Bill Johnston poses an interesting OCTribe question — what is the monetary value to online community member participation and contribution? As we evolve metrics for member participation (watching participants rate, moderate, guide discussions, answer & Inspire, welcoming new members, etc.) it beomes natural to assign value to member contributions (As Bill suggest, “support forum posts, tutorials, reviews, feedback and ideas” etc.).

He speculates that if an organization were to make the valuations of member participation and contribution public, “it may set off a firestorm of debate about member compensation, legal boundaries around “volunteer opportunities”, and ultimately, forcing the host organization to account for true cost and true value of the activities and content created in their online community,” citing the famous  AOL volunteer moderator lawsuit and the estimates of the value of structured, assigned moderating of chat rooms.

His big question: “What is the arbitrage between social and financial capital?” I don’t have an answer, but I do have a further question. Even if all of the rewards are experiential, and nothing looks like compensation, could an organized community that knows about metrics and valuation of a business do a “behavior stoppage” of desired activities as protest against a company action? Valuing behavior like work could extend the work metaphor in directions beyond the company’s valuation. “Interesting” organized group dynamics are possible too.

This is a replay to his Online Community Tribe discussion topic call… a loose association of blog posts for the 2nd and 4th Tuesday. See Bill’s blog for links to other Online Community practitioner’s thoughts on this issue.

Note: This post is part of the OC Tribe series. Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, online community practitioners will be encouraged to explore a particular topic via blog, video blog, twitter, or whatever suites your fancy. The recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This ad-hoc group (movement?) is just starting up, so please join in! #octribe

Standing out in the crowd, from my Flickrstream.

Posts on Online Community Tribe “writing assignment,” for Tuesday, July 14, the second Tuesday this month. Focus on Influence.

Will add in any article or post that is requested to be part of today’s set.  (Just post your link here, tag #octribe or tweet @wellgail)

The initial question:

What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”?

(Define community any way you please — a group of peers, customers, people with similar interests, people using a communications platform, etc. Define “do for” as you wish — support, create a tool, inspire, learn more about, etc.)  Added angles to explore:  Who in your communities is an influencer of others?  As a facilitator, moderator or community manager, how do you work with the most influential people in your network? As a designer, how would you accommodate the opinion leaders? Got three top tips for rewarding these valued members of a group?

The round up so far, on this initial topic:

Bill Johnston recaps valuable research from the Online Research Network on the state of  Community Influencer Programs with useful real-world examples.

Gam Dias writes about Influencers – and defining yours.!

Me with a recap of  the rise and fall of the Influencer concept, and the value of seeing this in the context of attention.

This post is part of the OC Tribe series. Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, online community practitioners will be encouraged to explore a particular topic via blog, video blog, twitter, or whatever suites your fancy. The recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This ad-hoc group (movement?) is just starting up, so please join in!

Next host will be Bill Johnston for July 28…  See his link  above.  He’ll base the next assignment  on ideas from this article from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0219/060s02.html

3 five year olds, originally posted to my Flickr photostream.

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About a year and a half ago, “The Tipping Point” got toppled (or at least wobbled) when Duncan Watts challenged the popular concept of powerful Influencers who determine the adoption of trends.

The commentary in response to this heresy was great — one of my favorite exchanges was where a member of a well-known formal influencer program — a Microsoft MVP — replies to Sean O’Driscol, long time leader of that program at Microsoft. I loved this comment in the replies to Sean’s post: “Maybe it’s down to being British but I don’t like being labelled as an influentials/mavens/advocates. Expert isn’t so bad … and Enthusiast is pretty much how I feel about myself… As soon as the 10% is highlighted in some way you have two dangers; 1) their standing as independent in the community is affected … and 2) the way they are treated by the “products” they are enthusiastic about changes.”

I’ve seen this before, in years past at The WELL: “I’m doing this here for free because I want to participate – don’t patronize me.”

Yet anybody who works in online community knows some people do add tremendous value. We know it intuitively, and we have seen it mapped statistically. (Check out slide number 13 in this sequence for an example where Marc Smith’s math identifies desired behavior by individuals in a peer technical help group.)

