treats, and vice versa.

And we always have search, but it’s more relevant when it’s filtered through your network.

I guess the answer to enterprise awareness, is natural flowing participation, and the more you participate and network, the more you will find what you want, in fact you start a path without realising

Tweetbacks - a wordpress plgin that will display trackbacks that appear on your blog post from people having your blog post URL in their tweets (it tracks many URL shortner services)

Something similar is when people comment on your blog post in Friendfeed you can get those comments to appear in your blog post.

Tweetsuite - a wordpress plugin with a whole suite of Twitter integration for your blog, including:
“* Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
* ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
* A digg-like Tweet-This Button
* Automatic Tweeting of new posts
* A Most-Tweeted Widget
* A Recently-Tweeted Widget
* A My-Last-Tweets Widget
* A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget”

Magpie - ads / monetising tweets, also see Twitad [via b]

Twittertise - more ads on Twitter [via m]

2tweet - email a load of photos to 2tweet and it will create a web gallery post hosted at 2tweet, and auto-tweet it to twitter, with a link back to your 2tweet post. [via TC]

BONUS
Create a Twitter Background Using PowerPoint (also see MyTweetSpace)

Yesterday I posted, Internal communities where visitors can contribute just like members, and two great comments were left by Nancy White and Matt Moore.
I was replying to these comments, but the content got too big so I’m posting them instead. As well as the fact that more people will read this in a blog post, over a comment.

The title of this post is something that Nancy mentioned that encapsulated my thinking:

“Funny, how things are reinterpreted when intermediated by technology, isn’t it!”

And Matt was riding this wave too:

“Membership is often presented as a binary “yes,no” issue. But there are many levels of engagement/involvement and people move between them.”

I agree, your comment excellently hones in on how “membership” is defined and interpreted differently online.
In a totally open community you could have a member that doesn’t reciprocate much (reads a lot but doesn’t comment or post). But then you have this visitor that is always contributing to the forums…go figure which the real member is.

Not to say membership is only about contributing, a members part in a community may be behind the scenes.

But like you say, just because it says “member” next to my name, doesn’t necessarily mean I behave like one.

In the end being a member means you have a stake in changes or direction of the domain, you get to go to telecon meetings, whereas a visitor doesn’t (a visitor doesn’t really have a say “so to speak”). The visitor may come back to the community the next week and things have changed, much to their chagrin.

I think the easiest way is to post to all members that you are having a monthly telecon about the community. The people who frequently turn up to these meetings and contribute to the conversation are your “members”. If this is 15 people, then they should be in a different role than the others.

It takes more effort to devote time to attending a meeting, than just having the word “member” near your online name. This “time” element has more of a care factor towards the community, and the fact that most people are expected to take part in a meeting somehow shows an element of commitment or dedication.

If you attend a book club meeting at someone’s house, you have made the effort to be there and contribute to the conversation, which means you show the characteristics of membership…you are an integral part of the community (club). If you bring a visitor along, they are usually more quite, in months to come they may really swing into the conversation and wavelength of the group. This is when the other members say, “yeah she’s one of us, she really fits into our dynamic”.

But this is the crux of it for me. In an enterprise community, people would be allowed to visit/subscribe to this book club community, but not contribute. All they would be able to contribute is blog comments, rate stuff, and perhaps asks a question in the visitor book. I guess this is similar to interacting with an online newspaper.

If a visitor is interacting quite a bit, they may end up being invited as a member, or they may request membership themselves.

So in all the community runs on a tight ship, and all members have an enjoyable experience as they are on the same wavelength.

But, by not allowing visitors to interact in forums (the heart of communities) are enterprise communities missing out on potentially valuable input, due to permissions.

You have to weigh this up - yes, you may miss out on visitor contributions on forums, but if you opened it up, the visitors could flood your community and change it.

