Do you or your organization have a question about how to use digital communication technologies that you would like a room full of experts to workshop for free?

Are there people you feel you could engage with in new ways with these new technologies? A campaign you want to support? A service you wish to provide? An idea you can envisage? A change you want to encourage?

On December 15th, iShed is launching Media Sandbox 2009, its second R&D commissioning scheme supporting research into emerging technologies. As last year, I am designing and facilitating the events and mentoring the virtual facilitation.

Media Sandbox is:

“…a development scheme which offers a ‘safe space’ for collaboration between creative talent, technology companies and content commissioners. It is an entirely unique opportunity for creatives from the South West of England to collaboratively create radical new products and processes – pushing forward understanding and potential usage of  interactive digital media…”

We will have a room full of experienced programmers, designers, academics, project and business managers, artists, writers, innovation people, gamers and other digital media types.

(Media Sandbox 2008 workshop action, CC: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediasandbox/)

We need some real issues to work on and want to apply ourselves to regional questions. That’s where you come in.

Can you think of something you would like to be ‘workshop-ed’ on December 15th? For free?

Maybe it could become a commissioned project (receiving £8,000 budget and more).

A couple of (very high level) examples:

1. How can we design a campaign to engage our target demographic with our message in an innovative way?
2. Our association needs to reach out to a wider group using a mix of technologies. What’s the best way to do it?

We are collecting questions from as wide a range of organisations as possible on our online network in advance of the event. Attendees will be able to see the questions and who they are from and will decide which ones to workshop on the day. We can’t promise your question will be chosen, but it’s worth a try. You can always turn your question into a proposal for the scheme afterwards.

You are welcome to pose a question to the group whether you come to the launch event or not – naturally you are welcome to come to the event, but we understand if you don’t have time (the event is between 2pm and 6pm on December 15th).

To pose a question for the group to work on:

1. Sign up to the Media Sandbox event network
2. Fill in your profile information – the more the better – it will help provide context for your question
3. Post a message to the group by clicking on ‘Messages’
4. Click on ‘Compose’
5. Type ‘question’ into the ‘To’ field
6. Add the question title in the ‘Subject’ field
7. Add your question in the ‘Message’ field. Please provide as much background as suitable, a clear question and desirable outcomes.

Those links again:

• Media Sandbox event network (for questions and networking)
• Media Sandbox formal registration page (for coming to the event in person)
• More information about Media Sandbox 2009 (about the scheme, proposals, etc.)

It covers all of our strategic planning, the tools we used, activities we pursued (and chose not to pursue), the lessons we learnt and the metrics we measured by. And there are some handy diagrams.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Here’s the intro:

“…Much has been made of the potential of web 2.0 or social media technologies to harness knowledge and network distributed communities, but how easy is it for organisations to effectively use these widgets and websites?

In November 2007, as part of the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme,  iShed set out to explore how organisations could integrate and deploy digital technologies and new facilitation methods to support collaborative research and build a Community Of Interest around a research topic…”

We set out on this trip with a mutual agreement to share our findings with others interested in the suitable application of all this web2.0 stuff in an organisation. I am proud that we got there and are publishing it.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington of iShed for being a pro-active, approriately daring, and wise collaborator.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate get in touch. The only constant is change and the learning never stops.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Other reports from this project:

• Launch event report
• Early case study
• Final event report

Here’s the blurb:

The questionnaire takes five minutes to complete, including questions on:

• Customer engagement strategy
• Tactics and initiatives
• Customer engagement and the economic climate

In return for your efforts, we will send you a link to a free full copy of the in-depth report just before it is published on the E-consultancy website in November.

Customer Engagement survey link

While all the news from the financial world is hair-raising, now is most definitely the time to buckle down and take your stakeholders seriously. If you don’t, they are bound to find someone else who will…

This sign is on the street down the road from where I live. It was put there by the amazingly admirable People’s Republic of Stoke’s Croft‘.

The street is called Stoke’s Croft and is in the middle of a tug of war between a range of ‘redevelopment’ forces – council, property developers, bottom up community folk, house owners, renters, anonymous private equity property holders, winos, homeless people, squatters, shop keepers, artists and more.