Now that we are in the year that everybody knows about Twitter, one of the simplest tools mass numbers of people have been able to play with, we seem to be back to a world where we want to count our importance by tallying up a group who are artfully labeled “followers.”

People are putting a good deal of effort into deciding how to count … for example, carefully comparing influential science-content twitter feeds … and into deciding how to display the counts and secondary calculations as a business venture… here’s another one, called “Twinfluence”.

Most of these counts seem to still be thinking in broadcast mode. From years in an online community where actual human influence is much more complex and much less linear, this looks simultaneously like going backwards and like picking up the thread of wanting to see how continuity, attention, context and meaning are developed in a group. One thing that I wonder about in the attempts to quantify Twitter impact is the dilution created by a follower who has your twitter feed mixed into a mighty stream of hundreds followed, versus one who follows a dozen carefully chosen twitter feeds.  I guess I always come back to the power of familiarity and context.

What can we give to those who are providing community connective tissue? I wish we could give ever-improving tools, though in my work we can’t move as swiftly as we’d like to. I wish we could pay a living wage for being part of a community and being fabulous, but that dedication has to be its own reward. It’s neither appropriate or desirable to give money or significant barter items because of tax and labor laws, as AOL learned back in the last century, and as gift economy research has shown. Realistically, in my world, working at Salon.com and specifically with Table Talk and The WELL, the one gift I can give is the genuinely valuable gift of human attention, and of being present. It doesn’t scale very well, though. There’s no simple solution for giving people the attention they deserve. There are times when a nice form thank you letter is appropriate, so long as the mass communication doesn’t have any whiff of spam or propaganda about it. (After all, moden citizens understand that a press conference is all one can realistically expect from a busy government official, for example.) As a rule of thumb the attention has to be unplanned, human and authentic, within the community or privately one to one. But in these online social contexts, at least some of the time, the information we get back when giving that respectful attention has a more profound value than in any other environment.

After all, we do say it’s conversation.

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Round-up of OCTribe posts on this topic.

Who are the “stars” in your communities, the ones others watch and trust?

Online Community tribe:  Who in your communities is an influencer of others?  As a facilitator, moderator or community manager, how do you work with the most influential people in your network? As a designer, how would you accommodate the opinion leaders? Got three top tips for rewarding these valued members of a group?

Write something tomorrow,  tag it octribe or tweet it as #octribe, and be linked from the recap page.  Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, the call and the recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This conversational project is just starting, so please join in. More about this tomorrow, July 14th!

Several weeks ago I met with Bill Johnston, Randy Farmer and Kaliya Hamlin in preparation forlast week’s  Online Community Unconference, dubbed #ocu2009 this time around. I have loved the series of gatherings convened by Forum One, (and their powerful and practical affilated group, the Online Community Research Network), and for me they have always been a loose circle of respected social tools designers, subversive online community trend-steerers, researchers, and other online community specialists and practitioners.

Randy posed the big questions. He used the term “tribe” in the sense Seth Godin uses it. Are we — the people who attend and follow those events — a tribe? If so, do we exist outside of those structures? What do we need for our community of people who tend to the many needs of online communities?

It was a juicy idea. People have been trying to figure out the format for loose connections among “the community sector” for some time, and we are getting to where that makes some logical sense to take action. On the other hand, people have tried to create gathering places before. We mentioned some interesting groups like Social Media Club, Community Roundtable (an East Coast originated initiative unrelated to Bill Johnston’s similarlly named events), Bill Johnston’s invitational Online Community Roundtable meetups, and other groups that have formed around people such as Nancy White and Jerry Michalski who are part of the loose Online Community Unconference orbit. Was there something that we could do that built upon the Forum One events and their research projects, but expanded it and made a non-centralized continuing focus?

Problem was, Randy couldn’t attend the Unconference. I offered to pose the question, however, and to get a co-convener for that session. Scott Moore was the one I had in mind, and I spoke to him the evening before.

Scott suggested that perhaps the umbrella is already being created as the peer network called the Community Roundtable. They have a gorgeous peer support site and are as close to a Professional Organization as we have so far.

Still, there is room for other levels of organizational complexity or lack thereof, something that does not compete with membership organizations but might extend beyond them.

