I want more. How about you?

[Jay Cross]

Ning provides a great shell for building a community. Drag-and-drop simplicity, free, and not that tough to figure out. Nonetheless, I'm hungry for more. This is boring.

I have yet to find the water cooler in this place. Maybe it's here and I'm overlooking it. (When I was active on the WeLL long ago, it took me about a year to find out that the real gossip was traded on the back-channel; I'd totally missed it.)

A hundred sixty-eight people have signed up as members here. (I kicked two of them out for overt commercialism.) Scattered among our group are some of the best brains in web/ learning/ collaboration field. Why is our activity level so low?

In a typical online group of a hundred, ten people take part actively, one or two stretch the limits and give the others something to talk about, and the rest sit back and watch. I'm not going to trash our lurkers: you can learn a lot by simply watching. I've been there myself. But there must be questions waiting to be answered, important topics begging for collaboration, and brilliant concepts waiting to be flushed out.

We need not be a TYPICAL community. Setting up things like this is a component of most of our professional lives. How might our experience here help us get better at it?

What do you think? Am I just howling at the moon or do some of the rest of you feel we haven't even started to realize our potential?

[Harold Jarche]

My attention is spread between my blog, comments, other's blogs, Facebook, Ning, social bookmarks and a few other social spaces. My best (?) thoughts usually go on my blog. If you added up all of the aggregate conversations of these 165 members there is probably much more depth than we see here. Perhaps we just have too many online options today.

[Andy Jones]

Finally someone has said it. I'm surprised (and pleased) it's you. You're right - this is a bit, erm, treacle like. I'm a full throttle, get involved, interact, shout, rant, think type of person (in case you hadn't guessed).

Internet time is where I put my ideas to the test of the community.

Because, as you said, there are some really good minds here (so what are YOU doing here I hear you ask) then I get some really good insite, ideas etc. If it wasn't there, I'd be going it alone.

We could become a stellar "think tank". STELLAR. With the knowledge, experience and wisdom sloshing around here then all everyone needs to do is contribute once every 40 days and we'd still get 4 new posts a day. Simple that way right. Imagine being able to ask the help of 167 other people from all over the world who are willing to help?

For those of you reading this thinking "but Andy, I can't write sparkling and witty prose like you". Spit it out and we'll work it out! Jay's made it clear that the rules are to play nice - so you're not going to get attacked or ridiculed (because if you did I'd be gone long ago - I once suggested that Lobster was a realistic currency - no seriously!).

Anyway - enough of the rambling. Jay - we're going to need to do some kicking but I think we're going to get somewhere.

[Bill Bruck]

Jay -

You ask why this community has not really taken off and become a place where there are lots of stimulating and robust conversations. As you know, at q2 we spend a lot of time thinking about and working with issues around online collaboration, and in another post I shared a white paper that deals with some of these issues. I'd like to suggest three points for your/our consideration: technology, you, and us.

Technology

Ning is a nice platform. But I see it as more of a social networking platform (designed for weak ties and occasional interactions among larger numbers of people) rather than an online community platform (designed for stronger ties and regular interactions among a smaller group of people). The affordances for the two types of platforms differ in subtle but socially important ways. Things like the ability to quickly and easily read all new posts, to participate by email (I was told that's so Web 1.0, but it's important to me at any rate, and would up particiption 100% to see and reply to things from my Outlook inbox); etc.

You

I've become convinced - and you've heard me say so in my talks - that self-organizing start-up communities just don't work very often. They need a strange attractor to get things going and build the momentum to where they have a change of being self organizing. They need a wedding planner - someone to take stewardship for creating a coffee shop and seeding it with some great discussion items. They need an event planner - someone to ask the equivalent of the leaning circuits "big question" of the month. They need a facilitator to ensure that every post is responded to - and not simply by the facilitator - so much facilitation is back channel, bringing in "ringers," etc.

