All posts in the topic Online Communities of Practice (Short link)
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- There are 12 posts — by 11 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Dave Briggs at Apr 22 21:25 UTC
I noted mention of the Ideas online communities and I have posted a couple times in those hosted by DCLG. The UK also has the Innovation Exchange project for the voluntary sector. I wonder if there might be a way for these projects to share a platform for online communities of practice? What I can't figure out is why all these systems are so unworkably web-centric? The only binding online communities of practice that I've seen work (outside of compulsory workspaces or time-limited exchanges) allow e-mail publishing and receipt like the open source tool we use for the UKIE forum. It seems clear to me that bridging the web-e-mail divide is the missing link - like GroupServer here - people can choose their technology and be part of the same space. Imagine what this or a similar tool could do for dozens of projects if people in just a few funded initiatives pooled their scarce resources. Steven Clift E-Democracy.Org P.S. E-Democracy.Org is about to invest in some new GroupServer features and a more up-to-date look and feel for http://forums.e-democracy.org . Many of those features will trickle down to this unfunded DoWire Groups site. If you want to add some resources to this feature upgrade and help influence our investment, let us know:
Until recently I would have agreed with Steven about the importance of e-mail
for online communities. My active participation in a web-only community never
lasted for long, but e-mail kept me engaged. But now I've switched the way I
read this community from e-mail to RSS, and find that works fine. Perhaps the
world is moving on.
I know, RSS is hardly leading edge, but it took me a while to work out how it's
useful to me and make the switch. Probably there are plenty of established
participants who still prefer e-mail, and they certainly shouldn't be
disadvantaged. But for the future, and probably to some younger and/or more
technical people already, I suspect e-mail as a primary means of participation
will look quaint.
Actually Pete, you proved my point by using a web feed to follow this forum.
:-)
People should be able to choose their preferred method of participation -
e-mail, web forum, web feed, even a Facebook application - and still be part of
the same online community of practice.
If it took someone as wired as you, X years to covert to web feeds (something
like 7% of net users have used them directly), imagine how many years it will
take for others. What I have found is that the invasive, broadcast character of
e-mail is essential to reach busy people. People you need to be part of the
exchange or it dies. They may not read most messages, but they will tune in if
the subject is compelling. If you are trying to get local government staff for
example to share knowledge, making participation a "destination" versus part of
their daily online experience (location, location, location), excludes 50% of
your audience. (Of course, if folks can't turn off e-mail you lose the other
50%!)
I'd like to venture the reason mySociety.Org succeeds with tools like
TheyWorkForYou.com compared to most other e-democracy projects, is their active
use of e-mail hooks to users. Most projects are simply too timid with
communication to succeed.
Steven Clift
Agree with pete on this one, i've personally never got on well with
email based lists, and on more than one occasion i've taken a group
across from an email list form of communicating to an online forum
and seen a huge increase in participation. The main factor people
found beneficial with email lists was the ability to download emails,
rather than having to stay online to discuss things. The advent of
fixed cost broadband seems to have done away with this problem for a
great many though. There's definitely an element of quaintness in
email lists too.
Would be interested to know if it is a generational thing (certainly
the places where forums have worked better are with young people) or
if it's something else. There are communities of practice out there
working forums really, really well, but just not in this field it
seems. Suspect it's something to do with the huge amount of work
getting forums to work requires, email based lists probably take
less. There's also the factor that other areas often hold a greater
initial attraction to their target membership than does public
policy, so the issue of keeping people engaged and re-engaged is
significantly smaller.
Anyone know of any comparative studies on these two areas?
Agreed Steven. Many of my colleagues don't even know what RSS feeds are, but
are receptive to receiving information via email.
Hi there (and apologies if this comes through twice at all...),
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Steven Clift wrote:
> allow e-mail publishing and receipt like the open source tool we use for
> the UKIE forum. It seems clear to me that bridging the web-e-mail divide
> is the missing link - like GroupServer here - people can choose their
> technology and be part of the same space.
Amen to that. Furthermore, bridging the same divide over *time* is, I
think, one of the greatest underdeveloped challenges faced across the
entire communication landscape, not just sustainable political engagement.
In other words, I can only just about choose what format I use to
"interact" (send/receive) with services - web, e-mail, RSS, SMS, etc. But
it's still extremely difficult to jump from one to the other for different
tasks *within* each service.
Twitter is a great example - short messages are fantastic for low-level
engagement, but I want to be able to jump to longer message - basic e-mail
would do - when a conversation gets more involved, or when I have more
time to compose longer messages. The topic may stay the same for the
transition, but the context in which I engage varies - as a result of both
the subject matter within a particular service, and what's happening in my
own life right now.
Flexible "Multi-Level" engagement like this is key to sustaining
discussion, I think. But I cna't think of anyone or anything that does it
successfully. I'd love to be proved wrong, of course :)
- Graham.
There are a few factors involved. I don't you can simply generalise on
generational.