The proposal I floated was for a monthly call to blog, write an essay, make a video, or otherwise do something in longer form than a tweetup. Free and expand upon some of the rich material that comes from these events. Surface themes and concerns. Take the opportunity to be considered and thoughtful.

These kinds of calls for commentary have been called “circus” or “carnival” calls for content on a theme before. There are various centralized approaches to them. Here’s an account of making that model work.

If somebody wants to play with that I’d enjoy hearing about it. But I have something more lightweight in mind, if we can make it fly. There are two parts.

First, let’s use #octribe as a tag for short and one-off communiques. Wherever we want to use it. You are invited. If this, or something like it, comes into being we have a way to be an open movement that can encompass other organizations and events that are of interest to our broader tribe.

Second, I want to propose an Online Community Tribal “open invitational.” The name is to be imagined.  The action is a second Tuesday call to write something on a theme, in a monthly exchange of blog or forum posts, wiki articles, white papers, slide shows or other longer-form contemplations on issues and opportunities in the online community sector (hey, I like “tribe” more and more!)

Here is an extension of one of the questions that was posed at one session I attended at OCU2009, and a them for the first OCTribe monthly post:

What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”? (Define community any way you please — a group of peers, customers, people with similar interests, people using a communications platform, etc. Define “do for” as you wish — support, create a tool, inspire, learn more about, etc.) Why top three instead of top ten? so we can talk about each in a little more depth. What if I can’t think of three? Write about one, or two.

Deadline: The idea here is to have time to reflect and get something that is longer and richer than a tweet, and to read similar and contrasting ideas. Once a month is a good pace, and it’s easiest to choose the Nth weekday of some sort. Provisionally I’d like to call Second Tuesday for this, but all of this is open to evolutionary forces. For July and August, let’s set July 14 and August 10. Posts, articles, etc are to go up on that calendar day where you are. [Upon edit: since changed to be second AND fourth Tuesdays, to better keep momentum!]

Can this be done without a centralized index? I know it can.  There is a model in the craft brewing community called “The Session”. Here are a few pages that show The Session in action:

Announcing a session about holiday beers.

The round-up when all the session posts go up about a month later

That community of craft beer connoisseur bloggers is a passionate niche community, and they are able to self-organize. Somebody eventually compiled an index, but the structure is loose, and the community does not submit through a form. The participants casually and effortlessly aggregate their thoughts.

So, two items, in review: if you want to play in the tag game, just use #octribe for as an umbrella tag for our community.  You can also pair it with a conference or meeting hash tag once or twice, to clue people in that you are at a conference that is related to the interests of this tribe.

If you want to participate in the longer form on the 2nd/4th Tuesday, the first question for you to explore is What are the top three things you do or wish you could do for your community “influencers”?

On the 2nd Tuesday, come back to the initiating page, here, and post your link to your piece in the comments.  Then on the following day I will get to do a roundup post commenting on all the linked pieces. That post would include the link to the next call to action, for the next set of posts, on the site of another member of the tribe.  (Feel free to volunteer and select a month to host, right here in the comments notes.)  Let’s see what the Online Community tribe can inspire in one another.

(A loose-knit beer community gets together at events like The Bistro’s Double IPA Festival 08, picture originally uploaded by me on flickr as fotogail.)

Dots connecting, worlds colliding

I’ve always been fond of walls, doors and other useful boundaries for conversation. It’s nice to have the ability to make subgroups of the populace, and to stay more or less on a topic as you choose.

That limitation pays off when it gives you some idea of who else is “in the room,” for context and shared vocabulary. Last year at the Online Community Unconference I was discussing Twitter with some social networking geeks and gurus who asked me why I was not using the now-famous microblogging site more. I said, “I recently took an exam to become a beer judge, and I want to talk with my new expert brewing and beer-tasting friends about things like flavors in relation to strains of yeast. I don’t want to drop that kind of geeky obscurity into the stream for my pals from The WELL community, for my professional colleagues like you guys, for people I care about who don’t drink or for my obsessed photography geek buddies with their own specialized lingo.”

