More thoughts on community structure and creation
Some more thoughts about community structure and bottom-up creation, see past posts The participation issue from community ownership and structure, The community paradox, and The top-down and bottom-up creation of enterprise communities, and wikis.
The easiest communities for us are the cross interest or special interest communities like the “bicycle users group” or “bulk materials handling” as the people who approach us are the one’s that are passionate about the topic.
Whereas, existing organisational teams wanting to form a community are a bit harder as the team already has a structure and dynamic, instead of it being born in the community.
They like having order and one community being the definitive hub for a topic, but the problem is that this community is too big, and people don’t always feel comfortable participating in such a big circle.
Smaller communities are better as people trust their peers and feel confident to participate, plus they have a similar shared context, so community activity is to your calibre…soon it becomes your favourite coffee shop to hang out and talk with your favourites friends about your favourite topic.
If I have to merge my community or open it up to a 100 people, then my coffee shop loses it’s intimate character, my favourite topic may become diluted, and all these people, even if I warm to some, cannot all be my favourite friends. Secondly they won’t all share my dynamic and context, humour, and all the idiosyncrasies that made the original community warm.
So the originals end up trying to find a booth in this loud coffee house, until they find a new coffee house.
If I was in a large room I would be more hesitant to share, but if I was in a small room with my direct circle of peers I would have no problem sharing, in fact I would go off on diatribes. This is why people like email because you are confident to have thriving discussions with people you trust (but it’s a silo and not designed well for this purpose)
Two approaches to structuring organisational communities
NOTE: I’m not referring to the original “communities of practice” concept of people with like interests clustering together in a group, instead I’m referring to existing teams that want to use a community space.
1. Usually the lead wants to build a community for their people (a one stop shop of conversations and documents for their business unit). So we build a community for hundreds of people, and structure it by region or topic or sub-teams etc..
Now this is OK for essential communications, but for blogging and discussing know-how it’s not as smooth, as people are shy and confident to participate in front of hundreds of people, even if it is their business unit.
The idea is to create forums for people in the community, and if we see clusters of people swarming around a forum, then this may warrant to be a community in its own right.
The only issue is the forum will be buried in a community, and the homepage of the community may only be 50% immediately relevant to a given cluster of people.
There is also the chance that some people participating in your forum may slow it down, or steer the topic the wrong way…this wouldn’t happen if it was your own community, as you would be in charge of membership.
So, we like the idea of a general test bed community, and see what percolates into potential new communities, but we want to make sure the nature of this test bed doesn’t hinder participation from the start.
Eg. if one of the same forums was in it’s own community, would there be more participation
2. Another idea, much to the chagrin of the lead, is to have many communities, as now there will be more places to visit to find information, but that’s OK because we can perhaps aggregate or be able to batch communities together and search multiple communities in one go.
The gist here is having a global community for essential communications and questions, but to let people in the team create their own communities, and see what coalesces.
I’d like to see an experiment where you could compare this self organisation (bottom-up) approach to a planned (top-down) approach.
Anyway…
Ethos or not, if your tool is not a simple design people may create, but not use, and as a result you will get a huge support load. It’s a good idea offering 2 or 3 one page quick reference guides, but other than that people just couldn’t be bothered reading. They are used to Facebook where the design is so intuitive you don’t need a help guide, or if you do, there are pointers on the page for information or even help.
If the software is really well designed you don’t need a manual, and therefore you can go with a bottom-up approach where people can create communities.
The top-down model does not allow for any emergence whatsoever, it also clashes with a knowledge sharing and conversation model (people are more likely to participate in a trust circle, and the more shared context, the more chance you have of properly transferring knowledge). If you get overlapping communities it doesn’t really matter, because if you were to merge them into one you will see participation drop.
The messiness can evolve naturally into something we could never pre-define.
