Research Findings 1 – confidence and diversity in communities

I assumed, when I began my research, that having a balance of experts and novices was important to engender the sharing of knowledge and experience. What I found was that more confident community members would share more readily regardless of how long they had worked in their roles.

The apprenticeship model assumes that a “master” can and will teach an “apprentice” what they know. We generally assume that the length of time in a role dictates the level of ability – this may be the case, but the ability and willingness to pass on skills requires a degree of confidence.

In terms of an online community, attempts to ensure that membership includes those with differing levels of seniority alone may not be the best tactic for ensuring skills are past from master to novice – if the “master” is not confident, they may be less likely to share their knowledge. Confidence AND ability are required to ensure skills are passed on within an online community. Face to face sharing may be different, as the level of confidence required to share may well be less in such familiar situations, and many of us have techniques for encouraging participation in even the quietest individuals.

Confident people may share more readily, but that doesn’t mean what they are sharing is good practice. Encouraging the more reticent members of a community to take part is important for diversity of opinion. Those with less confidence may be less willing to share online and may need support to develop confidence and trust prior to sharing online.

Managing the diversity of a community then is more complex that merely having a balance of novices and experts. Just as we see in meetings, training, any group gathering, quieter less confident members have valuable contributions which balance debate and enhance the knowledge being shared. Where there are no face to face opportunities, then techniques such as encouraging individuals to contribute by contacting them personally, by a phone call or an email, recognising their value, may give them the incentive to take part.

Time, Trust and Participation

If someone came up to you in the street, and you had a packet of crisps in your hand, would you let them have one?

If you wouldn’t share your crisps, why not?

Maybe because we generally don’t share things with people until we know them (or we’re just plain greedy/hungry).

Maybe because we don’t generally share things with people we don’t trust – you don’t tell someone a secret unless you know you can trust that person not to then tell your secret to everyone they’ve ever met...

In this very simple scenario, the two dimensions that clearly affect sharing are knowing someone and/or trusting them. The fact that degree of trust in information, individuals and technology and length of time people have known one another can affect knowledge sharing shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.

If we are to engender trust and encourage participation in online communities, then:

• On the time side – we need to develop relationships, sustain them, and not assume that people who don’t know each other will share.

• On the trust side – we need to be honest and transparent in our dealings with people, trust is a delicate thing – who is going to trust someone who keeps things back? Who is going to trust a system that isn’t secure. Who is going to believe information when the last thing they read was untrue or inaccurate?

• On the relationship side – trust is developed between people, organisations can only leverage relationships that are trusting.

As Kevin Dwyer from Build Your Own Business notes

Trust is personal. It is between two people. When organisations “trust” each other it is a result of trust between individuals in the organisation.

An interesting article from WeMedia says

From the consumer's perspective, it's easy to place trust in an established institution such as The Wall Street Journal or even MTV, but how does the audience learn to trust a stranger (or group of strangers), to evaluate the information they are providing, and to collaborate with them?

Thinking primarily about business based communities, it seems to encourage participation, we need to more fully understand how we can cultivate trust whilst at the same time acknolwedging that it takes time to build.

Maybe the first step is to assess readiness to share in terms of trust. Hsu, Ju, Yen and Chang from Taiwan have developed a very interesing model (sorry, can't find a free link to this paper) based on Social Cognitive Theory which measures multi-dimensional trusts.

• Economy based trust – based on economic benefit or violation of trust ie the termination of a relationship or the likelihood of retribution
• Information based trust – knowledge based trust, the belief that behaviour is predicatable and and uncertainty is reduced
• Identification based trust – parties understand one anothers wants and mutual understanding is developed

They found that certain trust dimensions have a positive effect on others ie

• Economy based trust has a positive effect on information based trust.
• Information based trust has a positive effect on identification based trust
  

Taking the crisp sharing scenario as an example:

• Economy based trust – sharing must give you some sort of benefit ie not being hit
• Information based trust – to share you believe what you expect will happen – and they won’t give the crisp to their dog
• Identification based trust – you share because you can see they are hungrier than you

To examine the level of trust someone has toward a particular group or system would help identify the barriers that continually prevent sharing. Individual differences are clearly important in understanding why some people share quickly and without pontificating, whilst others need to see individual benefit to take part.

I feel this model may help us to understand what it is we need to do to encourage diverse participation in our online communities. All we need to do then is work out how to help people move from where they are to where they need to be to effectively share and learn.

Shouldn’t be too hard...

Lurkers are legitimate

I’ve been reading an article by Jonathon Bishop on Increasing participation in online communities.

