Facilitating Online Communities

Online Forums

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.

Design & Confusion

Seth Godin posted a fabulous piece on his blog yesterday that I thought had some relevance to the vibrant chaos I observed in the first few days of orientation for this course. He says that:

"Great design is intuitive. Great design eliminates confusion. But not for everyone, not all the time. The words and interactions you use often have a sophistication that will confuse some portion of your audience.

Why not consider making it easy for the confused to ask for help? And treat them with respect when they do. If you don't create a little confusion, it's unlikely you've built something remarkable."

That seems to me to be a brilliant exposition of what happened with us. There was a lot of confusion, sure, but there was also a very clear way to express that confusion and ask for help. Whether the invitation was effective enough, and how many people were lost in the process are open questions, but for now (with 85 blogs on the class blogroll) we seem to be sailing along quite well.

Blogs vs Mailing Lists

How do we, as a group of 60+, communicate with each other? Or more importantly, how do we aggregate and keep up with all the ways we communicate with each other?

At this point we have the Edu-Wiki & Google docs, which hold more "permanent" or informational kinds of communications, and we have the Google groups list-serve and our blogs for the more interactive conversation.

There's been some great interaction on the mailing list and I'm sure there are conversations going on between blogs already, but short of reading all the feeds every day, I won't know about them and they will take longer to develop. I don't think that detracts from their value, however, either to the evolution of the group as a whole or to each of us as individuals.

I do find the mailing list is where the "juice" is for me right now, and that's where I am getting the sense of who people are. One thing that's a bit frustrating is that we can't tag or link to list conversation in our blogs, so there's a bit of a gap. Also, just using subject lines as the thread organization is a bit hit-or-miss. I would actually find a forum better suited to this part of the conversation, so we could aggregate and find information more readily.

But I'm finding the whole flow fascinating, and intrigued to see how it all evolves!