Bottom line - I hate to be blunt about this - but this is your community. It's your social capital that has me taking half an hour of my time posting here, and coming back from time to time to see what's happening - but now less and less, and there's not much going on.

The models here are Frank Burns/Lisa Kimball building the metanetwork in the 90's, and Howard Rheingold building Brainstorms in the 00's. They used their social capital and put their hearts into the communities. These were the places where they hung out, and got their friends to hang out. But they really put a LOT of their own personal energy into them - they knew that they couldn't just post a few things and hope it took off.

'nuff said.

Us

That having been said, it's not enough to have a robust platform and charismatic strange attractor(s). The soil has to be fertile and the time right to plant the seeds. That soil is us, and I'm not sure how fertile a field we are. Harold said it already - he spends his time planting seeds in his own field.

If I might press the analogy a little furthe - It's like we are in a city where we each have a 5x10 plot. Everyone waters and fertilizes their own little bed, but I just don't know how much appetite there is for planting with each other. Even you, Jay, didn't participate that much in our Learning 2.0 symposium - with some of the best eLearning minds around - everyone was too busy planting their own fields - posting to their own blogs.

And there's nothing wrong with this per se - I would suggest that a lot of it, in our field, is driven by the desire for personal branding. Folks want to make a name for themselves. In fact, for many, online personal branding is a (the?) cornerstone of building their own reputation in the field, and even generating visibility and buzz that will lead to consulting and other contracts.

I believe blogs are much better than participating in someone else's community for this.

So, I guess another question to ask or factor to consider is this: Of the 165 folks who include some of the best minds in learning - how much appetite is there actually to simply be an indian and not a chief? To be part of a community and not the start of our own one-person play?

How much to we want to sing together in a chorus (or have hilarious disagreements in the local pub) v. stand on our own soapbox in Hyde Park to proclaim our view of the world to passers-by?

[Andy Jones]

Bill,

Interesting stuff and, to be honest, a fairly dismal view. I've forgotten that actually this is Jay's community - he started it. I look forward to his comments but then I also look forward to and value everyone elses.

What you seem to be saying is that actually we're all in it for ourselves and are after contracts/work/credibility. Maybe we are, maybe though we're using it as a resource for getting thoughts aired, questions answered.

The truism is that you will get out what you put in.

I've put a fair bit in and to be honest I get loads out. It helps mould my thinking on things. Like the dis-fluencies thing - people have come back with thoughts/ideas/concepts that hadn't occurred to me. This is EXACTLY why I posted.

From what you're saying - it sounds like you're saying every social network is doomed to failure? I don't think so - depends who you get in and how much they decide to participate.

I sign up to Jay's hope that we'll form an altuistic helping community. Maybe I'm an optimist but then I think if it's helped me then that makes it pretty powerful.

[Bill Bruck]

Sorry if that's the way it read - that's not how I meant it. But I think what I DID mean was something related but I think different in an important way.

Regarding the "Us" piece of my post - I belong to a couple online communities that are absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, few if any learning professionals participate, so I don't get a lot of my professional needs met. But in one of them there are probably 30 forums, each of which may have 100+ discussion threads active within the last 30 days, most of which have 100+ responses, and some of which have been going on for years and have over 10,000 responses. So I don't think that online communities are not possible, nor that everyone is in it for themselves. In these two communities, in fact, folks don't seem to be in it for marketing, personal branding, etc.

But I WAS, in fact, suggesting as a possibility that many of us "learning professionals" may, in fact, put our online posting energies into building our brand and marketing, and have very little left for participation in online communities that will offer less in this regard.

In know it's a rather bold statement, and in fact, may be offensive to some, for which I apologize in advance. But as I compare the sharing I experience in other online venues with what I observe in the learning community, it seems like folks have much more energy for posting where it will build their brand. I actually don't have a lot of judgment about this, but I do suspect it may be true. (May also be true in lots of other professional fields - dunno.)

