Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

I think that facilitation is important in some form; it doesn’t have to be a cheery person encouraging us all to introduce ourselves to eachother or tirelessly forging connections and consensus; much of this we can do ourselves better than a hired outsider (and there are many networks where this happens).

I’m not going to go on about ‘facilitation’ because there are far more knowledge-able people around, and I’m more into the strategy and organisation design around distributed knowledge communities, but..

Facilitation has more subtle properties, be they assisting with strategic thinking, technology stewardship, launching communities, a bit of moderation etc., which are absolutely vital to a community’s health, related organisation design and knowledge flows etc. This is not limited to the ‘walled garden’ community model – this is equally relevant to a broad distributed community revolving solely around a word or a self-established group in facebook.

I have a gut feeling (quite possibly wrong, I always dwell on the dark thoughts) that there is a stream of thought that people are focusing on technology rather than social models to facilitate human communications. I am sure that, given some social contexts, very little facilitation is required, but there’s always a bit, certainly at the strategic level, which should be discussed. Probably more on this later, but in the meantime, here are a couple of interesting findings from the online community coal face about the importance of facilitation:

NCSL Online Communities:

“… Where facilitation is withdrawn or inconsistent, community activity often decreases. Where it is pro-active, consistent and visible, communities tend to flourish provided purpose and expectations are clear and understood by the participants”
(Research from Bristol University into talk2learn, NCSL’s online communities, as reported in NCSL’s report: “70,000 heads are better than one – lessons learnt from the world’s largest online learning community for school leaders”)

We certainly found this in the CILIP communities pilot and I know there is a study out there showing how online community interaction figures grew with active facilitation (which I am looking for).

Online Community Metrics Report (Forum One):

Question 14: For metrics you identify as “very important”, what tactics are most effective to improve those metrics?

Answers Summary: Key tactics for improving metrics categorized as “very important” were:

Engagement by Hosts: Being an active participant in your own community.
Contribute to conversations, praise exceptional users and content. Be “present” in the community.

Marketing Internally: Educate new users on community feature set. Place prominent calls to action to participate. Create email vehicles to send “best of the best” content and encourage members to visit the community. Make it easy for members to refer other members.

(From The Online Community Report’s fascinating Online Community Metrics Report (.pdf))

The odds are on that the OCR’s survey is largely drawn from ‘walled garden’ respondents, but the principles are the same. When facilitation is handled relevantly, senstively, contextually suitably, people do more stuff together.