To keep going…

There can be a real difference between online/offline communities when it comes to membership. You may have 10 members in a community and you want to enhance it by turning it into an online community. Over a couple of months, a lax Facilitator adds 100 people as a Members.
Are these people really “members”, do they contribute in any way, do they do anything to make the community what it is.
In the offline world you wouldn’t get a 100 people turning up unless they really wanted to contribute, as it takes effort and passion to get off your seat, or attend a synchronous meeting where you can be seen, and perhaps asked something.

It’s true that lots of the online members may have a shared interest in the domain, but will they care if the domain lives or dies. And will the original members be OK with “domain shift”, which happens anyway as an evolution of the community, but with lots of members, you are gonna get a variation of views and a resulting domain shift in a direction the originals may not want to go.
NOTE: When I say “domain shift” this could mean more of a focus on a topic within that domain, or I suppose a change of domain all together

eg. We have always been a Knowledge Strategy community, then we opened up membership by letting lots of people contribute, and slowly it has turned into an Complex Adaptive System (CAS) community.

The original community would sometimes talk about CAS, but it was decided this wasn’t the focus. But since they opened up membership it has become the focus. The facilitator may have tried to make it clear that this sort of discussion should move to a CAS community of it’s own, but you can’t stop a waterfall. So the originals become outnumbered and reformed into a new Knowledge Strategy community elsewhere.

Or the case could be that opening up the community has not ended up in a change of topic, but merely a change of feel…you may no longer want to hangout there as you don’t feel the same camaraderie.

A quote I have in an earlier post, by Adam Fields, comes in nicely to define community membership:

“There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this - in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.”

Something I noticed on PerthNorg, a local citizen journalism site, is that “membership”, or better put, “regsitering to participate” is a one click affair. But then you have degrees or levels of membership, based on activeness eg. cadet, level 1-5 journalist, top level journalist.

Sure you can have a 100 members in your community, but you are a low key member if you are a “cadet”. Look at me I’m a “level 4 journalist”, I’m more of a member, I’m dedicated to this place.

This statement has an element of truth, but it’s not so black and white, as membership is not based on solely the criteria of “contribution”, as mentioned earlier your role as a member may be taking the minutes of meeting at the telecons (behind the scenes).

Plus that “cadet” may have made a few comments and one blog post that have created more discussion and value and than the 100 posts the level 4 journalist has under her belt.

In the end it’s about content (participation and growth), but it’s also about turning up to meetings to talk about strategies to direct, promote, and sustain the community.

Great comment, like Nancy you seem to agree that “membership” is defined differently online, as you say in a more “binary” way, which I guess doesn’t leave much to describing anything about depth. This is something PerthNorg (see above) is getting to from the aspect (which of there are many) of contributions.
Your “community thermometer” is almost the opposite perspective, in the members telling the community how they feel, which the Facilitator can use as a feedback mechanism…if I understood correctly.

I feel your view for internal communities is tight knit groups of the same wavelength, rather than a free for all (for reasons discussed above).

What’s your views on visitors (non-members) not being able to interact some valuable information to a community forum they happened across? Is there anyway to mitigate this scenario?

Had a discussion yesterday with a community leader (facilitator) who was mentioning that people who came across his community may wish to participate in forums, but first had the hurdle of requesting membership.

He instantly grants membership without batting an eyelid, and currently has over a hundred members, which isn’t too bad considering it’s a business-unit type community.

I said aren’t you picky about people you add as members, wondering how they are going to add value to the shared identity of the community.

This did not bother him, in fact he’d rather his community be open so any visitor can contribute.
He did not want to miss out on receiving valuable inter-disciplinary participation just because of permissions. A visitor passing by may contribute a gem, as much as any member, and may never come back, but we are glad they visited that one time, and are welcome again.
Unlike the web, behind the firewall all our communities have something in common, and that is that we work for the same company, so any visitor may have something relevant to say.

In this case he would not abolish membership, but instead have a smaller membership of key contributors who would help with participation to engage and sustain the community.
But, there would be no difference in permissions/access between members and visitors, the difference is that members would be there when times are tough, they are a pillar of the community.

