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.

Cheers

Stuart

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.

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.

“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.

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.