This report covers the period of January 2009 until December 2011. It is made up of some contextual background, brief outlines about the central project elements, two key stories, some figures, and a budgeted timeline. There is much more behind this report; to dive into more detail read Ed the author’s blog, or contact him directly with questions.

It is a big thank you to our funders, Tudor Trust, for giving Transition Network £50,000 for an unspecified and unknown web platform. We feel that we have used the money sensibly to build the new platform and open up new channels for the movement, and hope that Tudor feel that they made a good investment.

Another purpose of the report is to encourage other people responsible for web projects to do it themselves; take ownership of their project, accept the unpredictable outcomes and have a more resilient, affordable web system than an external service provider could produce.

(Picture: Most of Transition Network staff and board after web project approved, June 2009)

This blog post has the introduction and the context and role sections (without the nice pictures). It does not have the other sections on:

• The central project elements (Technologist group, core information directories, webhosts, content strategy, community emergence, web survey results, the Sharing Engine)
• Two case studies (Ingredients directory and Social Reporting ‘Stories’ project)
• Budgeted timeline
• Achievements and figures
• The big last thank you

For those you need to download the documents below:

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

Introduction

Working in complex situations on multi-stakeholder systems can be like being dropped into an intimidating forest, but seeking others to do your work isn’t the answer! In this sense, the report hopes to be like a breadcrumb trail in the forest, left by a group who mapped their context, and want to support others who doing the same thing.

The big lesson from our experience is that it would not have been possible to have predicted where we would be now, then. Because so much changes as you progress.

If we had produced a detailed and fixed project plan with a product roadmap (which we could have done) it could have felt reassuring in ‘the deep in the dark forest days’ of early 2009, but it would have been wrong for late 2011.

The web project we see now has grown out of experiences and connections from all of the stakeholders, working together in a ‘constellation’ on and offline, facilitated rather than project managed, in iterative technical and social loops hung together with communications and agility, rather than control at its core.

(Picture: Transition Technologist group meets for the first time, November 2009)

This is illustrated with the two case studies which show that our two biggest products were at best just twinkles in peoples’ eyes in 2009, and the result of exploring the connections between people and ideas and technology, rather than having a big vision, then trying to predict, control and micro-manage the future and the unknown.

This is also a thank you to all the staff at Transition Network, the Transition Technologist group, and all the Transitioners who got on board with the project, all of whom worked on an un-defined project that deliberately tried not to control the future, but share responsibility for understanding and optimising the present.

“It gives a wider perspective on transition activity than the local group can achieve. I think it is important to continue showing the bigger picture and offering encouragement to local groups as it can sometimes be a struggle to remain upbeat.”

“Helps us remember that we’re not alone, because it can be hard to keep up the big effort required.”

(2011 web project survey response)

Context and role

A great deal has changed since the web project officially began. Indeed it could be argued that ‘change’ itself is accelerating in a world that seems to get more and more bizarre and challenging every day.

Amid this context, the Transition Towns movement has grown rapidly in numbers and matured broadly in concept. Every day there is something new from somewhere new. Initiatives are springing up all over the world facing different challenges with different people trying different projects in different cultures, with different needs.

Needless to say, Transition Network offers pragmatic support for the emergence of the movement; it is grassroots led so we do not seek to control it. It is a highly charged and creative environment, making for intense professional and personal challenges. There is never a moment at which things are quiet, or ‘the same as yesterday’, or something is not urgent, or brand new and requiring immediate action.

Thus the web project began in an endlessly changing context. Unlike a standard organisation, it is keeping up with a movement that is moving too fast and unpredictably to second guess. This is a challenging situation, particularly if you try to predict what ‘web product’ a movement will need in the future.

In light of this, the web team focused on three interconnected things:

1. Identify the boundaries. Build a shared view of a Transition web ‘constellation’ or ‘field’ with all the various initiative websites, social networks, blogs, etc. and the flows between them, and do not put Transition Network in the middle
2. Work with the ‘field’. Build relationships with all types of users and facilitate the emergence of supportive social groups (editorial, technical, facilitation) across the field to share roles and responsibilities as they spring up
3. Produce a robust, flexible technical platform that any reasonable developer can learn about, and work on without too much trouble. See it as a hard working shared bicycle rather than a specialised work of art!