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It’s not about the topic of the community, it’s about the people. |
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I think if people with like interests can find each other, then similar communities can also find each other. |
NOTE: This post has not mentioned adoption and participation points of facilitation. Even if you do everything right, participation may still be lower than you would like. This is when the community leader needs to use techniques such as getting some regular bloggers, and sitting down with them and helping them post, for a month or so, till they gain traction.
If people still use email, the lead must discipline them into using a blog or forum (people are just used to routines, or fear new tools).
And lots more…
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
Hi John,
I’m loving the post series, but there’s such a number of topics touched that it’s hard to comment
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Just two loose shots:
- When users register without managerial approval, they’re self-selecting themselves. They’re proving they’re interested enough and have enough to say (or believe so) to make the effort, and also that they like the environment enough to bother. Usually, they will be more qualified to know all that than any manager.
- Yes you can fight a waterfall
, keeping a community on-topic. You just need to make it easy enough to divert offtopics somewhere else that’s out of the way and still fun for the writers. In other words, if you get a clique bent on debating an off-topic until they threaten to change the focus of the community… open another forum and mass-move those threads. Done with. Now you have your community and they have their own playground, complete with background.
And an opinion. You can’t keep the community small and cozy like a corner pub forever… but you can build a very attractive beergarden, full of specialised nooks but sharing where it is useful (i.e. it makes no sense to subdivide conversations about a process into several forums). You can deaden things a bit by growing too much, but you can much more easily kill off a community if no-one can find the relevant conversations and their context easily. Better big and orderly than fragmented. IMHO
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And finally a political incorrectness. I don’t believe in users creating subcommunities on a whim (”bottom-up”). It makes for loads of dross, content fragmentation and empty forums. It needs to be user-initiated, but it needs to be sensibly assessed before it gets implemented.
Best regards,
Miguel
Comment by Miguel — January 27, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
Hey Miguel,
Thx for your comment
You say “When users register without managerial approval, they’re self-selecting themselves.”
To clear up our current scenario…
Anyone can roam around our communities as they are all open and they can choose to subscribe. They can also leave blog comments, but they cannot contribute to forums or have a blog unless they are members.
They are free to request membership, it’s up to the facilitator to accept their request.
On my other post (which you have commented), my query was should we open it up so you don’t even have to request membership. Which means anyone can roam around and contribute to the forums in any community.
And whether this affects the dynamic of the existing community.
And if membership loses it’s meaning?
You say “if you get a clique bent on debating an off-topic until they threaten to change the focus of the community… open another forum and mass-move those threads”
I agree, it’s great how a forum can splinter into a new community.
But if a batch of new people need a forum, I happy for them to start their own community rather than trying to find an existing community for them to be absorbed in.
Their forum may be buried in an existing community, and the community name doesn’t reflect their forum. In other words they want their own house to hang out in, rather than renting a room.
Sometimes when searching our community directory I would not have known to look in that community to find a forum on a specific topic, as the name of the community is different to the nature of that forum. Findability becomes a disadvantage when you are piggybacking on an existing community.
You say “You can’t keep the community small and cozy like a corner pub forever… but you can build a very attractive beergarden, full of specialised nooks but sharing where it is useful”
This is true, a community can self organise into little spaces, until they may want their own community, as the homepage starts becoming 40% relevant to them. Whereas in their own community the homepage would be 100% relevant.
You say “Better big and orderly than fragmented”
This depends, if it’s too big you may not get the participation you want, due to people naturally feeling more comfortable to contribute in tight groups. In this case better having multiple communities with high participation, over one with low participation.
Again, it’s cultivating a landscape for people, not for a topic.
You say “I don’t believe in users creating subcommunities on a whim (”bottom-up”). It makes for loads of dross, content fragmentation and empty forums. It needs to be user-initiated, but it needs to be sensibly assessed before it gets implemented.”
I see your point. Our communities are more like portals/websites with blogs and forums. But if they were like FaceBook groups, then I think we would have bottom-up creation (as these seem more liteweight and intuitively designed)
Comment by John Tropea — January 29, 2009 @ 8:46 am