The next thing I mentioned is that wasn’t he worried that visitors would post forum topics/replies that would pollute the community. Eg. off-topic, in the wrong forum, has been talked about in earlier topics, doesn’t blend into the wavelength of the group (this is more of an issue in small communities of ten or so people).
From what I have read in the literature communities may get polluted, as it ain’t what is used to be, the original dynamics, banter, calibre of talk, and all those elements that make it feel homely, all of a sudden feel like a city. Some important members may stop participating, and others may contribute less as they wouldn’t say things a certain way to people they don’t trust, plus they may not feel confident participating in front of hundreds of members (but this may be a non-point as anyone in the company can subscribe or visit a community without having to be a member, so there are indeed more listeners out there than people may realise).

One thing I like about this idea is that Groupthink can be challenged or broken by a visitor perhaps from another discipline.

Anyway, he acknowledges this total openness will obviously require more facilitation/moderation as visitors don’t know how things operate round here, so are more prone to do or say the wrong thing, but that’s OK, because that’s how we learn. To mitigate a little of this it’s a good idea to have a visitor welcome message with some pointers on the specifics of the community, and to please search forums before asking questions, which forums to use for which questions, etc…

He said, behind the firewall we don’t have an issue of “anonymity” as anything someone posts will have their name marked alongside it, so it would be career suicide to be a troll. In this respect, the act of “membership” has one less function to play.

I like this approach in that it doesn’t miss or prevent any opportunities and is totally a culture of welcomed sharing across all teams. But at the same time I wonder how it will effect the domain and community dynamics.
At the moment I think participation full stop, is an obstacle as people are used to closed tools like email, so I don’t think the total openness is going to be that big of a deal. If we ever get the network effects of the web, then we can see the bigger effects visitor contributions are having on the community. Anyway we are going to test this model on this community, so we will find out.

To wrap up, this community is not doing away with membership, instead they are adding another dimension, which is, visitors are free to contribute just like members.
If we were to do away with “members”, then we would really have no direction, and sustaining mechanisms.

It may help if I mention the default permissions Visitors and Members have at the moment in our communities. We do have the option of private communities for confidential stuff, but we like most of them to be open.

Visitors - visit, subscribe, leave blog comments
Members - all the above, and request to join or create a blog, post forum topics/replies

Please leave your thoughts.

[ADDED 22/01/09: Community membership reinterpreted online]

Just thought I’d round up the many places that I tweet from. It seems where ever I am, I’m conveniently one click away from a tweet.

Here’s my list

System Tray

Digsby

Another one is Twitterfox.

Mobile phone

dabr or slandr (or m.hellotext.com for meta-posting)

I’m yet to try out apps on my phone

Browser

Address bar - TwitterBar

Task bar - blogrovr

Sidebar - TwitBin (Another is Twitkit)

Links bar - TwitSnip, or bit.ly

Status bar - TwitterFox (Another is Twitter StatusBar)

RSS Reader

Google Reader Twitter script is not working for me on FF3

Feedly is an alternate interface for Google Reader, and you can share a post on Twitter with one click

GTweet - twitified “you and your friends” timeline RSS feed

Blog posts

ShareThis

Lifestream posts

Friendfeed
(or you could use Socialthing)

The tab script is not working for me on FF3

Web

Power Twitter

Thinking about TwitTangle, and PeopleBrowsr

Re-syndication

I use twitterfeed to auto-tweet my blog posts, tumblr posts and Twitxr pictures

OTHERS

Here are some other ways, that I don’t use, or yet to try out

Desktop app

Tweetdeck, Twhirl, etc..

Startpage

iGoogle, etc…

im

Don’t think this is supported at the moment, and is a bit messy.
I once used Gtalk and IMified.

sms

tweetSMS

email

Twittermail (post, replies, direct messages)

OutTwit (Outlook)

audio

Twitterfone and others

OTHERS

Toolbar - Friendbar, Twitterline, Twitter Toolbar

Handsfree - Spinvox, Jott

Bookmarklet - Tweetpkr, TwitterScope

Gmail - Gadget

Browser - Twitter Line