In this plan, the platform could be extended in many directions with a facilitation model to handle the social requirements arising and share the power among the users. Then, ultimately, the Transition Network ‘website’ could move from being a highly visible, central website owned by Transition Network toward a transparent web service, moderated by Transitioners to support and promote the initiatives websites.

(diagram to explain the wide array of Transition related activity on the internet, and how the Transition Network website is not in the middle of it, preferring to see itself as part of a ‘constellation’ supported by a ‘Sharing Engine’ using web standards and services)

This worked for us. Transition Network is comfortable with navigating the unknown, and changing plans when the need arises, rather than sticking to one grand plan.

Importantly, it also promotes the concept of accepting responsibility for unknown outcomes, successful or not successful, without blame. This means that individuals carry great responsibility in the team, but not fear of blame in case of failure; indeed ‘failure’ is seen as an entity where no learnings were extracted from an unsuccessful piece of work.

This is common sense to us, but we found that it is contradictory to most organisations’ web strategies, which are there to reflect a central institution’s self-image, and indeed, many people’s expectations; we are trained to respect centralised power. Our plan had been from the start to challenge centralised power – especially our own.

(Picture: Charlotte (Stories editor) and Mike (Newsletter editor) at the 2011 Transition Network conference)

After an initial burst of work to get the platform up, technical work was handled in focused phases with small budgets, delivering required enhancements and maintenance, identified by the users and prioritised by the web team.

“… It keeps me well intentioned, to create something that the world can believe in. I am so excited when I see my project featured on the side of the projects map, after adding content to my page. This keeps my project exciting, that there is a global network which my project is connected with, despite its small size. This is good, I believe, because despite its small size, the potential is there for great ideas to spawn. thanks, so much”

(2011 web project survey response)

…

For more, please download…

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

I am suddenly inspired to write this up after enjoying Ron Donaldson‘s excellent ecological explanation of web2 and Dominic Campbell‘s admirable work for Barnet Council at Unicom’s social tools conference this week (great write ups of the sessions from Suw on Corante).

Three pieces came together for me at the conference today:

• Judith Lewis from iLevel said “… the internet taught me to be an extrovert…”
• Ron Donaldson said “… the early adopters patterned our direction…” (when describing how all these www2 tools have been adopted and the patterns of their use laid out)
• earlier conversations with Dominic Campbell (who told me to write this up in April) about twitter and personalities and public declarations as how we may be experiencing “declarative immaturity”

This is a piece about networking: past, present, and future.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

It’s meant to be delivered with a mix of semi-serious bafflement about these www2 tools which I use all the time (and the stupid things I have done with them) combined with moderate rage about how we are in the middle of some briliant changes but also a huge amount of hype and evangelism which can alienate the very people we want to enthuse.

Without a doubt, the comedy angle of it will be lost in my rambling verbiage write up, so remember it’s half curmudgeonly, half comedic observation. And I will go on a plain English course, soon.

The current setting is an industry with software providers and agencies primarily interested in shifting product or selling adverts on web services with some brilliant editorial and specific technical affordances designed to encourage ‘growth’.

Compering this situation are somewhat evangelist early adopters encouraging certain patterns of use that they have found suits them personally (see Crossing the Chasm for the risks of this in marketing speak).

On top of that is our great societal paradigm of ‘Growth’ (which was built on unfeasible debt, astoundingly greedy bonuses and the gradual transfer of state monies to the private sector).

On the growth theme, we’re also seeing a cultural tendency in these softwares and practices towards celebrating quantity in our lives as we count and publicly display our ‘value’ in terms of numbers of friends, comments on our blogs, size of our name in our friends’ tag clouds, recommendations on linkedin etc.

It’s like being a teenager obssessed with how many friends you have, but it all being laid open for all to see. Yes you can ignore it, but it’s tough.

I’m not saying that people don’t value their online interactions qualitatively, but too often I have seen inferences that people are better than others or more qualified for work because of how many contacts they have.