Sadly, there’s not a ton of general interest in the strains of Bretanomyces and other “wild” yeasts except on a beer networking site, nor about how to reduce visual “noise” in long digital exposures except for places photographers hang out, such as the Photo conference within The WELL or in groups and photostreams on Flickr. These are not communication-technology preferences, they are context preferences, to reduce the chance of boring or annoying anybody.

Frankly, I think older pre-web social software did some of these things better than Twitter and Facebook do now, and that some of the best ideas and mashups to come will look familiar to some online pioneers.

However, today I am connecting a lot of the dots and tossing them into the mixed-metaphor stream. Hopefully happy chaos!

I met Brian Yeager, an enthusiastic craft-beer blogger and author of Red, White and Brew, at least a few times before and during the delightfully ad hoc and vibrant beer-community-driven SF Beer Week 2009. That week he did a reading for my pals in the Mad Zymurgists homebrew club, who I’ve collaborated with in producing beer tasting and evaluation events.

One of the things that we do at The WELL, the classic old-skool online community where I’ve worked for seventeen years now, is two-week author “interview” conversations that (unlike most of the site) can be read by anybody. These leisurely asynchronous talks feature authors who are active WELL members, as well as some invited by community members. I seldom suggest authors to the team of hosts who put the events together, but hearing good things about Red, White and Brew, I decided this could be a good time to mix channels!

So Brian started his Inkwell conversation today! His book is wonderfully readable, about brewers and brewing families in the midst of this gentle and delicious revolution, and it is an interesting picture of America whether or not the beer renaissance matters to you at all.  The permanent archive will live here:   Brian Yaeger’s Red-White-and-Brew discussion, on The WELL

Reminders are sprinkled around The WELL, I’m tweeting and facebooking, posting at Open Salon, etc.   So I am repeating myself in the eyes of anybody who actually reads a lot of my stuff.  That can’t be good.  There are real complexities of mixing too many of your specific interests in general feeds or contexts. I’ll give this a try during May 2009, and see if it is a better approach.  If not, I’ll move (most) all of the beer conversation back to BeerbyBART.com again. (Be sure to tell me if I bore you to tears — don’t just forget me!)

a sonoma evening photo from another year, originally uploaded by fotogail.

Four years ago I photographed these waves of birds at OCS 2004… and now I’m back for 2008. The morning session is non-profits and social software for good… currently Joshua Gay of the Free Software Foundation and Lisa Petrides of ISKME are leading a discussion about education and open source.

In 2004 we had a powerful IRC backchannel discussion. Powerfully distracting too! At the last few Forum One events I’ve attended there has been a shift to Twitter. So I’ll be delving back into twitterworld.

My gripe about twitter is that it does not support groups and subgroups within my stream.

So this will be odd. My Online Community pro pals talking platforms and social strategies, my craft beer pals at GABF talking beer competition, my photo pals talking lenses and curves and printing papers, political pals talking local and national election, oh, and my own YouTube political satire collaboration… all the different conversations ridiculously poured into one. Here goes, back into the narrows:

http://twitter.com/fotogail

The best get-togethers for online community professionals are hosted by Forum One. Their sold-out summer 2008 Online Community Unconference was just held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This year the demand was huge, and the percentage of participants from major institutions was up, too. I didn’t present at this one. I wanted to soak it all in.  I dropped in on some great sessions and sorely wished I ‘d gotten around to others, such as Jake McKee’s sections.

I’m interested in best practices, all kinds of group behavior and tool-design patterns and also in pitfalls and worst case scenarios. I jumped in to session on what happens when things go terribly wrong from Heather Champ of Flickr and Derek Powazek of the edgy and elegant magazine, Fray. The discussion led to a list of things to remember in the midst of conflict. The items on this big list vary in applicability, based on the culture of a community … and can that ever be different!

My suggestion for the list was to try to let all parties have a way to save face in a dispute. This is one of the ways to do what Derek had advised: avoid creating motivated super-villains. Or noble martyrs, as they may feel if they do not think they were very villainous. I think that in most cases respect and the ritual conveyance of respect through good manners are key in resolving these matters. Even if expulsion is the resolution, there are advantages to having the exiled member accept that they won’t continue to have access to the gathering place for the group. While being all casual with peers works just fine in the good times, courtesy becomes bizarrely important when relations are stressed. That’s just one reminder I sometimes need!

