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.

Kinds of Online Community

I came across this cool image, which gives one answer to the question of what makes an online community:

(photo from Jeff McNeill's Flickr photostream via his Creative Commons licensing agreement)

What is Community?

Leigh Blackall wrote on the FoC Mailing List:

"If we were to go back to a traditional understanding of community and ignore for a moment what Wenger has brought to the word (i.e. "Community of Practice"), how might we think of an online community differently? Would it be different if we had children and teenagers in the community for example? In this sense, how many of us have really been a part of an online community? "

I'm not sure that having an age range makes sense to me as criteria for defining community, but I do agree the term is used far too loosely these days - sometimes in ways that feel strange, even false, to me.

I went to an online community "unconference" last year and was stunned to see a bunch of new hires from big companies who wanted to learn about setting up what are essentially online Q&A forums, but they were calling them "communities". It's not that I don't believe it's possible for a community to form out of a group like that, but it's far from a given, and it seems like a shallow public relations ploy to define them that way right off the bat.

I found it was relatively rare to find folks at that conference whose interests matched my own more personal experience of community as a group of people defined by mutual sharing, participation, and care-giving or fellowship.

From my youth in the communal back-to-the-land movement to the online communities that make up such an important part of my personal and professional life now,  I have had the privilege of being part of several, so my answer to Leigh's question is a wholehearted "yes, I have". I personally find the basic definition of community applicable whether the community is convened online or off, but I'll use one or two current online experiences as examples, since that what we're talking about.

The first is Brainstorms, founded by virtual community pioneer Howard Rheingold. I'd been a sporadic but ongoing part of one or two ongoing areas of online discussion there, called "conferences" by Brainstormers, for a couple of years and was continually amazed by the collective knowledge and generosity I found there. There was an incredible willingness to help even noobies find their footing and (in my chosen conference, "life online") respond to all sorts of issues ranging from which digital camera to buy, what happens when blogging exposes you to problems at work, to finding companionship for exploring what's most worthwhile in Second Life.

It was clear there were some behavioral norms among the group and many who were stepping up in leadership roles. I contributed to the conversation and felt I was part of something very cool... It was all very enjoyable, but to be honest I didn't know the half of it! 

One day about a year or so ago, I noticed an announcement inviting everyone to one of the community's regular get-togethers in the bay area. Curious, I joined in the wiki correspondence and signed up for some of the planned activities.  I was looking forward to meeting people I'd been speaking to online and connecting with new people, but I was completely blown away by how powerful the experience of community was right from the beginning. I spent a solid week with people I had never met before - most of them I'd never even spoken to online. We met in each others homes and in public places; hiking, walking, sight-seeing, eating out, eating in, cooking, buying books, drinking coffee, reading our poems for the annual bad poetry contest, and talking talking talking. By the end of the week I not only knew firsthand what a thriving community Brainstorms really is, but I was part of it in a whole new way.

The next example is BlogHer, a community of women bloggers started a few years ago to "find out where the women bloggers are". There is distributed leadership in this group as well, and the inexpensive annual conferences are supported by a great number of people, who also contribute to a year-round online conversational forum .

Many of the conference presentations are chosen by the group, and in some cases even the contents of a session will have been blogged and options proposed and commented upon before they're offered.

This is a group of women who know each other and care for one other in many ways; its collaborative impulse goes beyond that of an association, and the active mutual support extends long after the conferences are over. Several mailing lists are always spawned after a conference - I'm on one for Girl Geeks that started after the 2006 event and is still ongoing. After a call for women speakers at various other events repeatedly went unanswered, some of us on the list shared our anxiety about public speaking. So after ascertaining it would be helpful, one of the more experienced women in the group offered to bring her public speaking coach out to California for a group training.

After this year's event a number of women who blog about art and beauty and take a consciously positive approach to life decided to go deeper together and link to each other's blogs, engage in cross-blog conversation, and participate in each other's projects. Friendships are being born right in front of our eyes, and while they're specific and personal, they're also held within the context of the larger group.

I know everyone doesn't use the same definition I do for what constitutes community, and even within groups that I consider communities there is no universal agreement. For example, there is one man in the online group mailing list I referenced in my last post that's been together for over 13 years now who constantly pushes back against the idea of it being a community. He just doesn't find the kind of "commonality" or intent towards "communion" there that would characterize a community in his eyes. He's always been uncomfortable with the presence of "lurkers", and doesn't understand how there can be community when everyone does not participate.

He has never come to any of the infrequent but fabulous in-person gatherings we've held over the years, and I can't help but wonder if that is significant in his sense of lack within the group. The in-person component has been a part of each of my examples in this post ... and face-to-face interaction of some kind is certainly something I would recommend if you want to bond a community, but I don't think that's absolutely necessary.  Beyond the characteristics I mentioned at the start of this piece, I've found that other defining elements of community are the impulse to care for one another, and the sense of shared leadership or responsibility towards the group that constitutes some level of commitment.

But enough about me - what makes a group of people a community in YOUR eyes?

A Personal History of Online Community

My first online community experience was the result of isolation- both geographic and ideological. It was 1995 and I was living in England, a US ex-pat artist & writer, partnering with a British scientist in a non-profit environmental education NGO.