Think of the old addage ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ but on gnarly stimulants. People do this for themselves – they ‘game’ these social networks to see how many contacts they can get; groups are set up with the sole purpose of being the ‘biggest’ group.

The message is written (not so) implicitly all over the networking technology: ‘more friends is better’.

Dunbar’s theory on the practicalities of this aside, this all makes me feel rather uncomfortable and un-loved (ah poor me) when I foolishly compare myself to others. For some time I thought it was just me being so neurotic in a curmudgeonly response to fads, but further to sharing these feelings it seems others feel the same way.

In parallel to this, we are learning what is public, private, personal and political, and what to say in public with our social tools.

I have made some amazingly stupid (but harmless) blunders on almost every social tool; but it’s a new world and thus it’s OK to do stupid things as long as we learn from them. The boundaries between these four are blurring rapidly and different people’s ethics come into play.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

For example, an indignant and possibly righteously furious ex-employee of an organisation might be tempted to tell the world how they have been badly handled; whether this is ‘professional’ or ‘public’ or not is up for debate, let alone the discovery that the world doesn’t really like hearing this sort of thing; it discomforts people to hear of others misfortune and, frankly they would rather not know. Either way, airing your wounded pride may not necessarily be the best thing.

I am well aware that I could simply not use all this groovy new social networking stuff (as I have been told when I am also being called a neurotic curmudgeon), but I like it and I range from helpless declarer of things or total recluse.

If ‘networking is the future’, along with transparency and open-ness as we are repeatedly told, then more ‘quality’ needs to go into the design of the products and the messages sent out by early adopters.

We are also in the middle of a huge wave of new bottom-up, open, cheap, inclusive, participatory, engaging conferences, driven by the people for the people.

I’m a big fan of them. I design and run them. I’m one of the early adopter evangelist types in this instance (my blended facilitation work uses online social networking before and after the conference too), dragging people out from the quiet corners, forcing them to collaborate, waving my horn around.

Although I keenly try not terrorise the shy people, and try to include interventions that benefit all types of person. Ahem.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

Likewise, network and community facilitators may make efforts to ensure that the ‘power laws of personality’ (whereby popular confident people get more popular and thus are identified as more important etc.) are handled sensitively in order to help groups achieve their goals by including everyone’s offerings. A similar subject is seen at a recent debate around Open Space facilitation for example.

In the land of online communities, the KPIs are still focused largely on numbers of people, numbers of comments, ratio of readers to commenters etc. In the ‘knowledge’ world, assessing ‘knowledge’ transfer or transformation still eludes beleaguered knowledge management professionals, so the temptation is to place value on quantity (docs, contacts etc.). Hmm…

People who don’t make endless comments in online communities are called ‘lurkers’, and community managers are told to drag them out into the open and ‘convert’ them – success being seen as them making comments, which can be counted and presented in a fancy report to management.

It’s wrapped up in nice talk about engagement, but if not handled sensitively, rather whiffs of centralised community dictatorship. I’ve been there and know that when you obssess over this as the facilitator, you make a rod for your own back when you have other routes to ‘success’.

For example, when we decided to publish the first community book on KnowledgeBoard, we found that many of the people who stepped forward to voluntarily write whole chapters (not ‘metoo’ comments in a forum or empty nice comments to blogs) had not made any comments onsite ever – it just wasn’t their thing.

Who are we to (albeit non-directly) tell people to behave in a way that suits us?

(See the presentation on slideshare)

We are in a time when it is considered very important to behave in a highly extroverted manner with a public display of how many people we know.

What about the shy people? Those less confident than the highly literate www2-ers? They who aren’t attracted to shiney new gadgets? Those who just don’t get ‘technology’. How about the busy people? Those who feel uncomfortable in big groups? People with no small talk?

It breaks my heart that people using social networking technology can be made to ‘feel small’ by a friend of theirs’ tag cloud (and before you snort derisively, they do). That is not good design; that is blunt and myopic. And the business logic behind it? If you convince people they have to make more friends, they will see more pages, which means more advertising.

Do we all have to learn to be extroverted? That would be a new tyranny – the tyranny of ‘social’.