I wouldn’t even begin to define the term “community” for this crowd, by the way. The ambiguity was probably all for the best. Some were thinking of a loosely interconnected group that may use an assortment of tools and modes of communication (including good old face to face talking) to stay in touch and identified. Others were thinking of the audience and interactive users of a particular site. Some were thinking of a larger “target audience” sense of people out there in the world who should be aware of one another. Listening to the use of the term from one person to the next was very interesting for that reason. Randy Farmer made the point that this group of people interested in these issues is now blossoming into something more than a clique who all know one another, into an extended community itself.

Randy Farmer is an opinionated, empassioned, seasoned online community pro,. His experience goes back to the founding of Habitat, the first graphical virtual community. The news: He left Yahoo earlier this spring and is working on a book about design choices in interactive multiuser contexts. His talk on context and tool/features patterns is shaping up too. Catch it if you can, both to learn and to give feedback that can make such a book more useful to us all when completed.

Mashups for the greater good. Net Squared, year three: Nonprofit web innovators congregate.

Last month I was honored honored to be able to convene a Net Squared session on how to do community building using Flickr. My interest is in how people can build community and passion for their cause using the photo sharing site with or without integrating Flickr image feeds into an external site. The smart people in the room during the Flickr session had plenty of interesting challenges, questions and suggestions. It was fun and totally impressive.

To recap my own primary simple suggestion: If you want to get quality attention to your images (for their subject matter or their artistry or out of loyalty) try to give quality attention to other relevant image makers within Flickr. If you don’t you can stiil use the powerful toolset as an image (and short video) presentation platform, but you miss out on the even more amazing community-building aspects of Flickr, which is designed to be one of the great online social settings.

Net Squared is a project of the long-running CompuMentor organization, which originally got me online in 1990 when I was doing community outreach and donor relations work for a non-profit theater company that needed database help. CompuMentor got me a volunteer consultant who gave me a modem to make assisting me easier, and an email address back in that pre-web, all-dialup era. I became fascinated with the richness of the culture of The WELL which led me into a new world as well as a new career. They are responsible for Net Squared and Tech Soup, an ongoing support system thousands of non-profit organizations turn to for advice, free or inexpensive software and networking.

Check out the amazing projects — not just the winners of the grant prizes, but the whole array of finalists.

Watch for next year’s mashup challenge — the entries are getting better and better: http://www.netsquared.org/

I’m writing up my notes incredibly late for this event, primarily because I ended up with a free evening and some thoughts on the gathering. One thing that is obvious after going to multiple events organized by Forum One is the nature of the ongoing community around these small conferences. Any successful run of conferences tends to create a community of regulars, and in this case they are regulars who know and care about how online community works. I’ve been fortunate to be on quite a run of attending Forum one events. The chicken and the egg of course is that I really enjoy the people who come back, as well as the new voices and thinkers who turn up.

I had thought I might be out of town this summer for another in the series, but last minute changes made it possible to sign up for the next one, the Online Community Unconference, next week. Last year’s unconf was terrific, and I can’t wait for this one. An unconference has the advantage of being almost utterly flexible, allowing all kinds of formats. Visionary presentations given to a handful or a crowd of other event-goers. Open round-robin discussions or brainstorms of any size addressing specific issues. Little breakout conversations that are the conference, and that others may wander into. An unconference will not be terribly interesting if there is not a lot of experience, enthusiasm and intelligence in the room at the start, and that’s why the community that has formed around all the Forum One conferences (including the more formal and the informal unconferences) leads to such satisfying events. It’s all about all the interesting and interested people there.  So what did we talk about?

There was a lot to enjoy at OCBF Santa Fe, aside from the gorgeous exotic desert quality of the place itself:

The presentations were full of fascinating examples of the commerce side of providing homes to people to play, learn and otherwise congregate. Here, for a flavor, is one slide about virtual gifts:

Scott Moore and I co-led a session that started by asking for problems from community practitioners, then called for various answers from the group. This was the kind of session that could continue for hours, and the knowledge and questions in the room were truly remarkable. Do I have good notes of what came up? No, but I was soaking it all in. And it’s just what I’m looking forward to at the Unconference. If you’ll be there let me know.