The sign makes me think about communities and our perspective on them every time I pass it.

I have worked with communities ‘being developed’, communities that ‘develop themselves’, and communities that do a bit of both. Each is very different, and require different approaches and activities. On the whole, it’s probably best to have a bit of both.

That’s it.

My bit is on how physical communities can be augmented by virtual communities, focusing on minority sports; pretty much as close to my core interests as you can get.

I’m going to consider a bit of theory and the importance of facilitation, then pull out some examples from groups support for less active people to the panoply of ways we interact in and around our local climbing centre in Bristol. Here’s the event blurb:

Over the course of the past three years the emergence of blogging, social networking services and platforms which showcase and share user generated content have transformed the possibilities of how we connect, converse and collaborate with one another.

’In the 20th Century, we were defined by what we owned, in the 21st Century we will be defined by what share and give away’ Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think

The potential for organisations and brands to harness these technologies and tools to engage with users, customers and their communities in radically new ways is becoming clear.

How can all those organisations working to promote active participation in sports and the brands that wish to sponsor their activates and campaigns work together to make the most of the unrivalled viral power and network effects of the web in the run up to 2012?

All Together Now will bring together leading social media developers and thinkers, sports governing bodies, communities’ sports organisations and some of our leading brands into a unique event to explore these opportunities.

Event site and booking here

With all the talk and early signs of an economic downturn the pressure on businesses to prove ROI on their marketing activities is greater than at any other point in the last twenty years. This changing climate will dictate not only where budgets will go but which companies will win and which will lose…

It will be on sale in printed form from 11th March, but it is a free download from the Winners and Losers website while stocks last. If you can get to the event on 11th March, I recommend it (details on the site) as well as the book.

I was going to write a short piece for it, but things didn’t end up that way, so here was the gist of what it was going to be:

Ed’s top tips:

1. Use Open Source software or free products wherever possible (not neccesarily with organisational single sign-on for example, but how about openid?
2. Use Open Source models and ideas reported elsewhere
3. Learn your lessons wisely and share the findings from your work with others freely
4. Embed the learning and resources in your organisation

This is how I work wherever possible. Most of my findings and lessons learnt from last year with CILIP, Amnesty, Media Sandbox (case study out next week) and others are available for nothing.

Some call it idealistic, but that’s fine by me. I don’t believe that ‘Knowledge in a box’ has much value, and that business plans built on hoarding IP are really sustainable any more. If you stuff knowledge in a box and hide it, you get a Schrodinger effect (quantuum knowledge anyone?).

It is better to share it, learn from it, converse around it and build upon it. See more on this from Miguel’s excellent analysis, or Verna Allee’s brilliant book The Future of Knowledge, which presents a variety of examples of how to share your product knowledge with your consumers in order to drive its development forward.

This approach has new assessment frameworks, sure, but these can be handled with approaches like Outcome mapping, currently used in the Development domain, which are far more participative and pragmatic than any of the other assessment models I have seen, much more suited to the basic fact that business is complex, and highly suitable to online community stuff.

If you want some uplifting thoughts on this subject I recommend reading Charles Leadbeater’s new book “We think: The power of mass creativity” (Thanks David), and combining those thoughts with those from the book “Enough” (Thanks Toby). That’s what I’m going to hint at at a couple of conferences this week.

I recently read some bits from ‘We think’ out loud to some strangers on the train it was so good, and thought I would share one here (I think I’m going to have to add a quotes category to this blog):

Markets trade products; communities breed knowledge. Ideas do not live in the minds of individuals but through a constant circulation as gifts. In the century to come well being will come to depend less on what we own and consume and more on what we can share with others and create together, especially as consumption becomes increasingly constrained by environmental concerns that mean we have to live more within collectively binding limits

This points firmly towards the original Cluetrain directions about the incoming integration of markets and communities through conversation and sharing.

Good work all!

I show the pictures about facilitation and moderation below to all clients (and anyone else who will listen) as the older I get, the more importance I associate with planning where neccesary. This post is largely based on the top of the triangles in the diagrams below; the strategy stuff. I chose a triangle to try to explain it because it seemed the most suitable. Possibly a spiral; whatever is the best visualisation technique, the most important thing is that strategy must come first.