I referred to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to express the point about how we are all different. I know it attracts disparate opinions but dont’ get hung up on it.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

My point being that networks, communities, events, pubs, offices, squats etc. are composed of people who are different. Being that they are different, I bet that they would want different approaches to their social interactions, not this new tyranny.

Odds on, some of them won’t be good at having millions of friends, and might prefer to have deeper relationships with fewer people. Yes, they can still use the technology, but all the messages in and around it are implicitly discouraging this, which makes them feel bad.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to feed the cats and worry that I’m publicly declaring nonsense…

So – some ideas about the future of networking:

• People will tire of the relentless networking ‘growth’ paradigm just as most bloggers eventually tire of relentless blogging (links from one google search ‘taking a break from blogging), and others learn to turn their mobile phones off
• We’ll start seeing the networkers being network-ed out and taking a break and telling us how great occasional solitude is.
• The software providers will adjust their packages’ design to afford deeper relationships between users
• ‘Networking’ will move from ‘growth’ to take more purposeful ‘knowledge-y’ stuff into account, and services like twine will focus on groups congregating around activities and objects rather than random chat and endless expansion, while other services like the Cynefin software will finally bring qualitative analysis to the fore
• ‘Unconferences‘ will increasingly focus on specific issues and become more ‘constructivist‘
• Community and network facilitators will learn to know their members better and focus on network optimisation based on qualitative interaction analysis rather than ‘number of members’
• ‘Engagement planning’ will consider people in their context long before processes and technology appear on the agenda
• Those who say that ‘Community’ has gone from being local to being interest-based and global will find that the ‘local’never went away, it just didn’t need any sell-able technology (beyond door knockers on your neighbours’ doors)

Simon and the iglab collective in Bristol are running another night of games, gaming, game theory and other stuff like that down at the Pervasive Media lab on Tuesday 11 March. Anyone can come and all are welcome. :

This time it’s personal… thats not just hyperbole this month iglab has a theme. Personal relationships.

Recommended.

Event booking link

More on iglab

Simon’s been doing some serious head-scratching about Swarm theory and gaming as part of his Media Sandbox commission so he’s probably a good person to be running a game workshop too

I’m going through a bit of a lofi phase at the moment (just put in a proposal for an entirely physical conference intervention around pervasive group knowledge including post-it notes and bamboo poles) and am looking forward to the night’s lofi games as well as the techno-pervasive stuff, but all of it will be fun and and learning-oriented.

Here be a prediction: ‘social networking’ and ‘gaming’ will become more prevelant as facilitation techniques in community development practice, but that’s another story.

Come and enjoy.

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.

Pete Ferne and Dan Dixon grouping a mindmap at The Media Sandbox community launch event. Are they facilitating, moderating, re-purposing, or nothing at all?

Facilitation:

Is largely around helping people connect, share, and learn together; disrupting the walls that keep them apart, understanding the purpose behind their interactions and assisting them achieve this in the longer term.

Knowing who they are and how they interact, and not dragging them into communal contexts they would naturally shy away from or drive others wild with rage.

Understanding where the knowledge lies in the network and how to approach it.

Knowing the people: when to bring in an extrovert, or when to refer to an introvert (yes I know that is a wide generalisation). Knowing when the big picture stuff is good and when to focus and produce detailed stuff, and who is good at that too. And while I’m on the whole personality and behaviour thing (more on that soon), having a feel for which tool, or which community outcome, different participants will be attracted to.

Moderation:

Is the coalface end end of the model. From member logins, to moving threads, via editing comments (be careful you then become a ‘secondary publisher’ and thus own the words legally). You can pre-moderate conversations, or post-moderate them. I say post-moderate, and only when someone complains with good reason. Do not let rules and moderation processes get in the way of knowledge creation through firey conversations; this is a careful balance and can kill good mailing lists and other spaces.

When issues arise, ‘moderation’ is the set of communications and processes thing that deals with them.

Either a problem needs to be escalated through pre-existing organisational processes, or new community based ones. It all needs to be transparent.

When it has to be done, doing it elegantly. If you want some practice, throw a party and then find yourself having to physically push a leery mate (who is only wearing one shoe for some reason) out of your front door at 6am and be decent about it at the same time.

