Sheldon Chang <sheldon@hyperlinked.com> writes: (01)
....
% > Surely there are people who bind to communities yet lurk
% > unobtrusively. Do they have 'recognised personality' motivation? (02)
% This is certainly true and their motivation is really the same as the
% underlying motivation of those who have the 'recognized personality'
% motivation. When I picked 'identity' as the quality to key in on, it's
% because it's something that's easier to provide than the even more
% amorphous quality of "sense of belonging." (03)
% Lurkers are indeed a sleeping factor of all online communities. While
% most of them have very little public identity, many do identify with
% the community as a whole. Since there's not a whole lot that you can
% do to gauge the level of engagement that you're getting with lurkers,
% just provide them with the best user experience possible and focus on
% the visible participants who'll largely determine the overall
% personality of the community. (04)
In december, we saw a blast of activity on the Blueoxen list.
It was a time where the space and energy of several people
freed up enough to jump on some ideas and things heated up a bit.
And as a result we got lots and lots of communications. (05)
In the efforts that Tom Munnecke is doing with GivingSpace,
we have discussed the need for latent energy. For the cascading
effects to happen, you need to have some kind of context where
there is stored or potential energy that are ready to be released. (06)
In that way, a few ideas strung together in a new way, cascades into
a bunch of activity. (07)
In the case of this community, we hope that a few ideas about
collaborative conversation ends up cascading into the result of
there being a new piece of software that erupts to the surface.
Or at least a new feature on existing software. (08)
So, from this idea, I believe that the quality and potential of
the lurkers is a fundamental element of the context of a group. (09)
If you took a list, and removed all people who contribute less
than 5% of the volume in the last 3 months, the end result would
be a list that dies. Or at least grows stagnant. (010)
So while I agree with your assertion that value is created thru
your notion of identity, I want to suggest that value is created by
the potential energy of the lurkers on a list. (011)
% Now, I may have downplayed the role of utility in managing an online
% community, but I'm not suggesting that utility isn't that big of a
% deal. Especially for lurkers, utility is a very important value. (012)
Yes, Utility is part of the feedback loop between the active center
of the fishbowl and the potential energy of the lurkers. Without
the conversation producing direct utility at some level, you strangle
a list by giving the lurkers no reason to remain. It becomes the
same as removing the non-participants. (013)
Because it is hard to measure, we assume that all lurkers are the same,
but it is not true. There is a vast difference between people who
are quiet, but paying attention as compared to people who have
stopped paying attention. (014)
When people have stopped paying attention, their potential energy
for activation and action is reduced. And therefore the value of the
whole community decreases. This is because you have rate limited the
context that will enable a potential cascading effect later on. (015)
So.... For a list to be a healthy list, it must be thought of as an
ecosystem, or complex system with feedback loops. The "identity/belonging"
value for the active participants (and for some lurkers) is tied
together with the utility/value of the conversation, which is tied
to the potential energy of the list. This potential energy, then
feeds back into both identity/belonging and utility/value. (016)
So we have a completed feedback loop. Our attention spans and our
business end up being a rate limiter on this feedback loop. (017)
% What
% I'm really suggesting is that in an environment where it's so chaotic
% that identity is impossible, utility is going to suffer as well. (018)
Absolutely. They are part of the same feedback loop. If you
make it hard for there to be identity/belonging, then you make it hard
for the utility/value by limiting the whole potential energy of the
system. (019)
I have a hypothysis: Different generations/ages have different tolerance for
chaos, and so the utility/value and identity/belonging feedback loops
behave differently depending on the age of the participants. (020)
For example, I find the IRC/Instant messaging tools to be a problem for me.
I am unable to sustain my attention on them long enough to generate
identity/belonging, and find the general value low. However, several
students who I have watched are able to derive much higher value from
IRC/IM activities. (021)
% > Relatedly, I'm quite noisy on this list, but I'm not sure I'm here to
% > ego-trip (honest). I'm just hanging about because I know there are
% > geniuses out there just dying to be noisier and fry my neurons with
% > great ideas. (022)
% I'm here for the same reasons! (023)
I think we are all here because we sense the potential energy of the
group. Which includes both the active parts of the list and the
opportunities represented by the people who are lurking, but paying
attention. Some of the ideas on this list are going to erupt into
features on software and drive new community discussions at new levels. (024)
And we all like to sit around and watch the volcano bubble, just incase
it might erupt..... (025)
-----
John Sechrest . Helping people use
. computers and the Internet
. more effectively
.
. Internet: sechrest@peak.org
.
. http://www.peak.org/~sechrest (026)
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