Inventiveness in Online Communities
Spiderwebs of links are showing up today as I catch up on blog reading after a few days off. Beth points to Lisa's post, Nonprofit Using Blogs: March of Dimes which mentions the March of Dimes ShareYourStory community. Lisa and Beth are interested in the emergent blog aspect of the site. I want to write more about that, but there is something that I've really noticed about the site worth sharing.
I've had a blast working on this project. Having been involved in countless online communities, I think it is fair to say this has been one of the most loving, warm, generous communities I've ever participated in and worked for. They make Lee and my job of updating the site so much fun and easy. When I see this sort of environment, I'm always trying to pay attention to why.
Some of the "why" is easy: the community is meeting a real need for parents to literally share their stories of parenting babies who had to be in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) after birth. Most of the families participating had a child born prematurely (fondly known as "preemies"). You can feel this common bond in nearly every posting.
The other thing is the community's inventiveness. Some of the things the community has invented for itself include sharing references and products that are particularly useful for families with preemies, thinking up ideas for kits for families in the NIC), ways to easily resize pictures to share (for the less-than-tech savvy) and countless other things. This idea of inventiveness to me is a sign of a healthy community. The group doesn't wait for someone else to solve a problem or meet a need. They figure it out. This community is not something "done unto" them by others. It is what they are doing for themselves and each other, facilitated by the March of Dimes.
This gets me wondering about what best supports inventiveness? What tools make it easier to be inventive? What processes? What general environments? In other words, as designers and facilitators, what should we do to foster inventiveness?
posted by Nancy White at 10:20 AM
3 Comments:
Thanks for this thoughtful post. It isn't great to work on project with people you really truly like who warm, generous, and loving ....
Your question at the end about nurting inventiveness, makes me want to ask another question: Can the online inventiveness you observed here really be fostered if it doesn't exist naturally through some sort of powerful person-to-person bonding such as the parental instinct to do everything you can for a child? I don't want to sound overly negative, but if community inventiveness doesn't exist naturally within the community at the start, isn't it really hard if not impossible to create it no matter the tools or processes you use. Maybe I'm missing something or completely wrong ...
I'm nodding in agreement. I don't think we create community inventiveness. It originates in the community. But I have seen that we, as designers and faciltiators, can SQUASH inventiveness or not give it the foundation to flourish. Control issues come right to mind, but it goes to subtler stuff like design for emergence rather than containment.
Make sense?
Yes, makes sense ....
How to step out of the way and let inventiveness invent itself without designing inventiveness killers into the content or interface design ...
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