Is best done on the back of communally and transparently discussed rules and processes which you should have done in the preparation phase of the group. That way the rules are owned by the community who had a chance to get involved in them, and understand that they are there for the best general purpose.

Thus when the moderator is being publicly and loudly compared to Attilla the Hun or the baby eating bishop of Bath and Wells by your outgoing resident nutter who everyone quietly wishes would push off but is a bit scared of, or doesn’t want to put their heads above the parapet) or being referred to the universal declaration of human rights, or free speech, or some other external declaration of something the nutter refers to, everyone knows what the rules are, how they came into being, and why the nutter is being stuffed, reasonably, out the door.

Never nice. If you are a facilitator who likes the fringes, it may be someone you really like. And it’s only really necessary in centralised controlled spaces, but it can happen very rarely, so have your groundwork up your sleeve.

Don’t believe that ‘the community will self-police’ and thus not bother set up proper processes. I hear this from people and think ‘hmm nice, but the wrong advice’. You don’t want to scare people setting up community spaces, but as Miguel introduced me to, ‘believe in Allah but tie your camel’.
In my experience in both worlds, when someone goes off on one and loses the plot, people rarely self-police. They hope someone will handle it. Why else do we have a police force? There’s always one person who tackles the issue. I have seen this in trains, libraries, squats, festivals, street corners, shops.

Why people don’t approach trouble makers is another question: are they afraid of the tribulation that that might entail or do they not want to be disliked? Either way, someone has to do it. So do it with spirit and heart and love, and with the utilitarian perspective of the group at large at the front of your mind.

It won’t happen often, I promise.

Somewhere in between lie the editorial skills of coaxing conversations out of people, re-purposing, summarising, bashing out newsletters, and otherwise helping the community digest and share its findings.

As usual it is not meant to be a statement of absolute truth – more a lens through which to think about things, and the three types of activity are not mutually exclusive. And I expect there are spelling mistakes and some weird tangents – I’m a facilitator type not an editor, so bear with me, it’s a long one. So make a cup of tea, deep breath, here we go…

Centralised facilitation:

The focus is entirely within the community boundary, usually one on technical platform. The emphasis is on the ‘Community’ and most of the members activity takes place in view of all the other members (apart from member-member messaging on some platforms). ‘Traditional’ measurements are drawn from the one platform being used – number of posts, replies, documents up/downloaded, page views etc. These have been well established in many places and a more formal view on them can be seen in Communities of Practice work like Miguel Cornejo Castro or Patricia Wolf.

Participation-wise, generally, Jakob Nielsen’s 90, 9, 1 participation rule applies. Have a look at the copyright notice as well – you might find that the people providing the technology claim a right to your words in more ways than one; best to check.

The social activity is around encouraging conversation and optimising knowledge exchange, networking and services integrated to the organisation. The facilitator (let’s call this person you for this post) encourages members to behave the same way, in accordance to a standard set of rules and processes, and hopes that if a member gets ‘over-excited’ and risks offending others that the others will intervene before any moderation needs to take place.

It is best to include the members in discussions around the rules and processes if possible – it is their community. They may not be interested, but if you don’t offer them a chance, when you are in a tough moderation situation with an irrate member banging on about free speech, human rights or Geneva Convention, you need to know that you are applying the rules which belong to the wider community, not just some mysterious sponsor.

Likewise the processes – should you find yourself banning someone, the communications may be private (or not – all your communications must assume that they will be shared with others), but the process must be clear and fair. Banning people is rare and sad – usually it is someone who you feel could be wonderful if only they could ‘behave’, but that very desire of yours is mis-guided; the behaviours that make them most exciting are the things that could well see them banned.

There is a pressure for everyone to behave in the same way; this type of community risks wanting to be like the Land of the Houyhnhnms from Gulliver’s travels (where everyone gets on and is the same (ie: so boring he ran away), and, given the commons nature of the space, the facilitator can expect to be drawn into resolving arguments should they come, and will be expected to resolve them on the basis of the rules and the ‘general peace’.