On the "You" section - the bottom line is that I do see this as Jay's community. As an old humanistic psychologist, I believe we in the learning, organization development, and other similar spaces often don't like to think about things this way,, but in terms of governance, this is Jay's to decide what to do with. In terms of branding, it's Jay's brand. And I believe there's nothing wrong with this!!!

I see that you are an active participant, and I think that's great! It would also be great if Jay can persuade you (and others) to help steward the space, and to take on active roles beyond posting in building and growing the community.

My point there - dunno if you agree or not - is that active stewardship needs to take place in order to maximize the possbility that the community will grow. If I may be permitted an analogy:

This space is not a community. It's a community center - the online "building" in which a community can meet.

You probably have a commuity center near your house. But there's no one in it now, because there's no basketball game going on. Community centers - be they online or bricks and morter - need to have basketball games and other activities in order to attract people. And we're all busy folks. We need sometone to organize and structure these activities to build a vibrant community.

Thoughts?

[Andy Jones]

At the risk of monopolising this... You make good points. It's easy for me to forget that I'm not trying to build brand (work for a big corporate) so I don't have to worry about building activities.

Really good point about needing more stewards than Jay. I was worried for a while that we'd created a cult of personality but not so much anymore. Maybe it's these extra stewards that would help remove this perception.

It's certainly something I'll be taking to my own community in work, so thanks for the tip!

[Jay Cross]

We don't have much "gardening" going on at present. I'll look into how I can share access to the controls and stewardship with others. To be honest, most of what's here is the creation of our members, not me. I particularly like Bill's suggestion that we fill the event planner role.

We may need to clarify why we're here and what we want. Thus far, our practice has defined our direction.

I'm surprised by this talk about each of us gardening our own plots. Indeed, blogs are a wonderful tool for self-promotion. But that's not what you come here for. This is not a blog; it's a place, as Andy pointed out, to ask questions and share insights. You come here not to plant your own seeds but to get advice on watering and fertilizer.

Frank, Lisa, Howard, and, yes, Bill Bruck, have dedicated their professional energies to community-building. It pays their rent. I don't think full-time community-builders are appropriate models for people like us who can devote only a narrow slice of our time to what we do here.

To play on another of Bill's analogies, the basketball game is here. Be here now. You can sit in the stands or join the action on the court. I take part to improve my game.

[Bill Bruck]

Quick point -

In talking about gardening our own plots I was NOT talking about this space - I was talking about the fact that most eLearning professionals that I interact with have much more energy for creating and maintaining their own blogs than they do participating in communities like this, which I would characterize as NOT bein our own plots.

[Ignatia]

The need for extra relevant activity is clear and I like the idea of an active stewardship to boost the allround activity in the community.

Although I do believe that blogging for your own personal branding might be a factor, I also think all the members of a community know that the exchange of ideas leeds to something more than just the sum of the ideas. So, I do believe that there is willingness of all members to contribute to a community.

Maybe more ‘partnerships’ can be formed? What about working on papers (as Jay or Jane Hart launched) or articles or wiki’s?
Why not take this question as a start to work on a paper “How to activate a community”? Well, we might wanna work on a more fluent title.

Or maybe look at another Ning community which focusses on performance of blogs: ‘building a better blog’ for possible strategies?

Or look into what Michelle Gallan put our attention to: incentives?

And… there is no gossip, who knows some nice gossipy things would also get members more active? At this moment I am in need for a chiropractor from moving bags with cat litter.

[Jay Cross]

I just found this Ning feature FAQ. Also, I'm going to set us up on Google analytics so we can look at the traffic here.

[Jay Cross]

Nicola, I get a "Page Not Found" error for Conversate but will look for something similar. jay

[Jay Cross]

Nicola, if we figure out what capabilities we are looking for, we should be able to narrow the tool search. Do we want to connect people who are online at the time? If it's not synchronous, voice won't do much for us. Or do we want something particular to a specific issue?