Each client sees different things which I find fascinating; however, the core elements remain the same, which I hope I’ve captured here. As usual, I’m not saying this is the whole and secret truth delivered from a cloudy mountain top in stone tablets to a chap with a big beard in sandals – things like that are contextually tied, date instantly, break easily and are prone to hording by those who horde things and want power. And the elements continue to evolve every day.

Why do you do it?

Without a clear strategy you have no shared understanding, identity or language, no goals, nor purpose, no research questions, no desirable outcomes or KPIs, etc. etc. and all manner of excitment can ensue. Most problems I have had facilitating can probably be traced back to mis-understandings or mis-communications around the core point of the gig.

Whether you are preparing for a highly formal CoP environment or a wild-west bandy-legged open innnovation network, put time into the strategy bit. Plan where you can plan – even (perhaps especially) where you have your fingers crossed for that all hallowed ‘serendipitous emergence’.

What do you do and how do you do it?

It’s all about groundwork and foundations at the beginning. Start with your questions. What are you up to? What is it that you want? What does the sponsor organisation want? What will the participants want?

Why not start the immortal Kipling “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.”?

What do you do diagram

There are many ways to go about identifitying and agreeing your strategy, from top down management-led ‘build and they will come’ processes all the way to a new set of engagement strategies centred around involving as broad a range of participants as possible. These two approaches are at opposite ends of the spectrum and have different stages associated with them.

Know where you are on this spectrum and be true to yourselves. Set the expectations, boundaries and purpose. People like to know what sort of relationship they are in, and if participants feel hoodwinked or let down further down the line, they will speak loudly or vote with their feet (both entirely understandable in my opinion). This can lead to ‘moderation’ actions which rarely boost’s a system’s confidence.

This is just as true for consulting and designing physical events as it is for birthing new online spaces; think about it – it’s humans we are dealing with here.

Whether you can produce a formula for strategic community modelling is up for debate; there are certainly common elements and decisions in the planning process which need to be discussed (and regular actions like newsletters later on).

Each group will have its own dynamics, context, routines, totems and behaviours. Many of these will emerge over time. Attempts at producing and promoting fake behaviours may work, but are more likely to be millstones around the facilitators’ neck later on because people don’t like doing silly things that they are told to do, and the facilitator will become increasingly desparate and isolated as the owner of the silly things and the distance grows between the system’s actors.

A quick diversion via Serendipity:

Don’t look longingly at a serendiptiously formed movement, or an anonymous anarchic one, and pretend that is what you are doing. That is what witless marketeers do and people can smell it from miles away. There is nothing wrong with planning.

Serendipity is a joyous thing; humans need to connect in ways they could never have imagined and the web affords that generously and beautifully. You can see patterns in retrospect and learn from them, but it isn’t possible to be them in this disguise – by the very nature of your planning.

Serendipity-wise, you have four choices:

1. Pretend your movement is serendipitious
2. Chase serendipity
3. Surf it when its wave breaks
4. Plan for a space which affords it

The third option is beautiful. I admire those spotters who see the crests and curls of rising emotio-energetic waves breaking in cyberspace, grab their virtual surfboards and lead a movement from the fore into the unknown with gall and daring. This is crazy brand and campaigning and sudden stuff. They opt for a distributed model.

Here is a gratuitous picture of ‘Serendipity’ extracted drunkenly from the notorious Matt Webb at Thayer Chinwag’s mega-bash last year when this Serendipity angle was going to be a whole blog post.

For planning purposes, I suggest the fourth is the only way to go.

And a cautious toe in the water of ‘emergence’:

Find out about David Snowden’s teenager party analogy if you fancy. It was big on the Knowledge Management circuit a few years ago and has left many of us with a feeling that you can over-manage un-plannable things.

