The Social Capital Costs of Lurking
Dinesh, at his new URL for Organic KM (change your feeds and bookmarks) talks about the costs of lurking in communities of practice. "I agree that allowing different levels of participation is crucial in a community. However,if people at the periphery don't drift in and out of the core periodically and if they choose to remain at the periphery-What are the social capital costs ? If organizations roll out communities with a specific intention of improving social capital(trust reciprocity shared understanding) ,would the 10/90(active/lurkers) or 20/80 ratio have serious implications? Irrespective of the 'fire' that is built at the core at any given point only 10-20% of the community is active. Will this offset the social capital costs that the community incurs ? Are the social capital dimensions of LPP like weak ties (and associated trust dimensions) more important and predictable compared to the typical social capital dimensions at the core of a community?
I commented on Dinesh's blog, but wanted to also post my thoughts here.
While lurking is a norm in many online communities ,it is a key issue that executive sponsors of communities in organizations have to think about."
Dinesh, I think trying to pin ROI on communities in terms of participation alone might be a dangerous game. It is indeed those weak ties that bring value and if you "out" them, they will go away. And that actually reduces the social capital. It is like saying to an executive, how will you demonstrate the ROI in terms of social capital of your dinners, lunches and golf games. They'd NEVER want that explicit because it would breach the trust of those more intimate engagements with peers.
There has been some good thinking within the CPSquare community (a-- membership community with a fee but worth it) about how to engage lurkers. A copy of one of their papers can be found here - you must join to access the file, but it's free. Join the Online Facilitation group here. Sorry it is so complicated.
What would really interest me is learning more about how people do or don't drift in an out of the core/periphery. In distributed communities, we try and "count" this by posts or logins into online spaces. But my instinct is that there are many backchannel interactions between members that may actually make people who would be percieved as peripheral based on posting, be much more towards the core based on their non-posting interactions with others.
Does that make any sense? (I also posted this on my blog.)
posted by Nancy White at 2:21 PM
3 Comments:
This reminds me very much of something Richard Bartle talks about in his book Designing Virtual Worlds. Fairly extensive experience and research showed that there was a certain class of game players in virtual worlds who were low on the level of interaction with other players, but had a key role in the community. Bartles calls them explorers. Explorers are more interested in learning and experimenting than interacting. Nevertheless, their interactions are highly valuable because they add new information to the ecosystem by feeding it to more social members.
A rich population of explorers has the interesting effect of lowering the population of griefers, that is players who thrive on negative interactions. I wonder if anything like that holds true in other social networks.
The concept of an explorer is very useful to me, Tony. Thanks for bringing it into the "conversation" (I'm never quite sure when a comment thread turns into a conversation!)
Nancy,
Thanks for the pointers.
I agree with your observations. Apart from the reasons why people tend to drift in and out of the core/periphery, I have been wondering about the 10/90 ratio of active to lurking participants.There has been a lot of talk about how proactive community coordinators and the core group can build fire at core to move people from the periphery inward. And this is possible only when the community design follows the fundamental principle that the scope should be narrow enough to interest most members and wide enough to bring in new ideas.My thought is that irrespective of how successful community outcomes are, they tend to follow the 10/90 rule.This makes me wonder if there are inherent structural/design issues that make communities follow this 10/90 pattern? Would a 30/70 or 40/60 ratio lead to more or less social capital? To be more precise,Does more participation necessarily mean its a better community? What do community coordinators focus on to show results?
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