Other facilitation risks include members ‘over-posting’ and swamping others with their posts – this behaviour can come from trolls and champions alike – sometimes members can feel over-managed and punch ups can occur (I can be both, I know it). Facilitators can expect to be sharing the space with members who have been there longer than them, or know more about the topic than them; this can lead to the members feeling a greater right to the space, more ownership rights if you like – which needs to be navigated with caution; they have a point.

It is tempting to focus on a need to endlessly want more posts, more comments, more more more; and should this not happen a facilitator can feel sad. But why is this? I suspect it comes from a financial driver behind the community (publishing sites will be driven by ad sales based on eyeballs), or the community’s hosts desire to feel that they are sparking great conversations (our community has the best conversations).

The key is quality, not quantity. And need – people will come to places with a need when it arises and ask in places they trust. The trick is to keep the community alive in the meantime but it can feel a bit desperate sometimes if the facilitator just wants ‘posts’ for posts’ sake.

Don’t expect all the members to be vocal; all people are different. A facilitator is likely to be relatively extraverted and is tempted to expect the same of others. Resist this urge; it’s vain and rather arrogant.

In fact, many of the community members will be introverted and won’t want to rush in and tell everyone their views on everything. They might be wonderful at finding information for others while conversations are in motion, or simply enjoy being ‘passive’ readers. Whatever you do, resist the urge to call them ‘lurkers’; the word sucks.

Please don’t start banging on about ‘converting the lurkers’ – if you do, it’s a sure sign that the community’s model is dominating which will make many people feel oppressed.

Great things can happen in these spaces. Brilliant conversations, serendipidous discoveries, projects start around topical conversations, members form alliances and lobby for cool activities. When I was editor of KnowledgeBoard we moved from a focus on posts measurement and centralised facilitation to exploring the fringes: having physical events and exploring new facilitation techniques, a community book (now in it’s third cycle) where members willingly wrote chapters for no cash etc.

But this model is not so trendy any more. With the advent of blogs and other personal tools, people don’t need to converge in centralised communities owned and maintained by publishers or associations or other bodies; they can build their own. Likewise, Social networking, focused around the individual rather than the community, has taken off and given individuals far more control over their public/private divide (although most social networking sites are still ‘walled gardens’).

Also, there has been a cultural move away from identifying oneself as part of a ‘community’ – it’s all about networks and enlightened self-interest at the moment. This will swing back in a while; a middle ground will be found once the community spaces have made their boundaries more porous and learnt to allow a bit more individualism, third party applications, and more gaming/social networking practices in.

De-centralised facilitation:

We live in a world of multi-membership, multi-platform opportunities which are challenging the membership model every day. Why are they members? What information and services can you provide that members cannot find elsewhere, provided by publishers, event providers, domain experts or simply their peers with blogs or on free bulletin boards? who says that your community is the best place for your type of knowledge anyway? Is it?

De-centralised facilitation is a recognition that members cannot give 100% of their attention to any one centralised community in this environment, and going to where they reside.

It is a dropping of the organisational ego in some ways; an understanding that we cannot command the attention of our increasingly information challenged members.

A phrase was coined describing this phenonenom: “Constant partial attention syndrome” (good slashdot discussion about it here). It is the reality. The centralised expectation of ‘build and they will come’ is no longer the truth, and the traditional community facilitation model has evolved.

This form of facilitation is complimentary to the centralised facilitation. Community facilitators and champions are out and about beyond the formal membership boundaries (and the login), advocating for the organisation and providing members and non-members with a representative in their spaces. Facilitators will find themselves across flickr, youtube, myspace, facebook, bebo, multiply, xing etc. They have no control in these spaces, only the opportunity to participate and advocate, guide and direct conversations. Each of these new spaces has different types of behaviours and ways of communicating; you will need to learn these.

You have a choice about this too – do you (as community facilitator) go out and do your stuff in each one, or do you recruit champions in each one, and run a champions network to support them? Suddenly you are a volunteer manager…

This takes place on blogs talking about the domain material or the organisation, social networks with related groups and other message boards. This is not to say that the centralised hub is dead; NO no no. But it is a smaller hub.

