Online Community Roundtable Notes: People and Rocks
Brian Hsi posted notes on an Online Community Roundtable hosted by Forum One at Microsoft. Nancy White has also posted comprehensive notes. A couple of highlights from Nancy’s notes:
- What about seeding it to be the way you want it to be? Create a space that encourages the kind of people you want. Cancer Survivor’s network was totally open. They totally please themselves. They come in and do things and before organization responded the community were on the people.
- What kinds of grouping do your tools to support. Forums provide groups of certain sizes to interact. Incentive structures to engage groups of what size? 3 is different than 300 or 3000. Those rules are built into your system that govern behavior and interaction. They are represented by the way the product works.
- What will users actually do? A hard question. One of the hardest ways, clearest dead ends is asking them. Lots of evidence in cognitive psych, if you ask what they want, what will make them happy = they can’t tell you. No better than tossing a coin if they are actually satisfied with what results. Weird wrinkle to that. If you come after the fact, they will often say they are happy. Often don’t know what is possible so can’t ask for it. Behavior based inferences are better than verbal inferences. By giving choices, and don’t let them talk about it, watch what people choose and infer their value systems.
- Don’t chase too many features. Don’t chase tech early adopters. Organizational, professional reluctance to get within anything with social networking.
- Basic community building – Saul Alinsky talked about trying to organize an neighborhood to get a stop sign. Community did not get visibility. They picked a big boulder and dropped it right there. That shock, that notion got the people trying to organize engaged. Gave them a sense of a small win. That was a catalyst for subsequent action. Rules for Radicals. Example of community organizing. They looked at their own meager resources. People and rocks. One of the principles in Made to Stick. What capacity do they have and how do you tap into that?
