Facilitating Online Communities

Online Forums

2008-10-10T07:35:42-07:00

I'm way behind in my course blogging assignments, but am determined to catch up, one by one. The last one I missed was to locate an example of an online forum and post it here, along with 1) an assessment of identifying features you might look for in an online community and 2) what if any additional facilitation might be valuable.

There are so many great examples, it's hard to focus on just one, but my task is made a little easier by the requirement that the forum be open to the public...

One of my favorite open-to-the-public online communities is Zaadz, now the Gaia Community. When it started it got a lot of support from face to face communities like the Integral Institute and the folks at Yes! magazine. That kind of ready-made membership buy-in was of immeasurable benefit to them, and they also had great media relationships with other trendy publications like Ode who avidly promoted them.

As may already be clear from the kind of support they received right off the bat, they had a shared set of values going for them; a change-the-world, "spiritual but not religious" idealistic orientation that was very attractive to a certain audience, including me and many of my friends.

The sense of shared values or common concerns is one of the identifying features of this community, and most others I'm aware of, at least on one level. Another is the kind of generous interaction that sprang up almost immediately - the willingness to communicate with, listen to and help each other is another key trait of online communities.

Among the many other factors that led to their success, the Zaadz team were extremely efficient and effective in fostering a certain kind of facilitation - largely volunteer community efforts looking to find and weave the connective tissue among the growing membership.

There was from the beginning a lot of communication between the "staff" and the larger populace at Zaadz. The founder himself was extremely accessible and open to feedback and ideas from the group and he gathered a small management team around him that felt the same way. It was a pleasure to support these guys, and they were so good at seeding support in the community that it was soon very hard to tell who was actually staff and who wasn't.

While I am still in contact with many of the people I met through Zaddz I am much less involved with the day to day goings on there at Gaia than I was in the first few years - not because they've lost anything, but because I've gained in busy-ness. I dip in from time to time and the community spirit still seems strong and delightful. I still hear about new and exciting developments in the creative and spiritual fields there, and retain friendships with people and access to projects I want to know about.

Membership in the Gaia Community is free, and it has remained so throughout the acquisition/transition process as a result of open conversations within the community. That collective decision making process alone is testiment to Gaia's stature as an exemplary online community.

What does it mean to Facilitate?

2008-09-02T18:24:52-07:00

Before we leave this two-week module on what facilitation is and is not, I wanted to add some thoughts about different sorts of facilitation based on some of the people I work with and what I think are some interestingly evolved perspectives on the subject.

In the World Café we don't even use the word facilitation - rather, we speak of "hosts" that help create the context for generative conversations. In trusting that the "whole" holds whatever knowledge is needed, a good host gently "guides" the proceedings, largely through creating hospitable space for collective wisdom to emerge, rather than trying to manage it in any more overt ways.

The Art of Hosting offers facilitation training, using process methodologies like the World Café, OpenSpace, Appreciative Inquiry and Circle work. Their concept of facilitation is largely based on self-awareness and cultivating a "way of being" that is conducive to mutual responsibility and interactive creativity. Online conversations with this group are fascinatingly fluid - full of participation & innovation - with no one "leading", but no one holding back either.

Craig Neal of Heartland Circle offers a tele-course in the Art of Convening, and his approach to facilitation is similar to the Art of Hosting and World Café in that the training is largely focused on convening, or creating space within which transformation can occur - both internally and externally. Craig & I also work with FireHawk Hulin and PeleRouge of Resonance where the work of "facilitation" becomes even more refined. They model how to "listen" closely to energy and notice how it "moves" - inside oneself as a guide, and inside the group as a whole. The key to facilitation for them is in listening deeply to what is emerging and knowing how to respond to it moment by moment.

My immersion and collaborative participation in all these group processes has greatly influenced my own ideas on facilitation and my personal facilitation style shares many of the fundamental principles they espouse. It's a little out of date now, but here's a short overview I wrote with a few key suggestions on how to "Midwife" Online Community: Download MidwifingOnlineCommunity.pdf (100k).

All these methods either pre-suppose a populace that is self-motivated and mutually responsible, or they are designed to support the emergence of these traits. Greg Bacelon wrote a recent post to the FOC08 mailing list, posing the question "If one were to take the Internet as one on-line community, then the term Facilitating is possibly a contradiction in terms – who is the Facilitator of the internet?". The answer for the communities using these methods, like the internet itself, is of course "all of us". Everyone that participates in a conversation, who offers content or helps to build infrastructure - we all have a part in "facilitating" the collaborative phenomenon that is being born as we speak.

Wordle

2008-08-23T22:52:49-07:00

This is a Wordle image of this blog's posts ... cool, eh?
(click it to make one of your own)