On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 08:48 AM, Eugene Eric Kim wrote: (01)
> Question of the day: Have people observed quality facilitation in a
> primarily online setting, such as a mailing list? (02)
I have, but it's been years since I've really felt like I was in on any
high quality collaboration in an online setting. I'll have to go back
about seven years ago when I was on a listserv for Technology in
Physical Therapy. The number of physical therapists who could speak
intelligently about the Internet in 1996 were few and far between and
most of us exchanged notes online. (03)
It's like what you said about the pre-print server for high energy
physics. It's nothing fancy, but there are so few people in the field
of high energy physics that it doesn't have to be fancy. There was one
particular case of online collaboration that I remember particularly
well because my paper was the subject of discussion. Based on the
self-coordinating input that I received from the other list members, in
the span of about two weeks I had all the direction I needed to turn an
awkward 15 page paper into a 60 page white paper that I'd start to
build a career upon. (04)
In recent years I haven't "felt" that same kind of energy from any list
online and I believe the key culprits are info glut and instability of
the communities. In more recent years, I've seldom seen the kind of
"self-policing" behavior that hallmarked the mature communities that I
remember. Even on small lists, the quality just isn't the same
anymore. Take this tools list for example. I'll bet that each and
every one of us is on a good number of other lists or online forums,
all of which require our the bulk of our attention now and then. Even
when you have the same people in a stable group, you have "less of
them" because they're pulled in so many other directions too. (05)
Actually, there _has_ been one group as of late that I've seen some
quality facilitation in, but it's an online gaming community.
Specifically, it's a "Clan site." If you're not familiar with the
"clan" it's what gamers call their teams. I'm in this particular clan
and about a year ago, some members felt like there needed to be more
structure around how we ran the clan and recruited new members. My
clan's a bit unique in that we're older and so many of us are fit to be
leaders that we instead opt to have no leaders which got difficult
whenever we needed to take action. Some people got sick of us always
having great talks but no walks and initiated what ended up being our
operational guidelines. (06)
There are about twenty people in our group and only a few of us are
college educated. What was produced was a fairly elaborate list of
guidelines that came about after over two weeks of very active debate
and polling. During that period, many members of our clan would shift
in and out of the facilitator's role. In case you want to see what was
produced, here's a link to the Valiant Clan's Operational Guidelines:
http://www.valiantclan.org/guidelines.html. (07)
There's something in common between my gaming clan and the PT
Technology listserv that I mentioned above: a stability that breeds
familiarity. Most of us have been in touch with each other
consistently for over a year. Some of us have been in and out of touch
for over three years. I also believe that it's critical that we
frequently need to contact each other one to one outside of the online
community. Personally speaking, I found that these one to one Emails
and IM's outside of the group context to be conducive to building
camaraderie. (08)
---
Sheldon Chang
Online Communities Developer, Web Designer
E-mail: sheldon@hyperlinked.com
Phone: 408-455-2559 (09)
Hyperlinked Web Services - Connect, Collaborate, Communicate...
http://hyperlinked.com (010)
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