The centralised hub is still the only place you can guarantee a specific controlled environment in which formal discussions, membership services, engagement activities can take place, and this should be clearly defined as a difference and benefit to the more de-centralised activities. People should not expect formal organisation processes outside of the hub.

Measurement in this model is emerging. There are no management tools that cover all these different spaces yet, but there will be. When I worked with Amnesty in 2007, we worked across a few different spaces and had to measure by hand, but with recent announcements about being able to port data out of facebook, it is highly likely a new tool will emerge to aggregate data from different spaces into one dashboard (anyone want to help me build one?). But before the tool should come many questions: is the number of members in a facebook group more significant than the number of friends in myspace? Is a group in facebook more valuable than a list in Multiply? etc.

So, most facilitators should expect to be doing both centralised and de-centralised facilitation – here’s a picture to express that:

Facilitating inside and outside the login:

Distributed facilitation:

Now we’re cooking with psychaedelic rocket fuel. As with the previous two models, there is a ‘hub’ but now it is tiny and not the centre of the community’s universe. But ‘Community’ does exist; at the very least in that people wish to share stuff with eachother for benefit beyond their immediate self-interest.

The community’s universe is everywhere and anywhere; it is a passing thought in my brain as I upload a photo to flickr and add it to the community’s group therein, a flicker of selflessness as I bookmark an interesting website and add a tag to share it with others using the same keyword etc.

Although I am not logged into and fully focused in the central space, I am thinking of the community, and the community has made it possible for me to share things with it on my terms, in my spaces, in my preferred method.

I don’t have to conform to any centralised behaviours and won’t be cheered on by a gung-ho facilitator. All of my stuff is my stuff – the community does not have any rights over it beyond my choice of copyright.

But this doesn’t mean the concept of community is not useful and powerful. As our lives are flooded with reams of irrelevant information and unreliable information sources, the role of the editor (in a new form) is going to become more needed, not less. People are busy predicting the death of the newspaper, but not the editor. This competence will grow in the facilitator’s requirements.

The playing field is now much flatter than it was 10 years ago. As facilitators we don’t have the big stick of ‘Community’ with the underlying threat of banishment, we only have the lure of benefits by thematic knowledge sharing and networking built around our community being interesting.

The community can now be banned by the individual, not the other way around. Nice. I like to know we are all being kept on our toes.

The ‘community’ is now a ‘community defined by keyword’ rather than a log into a walled garden. The key is in aggregating all this activity from multiple locations into one space and making sense of it there (see the editor role), and providing a central space from which to present the group’s identity and advocate on its behalf, without ever demanding the group go there. Debates may take place in a shared space, some of them may be private. Maybe multiple debates will take place in different locations; a distributed democracy. Who knows?

Facilitation in this model is widely distributed and doesn’t revolve around trying to make people converge, conform and behave. In fact, it is almost the inverse; it is about finding people from far flung corners, identifying them as valuable, and seeking their permission to share their knowledge and experience with you and others. On their terms.

You will be researching, establishing and supporting groups in different social networks. Understanding that each different social network has different behaviours, language, traditions and measurables. You will be measuring activity in these social networks suitably and making sense of it in the organisation’s HQ.

You will be finding the members’ opinions by reaching out to them instead of sending a survey from your survey engine to a clearly defined mailing list. You will be working with champions who have already established groups in different social networks, and do actually have more knowledge than you and experience than you, and can negotiate on their own terms.

You will be facilitating information sharing between members across the groups with technical tools, and embracing the fact that knowledge assets (pictures, videos, documents, bookmarks) are the individual’s property and they can do what they want with them. If you are representing an organisation, as well as externally facilitating, you will be establishing effective and sustainable knowledge and information infrastructures around your organisation based on these shifting sands outside.

It is your privilege that they choose to share with you. You have to understand that your best chance of engagement is by going to where they are and speaking in their language and listening as well as counting how many times they say things in your controlled environment, fitting the figures into a spreadsheet, comparing it to last year’s ‘growth’ and calling that engagement and community.

“So, what sort of thing do you mean when you say – we want a community?”

Just as there are over 1,000 definitions of ‘Community’, so I am not trying to say ‘this is the absolute truth’; perhaps add these to the growing list. They are models to assist with understanding, conversations, planning etc.