Firstly, frequency of activity is important. If a forum is very
frequently updated people will visit daily to see the latest activity.
If it is very frequent emails and even digest quickly become
indigestible. Likewise if a forum is not frequently updated then people
need notifying of new activity when it occurs otherwise a conversation
will not ensue.
Secondly, choice is important. Some people as Jeremy said prefer
email. Perhaps their corporate firewalls prevent access to forums or
perhaps they prefer to access via their Treos (or Blackberries). Others
will prefer to use web.
Some fora will benefit from both. The BarCampUKGovWeb Google Groups
mail list was unmanageable by email at it's height. The number of
messages peaked at over 20 per day and I accessed it via the web but now
it just trickles in and the occassional digest email reminds me that it
still exists.
Thirdly, technical expertise. Email is a very widely used technology.
Web forums far less so. Despite some always-on broadband (not so with
the majority of mobile connections) not everyone will want to browse
forums or read through RSS readers.
The answer I suspect is that to maximise participation you need to
maximise the choice for people. Remove hurdles to participation and
allow them to read and contribute in the way that suits them.
Graham Lally wrote:
> The topic may stay the same for the
> transition, but the context in which I engage varies - as a result of both
> the subject matter within a particular service, and what's happening in my
> own life right now.
>
> Flexible "Multi-Level" engagement like this is key to sustaining
> discussion, I think. But I cna't think of anyone or anything that does it
> successfully. I'd love to be proved wrong, of course :)
This is sufficiently hard that I proposed it for a Framework 6 research
project. The idea was to capture the notes a group of people make in one
tool, and make them available in the next tool, as they move through a
problem-solving sequence. E.g. from synchronous chat or
video-conferencing into a discussion forum, then on to a mind mapping
tool, then into a report writer, and so on, until they reach the
organization's knowledge management repository. The problem is of
capturing and transferring emergent knowledge, in an emergent learning
habitat.
It's interesting to be having this discussion, we really haven't moved on much
at all in ten years in some ways! And that's good because email really does
work in a lot of situations (as Shane alludes, not in all!)... it's not a new
theory though and it's well enough researched.
It's the push versus pull argument. Email (and rss feeds) work because they are
passive; web-forums fail in these kind of settings because they are active (you
have to go and get them and so motivation needs to be much higher and that's
hard to sustain).
Dan's software (what we're using here) works because it allows for all of the
combinations of push and pull so the user gets to select the experience that
suits them and their way of operating. And it's made in New Zealand too ;-)
Simple as usual is best!
If a website is interesting and active enough, it's best to share and
exchange there in my opinion. Email coming through all the time drives you
mad!
On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:21:42AM -0500, Steven Clift wrote: > Actually Pete, you proved my point by using a web feed to follow this forum. :-) > > People should be able to choose their preferred method of participation - e-mail, web forum, web feed, even a Facebook application - and still be part of the same online community of practice. > > If it took someone as wired as you, X years to covert to web feeds > (something like 7% of net users have used them directly), imagine > how many years it will take for others. Whilst nominally, amongst other hats, I'm a technologist (and a geek), i'm a self-confessed non-RSS user (i.e., i don't use RSS) (I'd love to use RSS, but I've yet to find a client that doesn't annoy me. I might get around to writing one I could use, at some point) > What I have found is that the invasive, broadcast character of e-mail > is essential to reach busy people. People you need to be part of the > exchange or it dies. They may not read most messages, but they will > tune in if the subject is compelling. Email, to me, has the advantage that it's easy to killfile senders, I can filter stuff out of the way, and have my mail client organize things nicely (assuming not too much brokenness in other participants/their mail clients). It's trivial for me to connect to the web (from anywhere, really), and resume my mail from where I left it too. I don't usually need to worry about "oh, this site's blocked by $overzealous-proxy" when it comes to email. That it arrives to me, and i don't need to visit a webpage is great. > If you are trying to get local government staff for example to share > knowledge, making participation a "destination" versus part of their > daily online experience (location, location, location), excludes 50% > of your audience. (Of course, if folks can't turn off e-mail you > lose the other 50%!) Also, email's now, almost universal, at least amongst most people intended. One thing worth noting is that whilst people may (want to) use some sort of collaborative-working software, it *has* to be something familiar, or easy to pick-up: at the recent BarcampUKGovWeb, a few participants were bewildered with the barcamp wiki; in setting up http://www.govhack.com, I chose Mediawiki: it's familiar to people given that's what Wikipedia uses.
I think it is fair to say that for a lot of people, email is work, and web is play. In other words, if your boss is looking over your shoulder, would you rather he/she saw you writing or reading an email or posting something on a website? I'm not saying it's right, but the perception is there. Maybe it will change over time. The Improvement and Development Agency's Communities of Practice platform [ http://communities.idea.gov.uk] is nice, offering a number of different tools for people to use to work together as they see fit: forums, blogs, wikis etc. People who hadn't used this stuff before are now becoming real converts, which is great. Dave On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:51 PM, Jill Sanders <> wrote:
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