Incidentally Jonathan went to the same University as me, the University of Glamorgan in the lovely Welsh Valleys, and it’s very likely that I served him a pint in the Uni bar or the local student pub, The Otley, run, funnily enough, by the Otley family, who are now brewing their own beer very succesfully, but that’s another story (and really sorry to hear that the lovely Alf Otley passed away last year).

Anyway, Jonathan Bishop talks about drivers for participation, predominately why “lurkers” don’t participate and how to get them to do so.

The paper has some interesting insights into motivation to participate in virtual communites, but my reaction to it has been adverse, due only to the fact that he uses the word lurker. Not his fault alone I admit, it’s a word that has been synonymous with online communities, but...

I hate the word lurker

Lurkers are actually valuable, in that they may, without ever participating in a community, be reflecting on what is being said, taking away valuable learning and sharing it outside of that particular community, within another, different community. They may encourage others to participate, we don't know...and we shouldn't judge.

I make a call to stop using the word lurker – it means to move furtively, to sneak about, has overtones of concealment and danger, and these people, these so called lurkers, deserve more respect.

Although I believe Lave and Wenger's category of Peripheral describes the behaviour of people who aren’t actively involved in a community, I prefer “readers” to lurkers…

Please can we all stop calling people who are valuable members of our communities lurkers and call them readers instead.

See the Virtual Community wikipedia entry for more on descriptive categories for involvement in online communities and encouraging participation.

Communities of Practice, Knowledge Management and Learning

I've been having hours of fun analysing the statistics from the use of the Project Managers Knowledge Collaborative - the blog I've set up for my MEd dissertation. I found something interesting in terms of the participation levels in terms of reading, commenting and posting.

The basis of my dissertation research is a group blog for Project Managers. They’ve been told to blog about whatever they feel would be relevant to their colleagues, but they’ve had no other guidelines (apart from "Be Nice"). Ideally, they blog about their experiences, sharing their tacit knowledge with others, so their knowledge can be managed effectively and visibly, and learning can take place within the community, raising the level of of Project Manager competency.

If we start with the premise, as stated by Lave and Wenger in Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, that people learn by the process of being active participants in the practices of social communities, that learning is situated, then membership of an online community should reflect the theory, that participation leads to learning.

In practice, a large percentage of activity on the blog is reading, followed by commenting, then posting. Taking the model of legitmate peripheral participation, this behaviour reflects the idea that the majority are peripheral but still valuable members of the community, some are active and commenting, and fewer still are core, doing the posting, sharing the knowledge, questioning and driving forward the practice of Project Management.

Someone by the name of Ruben posits the assumption that the use of social software relates directly to Wengers framework, and lists a number of hypothesis to argue this case in his post Learning 2.0. Particularly rellevant in this case is his Hypothesis 6:

“Hypothesis 6 : Social software supports an important prerequisite of communities of practice, namely legitimate peripheral participation, because users can particiapte in a way that best suits their needs, without being obliged to become core community members who participate for the greater good.”

The issue is, that those on the periphery will only participate if there is something going on at the core – in this case, posts. With nothing to comment on, the active participants will wander off, the community will stop creating opportunties for learning. Bearing in mind this is an internal, closed community, I'm struggling as I’m now at the difficult stage of cajolling people to post, and get more participants, neither of which I’m finding particularly easy…I guess I need to re-read Saint-Onges Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage (despite what he says about blogging...see John Husband's blog for more on this KM/blogging debate)

Linked articles/sites
Infed.org article Communities of Practice
Situated cognition and the culture of learning (Brown, Collins & Duguid)

Reference
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Saint-Onge, H., Wallace, D. (2002), Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage, Butterworth-Heinemann, USA

The Tipping Point and knowledge sharing

Thanks to George Siemen (and by association, to Stephen Parker) for bringing my attention to the fantastic publication - Networks, Connections and Community: Learning with Social Software.

Not only does it reference theories and models which relate to the use of social software, but it also contains a great example of how to define your research approach.

I've been attempting to gain support for the use of Andrea Shaprio's Tipping Point developer, a simulation tool for enabling those responsible for change to see first hand, the impact of the decisions they make about change management.

Andrea's theory is based on the viral model of the adoption of the new, as discussed in Malcolm Galdwell's book The Tipping Point. The Flexible Learning network also reference this work, but through Gladwells defintions of the characteristics of people who start epidemics.

Whilst working hard to cultivate an online community, I've noted that it really is the case, that if you can find the Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople in your community, and they engage which what you are promoting, chances are the idea will flourish. Ideally, this happens to the extent that it reaches a Tipping Point where less or little effort is required to ensure the idea is adopted.

A lovely theory with a fundamentally individual basis, which fits beautifully with the activities of the blogosphere. What's the betting many of the bloggers out there are either Connectors, Mavens or Salespeople...something it seems other people like Liz Strauss agree with...