In a nutshell, he said that you wouldn’t organise a teenager’s party with milestones, deliverables, flip charts and whiteboards; you would chuck a few ‘attractors’ in (balls, bats, games etc.), set clear boundaries and offer great fear of over-stepping them, and then let it rip (and go and drink real ale while watching rugby probably). Other approaches will stifle any ‘serendipitous outcomes’ in their obssession with order and control (which is essentially some form of Utopia, which is a worry, but let’s not start on that).

Using this analogy, once you have the core stuff sorted (more on that further down), set the boundaries and attractors, step back and light the fuse. But don’t then walk away to the real ale pub and watch rugby; watch, observe, engage, be involved, learn. See the patterns with your facilitator’s third eye, understand them and build on them. If participants don’t like particular bits of your community model, change them; if they find cool things they use without your planning, promote them. It’s their space.

The point of the Serendipity divergence is: at the strategy stage, you need to build in effective facilitation pattern to take this into account.

Back to: How do you do it?

Tools exist to help core teams assess and build their strategies. Dan Dixon and I run strategic workshops using pattern languages (more on them soon), David Wilcox has some great ‘games’ (simulation exercises), Nancy White does amazing graphic facilitation, Beth Kanter has loads on strategy thinking for the NGO sector, people build and use personas, psychological touchpoint analyses, content assessments, taxonomies, then stick to user-centred-design principles and there are much much more; the most important point is to build a common understanding of the model, shared language and socio-technical direction.

How do you do it diagram

There will always be a core team whether you are highly centralised or totally distributed; someone somewhere has to make some decisions, so identify this group for starters.

Get a clear understanding of your community model, patterns, purpose and related language. Use that language to express the community’s emerging identity to all stakeholders as the stakeholder landscape expands. The language can change, but make sure that when you say ‘community’, or ‘forum’, or ‘reccommendation’ or ‘banana’ that everyone knows exactly what you mean. Many mis-understandings have come from different interpretations of a word.

Having got the core team aboard, start thinking like a team. They usually weren’t a team before (see CILIP case study). Understand what you are up to.

If you are in an organisation, advocate within the organisation to recognise the team’s work, reward the team, and identify this practice and knowledge as a new and valuable practice. Miguel Cornejo Castro’s latest excellent paper on ‘the knowledge wave‘ has a lot on this which I highly reccommend. Then you can expand your stakeholder horizons.

Ann Holmes and David Wilcox’s consideration of engagement with my arrows expressing the process

Once you have your core understandings and processes, you have two choices:

1. If your technology is already decided:

Proceed directly to launch and run an inclusive discursive pilot phase (not forgetting the Serendipity bit) to help a representative group of participants charactise the space for themselves, discuss the rules, the processes etc. You are likely to need support in this activity so identify some champions to help you out.

Do this publicly, but maintain it as a pilot – everyone is learning and there is nothing wrong with that. Collect findings and opinions and buildthem into a new model more closely suited to the participants. This may involve changing the technology later, so have some resource for that outcome. Try to organise at least one open event for people to network, learn and share their opinions. As you progress down this path, keep a log for your organisation so that it can learn, and all your work can be shared if another group needs to be set up elsewhere.

2. If your technology is still unspecified:

Get real people into a physical space before you even say the word ‘technology’. Don’t even mention a computer; consider with your people, who they are and what they want and need. Educate them about the principles of networking with an easy and fun workshop. Help them express their activities and hopes in the physical world and map these to technical affordances.

This will give everyone a clear view and say, and thus ownership of the network/community/group model to co-design, understand and discuss.

This can be done with graphic facilitation, group mind-maps, open space led emergence etc. This is tricky and not as sleek as option 1; nor does it give the host organisation the control that option 1 has (which, when you are considering a community tool neccesarily linked to multiple membership databases is a significant issue).

It puts the decisions firmly in the hands of the people and is a thoroughly engagement-focused method most suited to pretty adventurous organisations. Things they want may not be possible which you may only find out later.

Be honest with people.

If for no other reason, do this because otherwise you will create aggravation later. Whichever process you chose, your decisions at this stage will have significant implications when you are facilitating and moderating.

Understand your ‘community’ as a being that will change over time – establish an effective organisational interface to handle this and take your engagement processes seriously.