My hippie ideas weren't always going over so well in Blighty, a fact that came squarely home with a funder's offhand comment about an article I'd carefully researched and written on ecopsychology for our newsletter; "You're not in California anymore, you know!" So I reached out and brought "California" home to me - via an international group exploring the nascent field of ecopsychology through a mailing list. That group is still active today, 13 years later. Now we have, in addition to rich conversation among peers, a website, collaborative blog, online journal and a directory of research practitioners - all without funding or any external support beyond the University of Leed's hosting of the mailing list.

Today I am part of more online communities than I can count. Well that's a slight exaggeration, but I'm active on a lot of them and they are vital elements in my personal support system, my professional development and capacity for learning, my intellectual obsessions, creative inspirations and almost spiritual yearning for collectivity and shared consciousness. In other words, they're an integral part of my life, and I am very grateful to have access to the abundance of resources they offer.

Communities of Practice

My friend Nancy White made her debut as a "guest blogger" on Darren Sidnick's blog with this  post on Communities of Practice (note the excellent list of resources at the bottom).

In it she quotes a definition by her colleague Etienne Wegner, who coined the term:

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."

Like most everyone, I'm part of several "Community of Practices"; some that primarily or exclusively congregate online, some that are primarily face-to-face, and several that flow easily between mediums. I find most of them extremely valuable, and each one is unique, with its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

In some cases those strengths and weaknesses refer to the medium in which I experience them, but more often the benefits and drawbacks are to do with limiting factors like time availability, or interpersonal conflicts, differing models of relationship, or lack of some sort of necessary support.

I'm intrigued by the idea that many organizations want to have what they call Communities of Practice, but they don't know how to negotiate the fact that to a large extent communities of practice can't be created, they can only be encouraged and nurtured as they are developing. Too much structure or expectation is a "buzz killer" and can squelch a community of practice before it ever gets going.

One of the things I found most interesting in Etienne Wenger's article (which was part of this week's course reading) was his list of the largely internal leadership roles that he's found to be foundational in building & sustaining communities of practice:

• The inspirational leadership provided by thought leaders and recognized experts
• The day-to-day leadership provided by those who organize activities
• The classificatory leadership provided by those who collect and organize information in order to document practices
• The interpersonal leadership provided by those who weave the community's social fabric
• The boundary leadership provided by those who connect the community to other communities
• The institutional leadership provided by those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies, in particular the official hierarchy
• The cutting-edge leadership provided by those who shepherd "out-of-the-box" initiatives.

This distributed authority offers a new model of leadership that creates an altogether different fabric of relationship within a group. When almost everyone has some way of positively influencing and contributing to the experience of the whole, the "practice" becomes a collaborative endeavor and nurtures both individuals within the group and the ongoing development of the skills or learning involved.

Another point I found fascinating in Wenger's article was the paradox he observes in successful communities of practice between the need for external leadership or inspiration, and the need for autonomy and internal space. He puts it like this:

"Communities of practice do not usually require heavy institutional infrastructures, but their members do need time and space to collaborate. They do not require much management, but they can use leadership. They self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment. The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling. This need for balance reflects the following paradox: No community can fully design the learning of another; but conversely no community can fully design its own learning."

So as facilitators it seems a challenge we face is how to both create the conditions that nurture leadership within communities of practice and make sure there is enough external stimulation to help them thrive.

Community & Technology

Bronwyn Stuckey posted something interesting to the Google group recently about "how readily technology has seduced the conversation."

She was pointing out how the technology-centered focus could make a newbie feel very overwhelmed and "out of it", which is key, since one of the things I know about this sphere is how important it is to create what the World Café calls "hospitable space" for community & inter-connection to thrive within. That means creating a "container" that is beautiful, and safe, and easy to "be" in.

I mention beauty in the sense of an attractive aesthetic, yes - I'm a big believer in the power of line and space and color - but equally in the sense of kindness and care for the whole, creating a psychologically "safe" space in which people feel free to speak up and know they will be listened to. A space where they can easily find the tools they need to use and feel confident in using them. A space where all can feel equally valid and important to the whole. Having a buddy system can help with this, and that idea came out of this group quite organically, which is great.

But the concern about being seduced by technology is not only a concern for the well-being of the newbies among us; it also has to do with the group as a whole. Community is not about technology, it's about people, and when the focus of the conversation is too centered on the technology it draws attention and energy away from the whole and our ability to create or facilitate community together.

I find it particularly interesting that the exact same issue has come up recently in an online community I help facilitate, one in which finding the right technology is very important in re-creating the kind of experience we want to foster online. But important as it is, it's at best secondary to the human, or social technology we need to develop.

I'm a tech-lover myself, and absolutely revel in this kind of technological exploration and comparison, but I've found it's helpful to hold these conversations within a separate thread so they don't dominate the more community-oriented conversation, which they otherwise tend to do.

But what do you think? There was some "push-back" to Bron's comments on the list, for all sorts of reasons, but there were also those who agreed with her. What do you think is important in this conversation?

One key piece, for me, is a question about what we're up to here. If we are trying to create the conditions for community to emerge, then having so much focus on the technology right up front maybe isn't the best idea. But given that we're a class trying to find our way, well, that's just what happened. This co-emergent model of community is kind of messy and even chaotic as I alluded to in an earlier post, but it's authentic and for us, it's reality. That's got to count for something. :-)