The three are not necessarily sequential; although (1) and (2) could be as an organisation opens its previously private communities up to the wider web. (3) is very unlikely to follow (1) or (2) as it is rather different in nature – but it could, I guess.

Each of these has a related ‘facilitation’ style which I (and fellow facilitators and clients) have found works. I will write another post about the facilitation styles in due course. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this way to think about stuff.

Centralised community:

This is a diagram representing a traditional online community with a clear boundary defined by membership and related login. This could be a closed google group or any website which does not allow you to read much before you have to log in.

Information does not pass through the boundary, non-members cannot see anything going on inside. There may be some reporting about the internal discussions on the perimeter for non-members to see, but this will be carefully edited, and is generally for PR/marketing purposes only.

This model serves only a membership who are happy to log in to a central site, keep all their conversations therein, and, most importantly, dedicate 100% of their attention to the community.

It’s a robust model and one we’ve been working with online since 1997. It has many benefits, and there will always be things which are best kept private and thus need to be behind a login.

However, things have moved on. Asides to technology coming on in leaps and bounds, we live in an era of much distraction; the term ‘Continuous partial attention syndrome‘ was coined this year and has stuck. In light of this, the centralised model suffers as people simply don’t give 100% of the attention to much any more.

De-centralised community

This is a de-centralised community. It has similar boundaries (membership) to the centralised community, but they are porous. The CILIP communities space is like this, and possibly the blogging platform and stuff that The Foreign Office released recently. The Innovation Exchange bid was based on this concept.

Information can flow through the boundary to/from members’ other spaces including blogs and other social network spaces. There is still a private hub behind a login.

Many people who are trying to engage their members/clients/advocates/volunteers etc. have found that a centralised community (also known as a walled garden) does not satisfactorily do this as more and more of their people are in other networks, platforms, or have their own blogs, and they are happy there – and increasingly reluctant to come into your special space.

Given this reality, expecting your ‘target participants’ to come and dwell solely in your space is unpractical. And selfish.

This model offers members in spaces outside of your hub an opportunity for inclusion without having to log in to the central community. It does not assume that they will give 100% of their attention to the centralised community; in fact it supports their activity in other spaces with a mixture of technical (RSS aggregation) and social (external facilitation) activities.

It is a pragmatic approach to the increasingly distributed nature of people across the internet. It needs to be matched with a rational and clearly explained engagement strategy for the other social networks (ie. What is the point of this space in this social network, and how does it relate to the membership hub?) .

Distributed community

Here is a distributed community. This is the model we are seeing more and more of on the web. Amnesty’s Unsubscribe campaign hub reflects this; The We Love Ashton Court Website was one, my local techno-bods mailing list is putting one together as I write. The key is aggregation at the core.

Here, the community managers see the web as the platform with all of its different networks with their related behaviours and practices, not an uber-controlled centralised hub to which punters must come and behave in the way they are told to.

The community’s boundary is defined by a brand, a concept; it is a theoretical association represented by a keyword which can be shared across the different services and used by members in each one (e.g. CILIP can be used as a tag in delicious and technorati, a group in flickr, a channel in youtube etc.).

From a member’s perspective, this model enables them to interact with the community in any way they choose in an ever expanding universe of web based platforms, and the ‘community’ does not suffer; indeed it benefits.

Asides to letting members interact with whichever tool they prefer, it also takes into account that we are all different – some of us like to chat in forums, others like to blog, others swap photos etc.: all of these are valid additions to a community, so why force people to interact in the way you say?

So what does this mean?

We are beyond hoarding and into sharing. Hopefully. We have realised, after more than 10 years of web development and Knowledge Management, that when you put knowledge in a box, it becomes something in a box; only by setting it free and sharing it does it grow and thrive through distributed conversations.

The logic behind forcing people into centralised communities is based on controlling them; in the early days of the web this was their only option, but people have control now and have realised their own two feet. And they are using them.

They can finally manage their own knowledge and interaction spaces and choose to share things with us, rather than having no other place to develop personally.

Good for them. Good for us.