An organisation who hosts an online community and mentions the word ‘engagement’ but is not actively involved in the space is not actively engaging. This may be fine for some models, but if your members expect engagement with the organisation, and are investing their time in the community space, you should make sure that your organisation will respond suitably as and when required.

This may make people who prefer to run things behind closed doors feel queasy, so if you don’t mean it, don’t do it.

I’m keen as I always run scenario workshops with clients when we are thinking about setting up/partnering with/exploring/structuring new communities (inspired by ‘Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage‘ (Saint Onge, Wallace, Butterworth Heineman, 2003) ; in fact I’m particularly proud of being able to come up with some utterly ghastly scenarios.

You can never have enough scenarios – The following list is from a number of members’ input (with permission) when Helen asked if:

“…anyone as any headings/topics to share that they would put in their risk analysis (especially if based on previous experience)…”

Helen Whitehead:

Lack of buy-in from senior stake-holders including budget holders
Limitations of current IT infrastructure and IT policies
Limitations of software choice / software not fit for purpose
Sustainability after setup and particularly the lack of appreciation of the ongoing moderator role
Staff changes

Tamara Littleton (eModeration.com):

Under age registration
Negative discussion about company/brand/client
Negative reaction to project in press/blogs/other sites
Advertising or spam on site
Disagreement of moderator decision
Illegal content
Non-consenting content (video/images of people without giving permission)
Copyrighted content
Online harrasment of users outside of community
Stalking of users
Child safety
Users spam others outside of the community
Spam within the community
User posts personally identifable information (PII)
Inppropriate content
Fraudulent access to another user’s account
Hackers attack the site

Vanessa DiMauro:

Organizational integration: failure for the community knowledge assets (info from the community) to be delivered/integrated into the other areas of the business (e.g. – sales/marketing/product development etc.)
The community thrives but the org doesn’t see the real value
Failure to plan for scale – technically or operationally, failure to manage (subgroups etc) community size before it gets too big
Poorly defined governance of community: who is responsible for content, moderation, sales, sponsorships, technology etc in the short term is often different over time.
Need to plan for creation of community and transition planning.
Renewing sponsors is always more difficult than getting sponsors/partners/etc.
Plan for quarterly newsletters and information sharing with sponsors early and often to demonstrate value

Rikki Chequer:

Abuse of Private messaging systems (not easily tracked)
Impersonation of someone/ some organisation in UGC content
Forum wars ( it happens !)
Link spam

Ian Dickson:

Overoptimism. This is one for the those pushing a community project – if you get buy in and resources based on over-optimistic assessments of the impact of the community, the resources needed to support it or the timescales involved, it’s all going to end in tears.Of course this is no reason not to be optimistic (you’re making a sales pitch, of course you are optimistic), but be aware when you are making promises that are close to the wire, and be willing to accept the adversity potential. Always know when to walk away – if you want 50K and get 25K, is that really enough? Is it not enough on its own but is enough to prove the project sufficient to get more, or is it just enough to hang yourself with.

Ed (me): on membership angle:

Democratic model/social model – communities could interfere with pre-existing groups/branches etc.
Integrating staff into membership relationships
ROI: not properly assessed or clearly outlined or balanced between sponsor and member
Expectations of interaction figures (participtation ratio) – millions of posts when it might be much less
Value of interaction figures – why do you want them to interact?
Other networks pre-existing – do you want to replace them, be in parallel with them, compete with them?
Stuffing people into technical boxes without fulling understanding their requirements and behaviours
Facilitating incorrectly for the context

Liz Cable:

Not fully understanding which elements of the community will be/are already in competition, and which will be collaborative, especially assuming motivation for collaboration when in fact the community (parts of it, or functions of it) are basically competitive.
Not fully understanding or implementing privacy elements for creating groups within groups.
What functionality should be personal, team-led, available to the whole community, or available to all.
Not working with the external part of the community – offline and in real life – properly (been said elsewhere, but I think its vital so I dare to repeat )
Ed – re ROI above – is there a way of defining ROI for communities – or is that a whole other wiki?

I’m sure it doesn’t stop there, but this is good food for thought. If you fancy adding any more, add it either to here or to the wiki page.