Community membership reinterpreted online
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.”
Nancy,
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”.
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Membership is something that is felt, rather than handed out. |
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.
Matt,
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?
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Hi John,
You’ve posted a lot about CoPs recently. I haven’t commented yet because A) you’ve discussed some many things, my comments would tend to ramble on and B) I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but am very conscious of an overall problem with the whole discussion. I think Nancy and Matt’s comments bring this to the fore.
They mention the binary nature of membership “online”. But it is not just online. The binary decision point comes from someone trying to mechanically define a community.
There are communities then there are the technologies we use to “support” communities. We often speak of these interchangeably (I know I’ve done it). So we speak of a SharePoint or a forum “community” when we actually mea a workspace of bulletinboard intended to support the community.
But more often than not what we intend to “support” we end up “controlling”. This happens either because the technology forces us to create sharp boundaries (e.g. the topic or name of one forum over another) or because management wants us to (e.g. “tell me, how many people are members of this community?”)
I could rant on about this for days (and might in my own blog) but will try to keep this short. Suffice it to say that what we call “communities” inside corporations are — at best — only an approximation of the real communities (i.e. social/professional networks) that exist. the closer that approximation is and the more the technology supports rather than gets in the way, the more effective our efforts are.
Comment by Andrew Gent — January 21, 2009 @ 3:49 pm
John - Loving your blog at the moment.
“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).”
That’s how it may have come across in the comments but that wasn’t the intention. The community themselves get to decide the boundary - which may be absolute (there’s a super secret email list with forwarding disabled) or non-existent (they do the majority of their business on a wiki without even having to register).
“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?”
So this may not be an issue (see my second example above). If the group are more secretive then you need some way of publishing & promoting non-sensitive information to the organisation (first example). In some communities I have been involved in it’s as simple as saying something like: “This is a really good discussion, who else needs to know about this?” I am a big fan of openness.
The broader point is that just as individuals have dynamic engagement levels around a topic so also cliques and circles naturally form. This is not necessarily a bad thing (it certainly can’t be prevented) but the role of a community manager is to often to mitigate this - or at least prompt open discussions about it where necessary.
The PerthNorg example you mention is really interesting. I am a little wary of explicit levels of membership - because they can lead to status games. I’m much more a fan of allowing people to self-manage thru transparency (I get see what you’ve posted and how of other people have responded before assessing whether you are a smart cookie or an idiot). In communities where roles & responsibilities are allocated so work can be done (which may be the case with PerthNorg), then there’s a much stronger case to be made for that kind of thing.
Comment by Matt Moore — January 21, 2009 @ 9:29 pm
Great Andrew. I definitely would look forward to reading a post from you on this topic. Especially when you say “But more often than not what we intend to “support” we end up “controlling”.” (both from a management and technology perspective)
Agree, I tell people our online “tools” are just enhancing what you are already doing offline or in email…they are enablers.
I guess one of my points is:
- someone who may want to be a member of an offline group, but just isn’t dedicated enough would not turn up to meetings, therefore they are not a member
- if this same group was online, it just seems easier for them to request and be defined as a member. So they would try, even though they are not dedicated…being an online member may feel like registering for something to them, no big deal.
They wouldn’t feel right turning up to offline meetings without seeming dedicated, but they don’t have this worry online (unless they had an online meeting).
In the end, I’m saying it’s easier to be an online member without having to demonstrate member characteristics, than being an offline member.
I guess this was triggered by our internal communities adding members without first letting them know what visitors can do, and what members can do, and given this do you still want to be a member. As a member has a responsibility to contribute and to perhaps attend meetings to talk about the domain and practice. (this would be ideal, but I don’t think our communities have meetings).
Ignoring this questioning could lead people to being a member of 10 or 20 communities. I don’t think it’s possible to be a “member”, in the sense of the word, to that many communities.
Or maybe I’m trying to force the concept of “member” in the offline world onto the online world. Maybe online,”member”, means something a little different, as the dynamic is different.
Another thought - offline groups meet f2f, but online groups may not, they are asynchronous, and as mentioned some online groups don’t even have synchronous meetings eg. skype
So maybe it’s not an online/offline thing, maybe it’s the lack of synchronous meetings in online communities that make it easier for people to be members, as they don’t have to be in scenarios where people ask them a question about integral community matters.
Comment by John Tropea — January 21, 2009 @ 10:57 pm
Great input Matt.
When I said:
“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?”
Just to be clear, I wasn’t referring to private communities. I was referring to a worker browsing online communities, and having a look around, and seeing that they can add a valuable reply to a forum topic they just read, but they can’t because they are not a member.
One community at work doesn’t want to miss out on these opportunities, so they are allowing visitors the same permissions to contribute as members. I guess then the difference is that a “member” would be invited to meetings about the direction of the community (kind of a steering committee).
This community (a business-unit type community, well, team I guess) doesn’t want to miss out on these opportunities, as they believe a major point of these online tools is cross-unit awareness, and further to this being able to publicly interact with each other, which won’t happen if you have to register as a member to fully participate in each community.
Our communities have a choice to make someone a “guest” role, but will that someone bother to ask to be an official guest, so they can post a forum reply. Most often if they can’t interact then and there, they won’t bother…no-one wants to wait for permissions. And perhaps they will go back to visit that community in three months time, so they won’t go to all this fuss for infrequent interactions.
Comment by John Tropea — January 21, 2009 @ 11:18 pm
Yep, working on the concept of a ‘ladder of participation’ for communities it helps to be able to firstly read content without needing to login, then once a member to easily engage by taking part in an online poll/rate a blog post. In fact be a nice way to think about metrics in these communtiy terms, rather than just posts/comments/views?
Cheers
Stuart
Comment by Stuart G Hall — January 30, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
Thx Stuart,
I’m going to keep in mind “ladder for participation” for explicit types of members.
Right now I’ve got to let communities be aware that they can open up their CoP so visitors can contribute to forums, if they like…but beware that this means more facilitation, and possible interference with their community dynamic.
For example one CoP at the moment are using a forum for continuous improvement for their team…this forum can be read by all, but you have to be a CoP member to contribute…otherwise they’d get posts by everyman and his dog.
Comment by John Tropea — February 1, 2009 @ 10:23 am