Well, I’m only five months late sharing this, but because some of you, dear readers, travel in different circles, you may not have seen this. It is worth a read for anyone interested in online interaction from the good folks at the Community Roundtable!
Via Howard Rheingold, Face the Rear: An Illustration of Social Influence rings true like a bell. I love playing with “elevator etiquette” by not standing the way the group is. Last month at eLearning Africa in Dar es Salaam, our hotel had one elevator out, and tons of people moving in and out of their rooms on the same schedule. Yup, crowded elevators. I was on the 7th floor of my 13 floor hotel and each morning as I sought to descend, the door would open showing me a packed elevator. Overpacked according to standards here at home. Body to body. But everyone seemed quite comfortable, if hot. But I had to switch my tactics (because the lights were burnt out on the stairs, so that was a tricky option as well.) I hit the up button, got on as the car was going up in the morning and rode down 13 to 1 on the ever filling car. In the back. In the corner. Watching — you guessed it — how people behaved. How they accommodated a suitcase. What Africans did vs colleagues from Europe or North America. So when I saw this video, I was hooked. Watch the video. Then one more comment at the end…
When I think of group dynamics both face to face and online, there is this dynamic of conformity. It is stronger in some cultural contexts and in my experience, stronger F2F. But it also exists online — despite all the talk that people act with less inhibitions online. Some people do. Not everyone. đ
And for my US friends, Happy Fourth of July!
Nice visual organization of useful/not so useful responses to negative comments online. Take a peek! Thanks @silkcharm / Laurel Papworth!
After months of trying to get our schedules aligned, I had the chance to be a guest at the IBM âCommunityBuilders” monthly call. These are hour long sessions where people who facilitate/manage/care about communities within and across IBM talk about things together.
I am a big fan of Luis Suarez, one of the hosts of these gatherings, so it was easy to say yes. Plus I know some of the IBM community builders -some over many many years, so this was a great opportunity to think together. It was the good folks at IBM who helped me actually see my own practice and it’s value in the late 90’s and I’m grateful.
Luis has his reflections up on his blog, so I thought it would be worth pointing to them and reflecting a bit myself. CommunityBuilders â Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy White. (Luis, do we have a chat transcript too? There were lots of great comments and questions!)
If you have been involved with virtual communities and online facilitation, I bet itâs almost impossible not having come across the absolutely fabulous work on facilitating online communities Nancy has done, and shared across!, over the course of the years. Her work around Online Community Toolkit is probably one of those essential resources for any community manager, leader, facilitator out there who may want to get things started with their own online communities, or take existing ones into the next level of interactions. Her book, co-authored with Etienne Wengerand John Smith, on Digital Habitats â Stewarding Technology for Communities is probably what I would consider a bible on online facilitation, community building and community tooling…
It was an hour long session, where Nancy covered some of the basics behind the concept of Community (And how not everything out there, other groupings, may necessarily be a community), how both technology and community are walking through a rather thin line influencing one another, for the better, in defining how community members connect with one another and how those connections influence the path technology is following; and from there onwards she dived into an engaging conversation with the rest of the audience through a rather lively Q&A session covering a whole bunch of topics going from examples of effective community tooling, communicating efficiently with your community members, measuring the value of communities towards their stakeholders, biggest new challenges for online communities today, promoting and engaging activities for communities, etc. etc.
Thus I guess I better stop here, for now, and cut right to the chase, sharing with you folks the link to the materials, so that you can have a look right away and dive into them. The link to the video recording can be found over at âCommunityBuilders Monthly Call â Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy Whiteâ (30 MB download) and you can download a copy of the slides over at Slideshare or start checking the deck through the embedded code below:
She probably doesnât know this, but one of the reasons why I am so passionate about collaboration and online communities in general is due to her own contagious passion, expertise and know-how that she continues to share over the course of the years!
When I started getting interested in online communities there weren’t very many practitioners to talk with. Today it is a rich ecosystem. The evidence is everywhere. The practices have blossomed and diversified. We have gone beyond older notions of “community” and layered on “networks.”  Look at the Community Managers Rountable (see their “State of…” report here), Gautam Ghosh’s guest post on Luis’ blog. The proof that this is a maturing field are everywhere – and the fact that no one of us can keep up with it all. I keep thinking I need to redesign my online facilitation workshop (which I have not offered for several years now – shame on me). But the territory is almost too rich. What a delight.
We didn’t get to the slides at the end of the deck – the “looking forward” stuff. I’d love to know what you think are the learnings agendas still in front of us for working in and with communities and networks. Hit the “comment” button and let me know!
This is a crosspost from the Network Weavers Community of Practice!
On today’s full community “share fair” meeting the concept of tweetups and tweet chats came up. I mentioned that there is an open Google doc listing some of the more well known tweetups and I would share it, so I wanted to post that link and a few others here. In poking around, I found a few more lists (Meryl’s list was updated just last week!)Â and resources.
How to Run Twitter Chats
There are both technical and facilitation things to consider to effectively pull people into a coherent interaction on Twitter.
Hashtags Resources
A hash tag (i.e. #nwwcop) is a way to aggregate tweets during a tweet chat and to aggregate tweets with other digital content with the same tag.
How to Capture the Content of Twitter Chats
Here are just a few of the tools you can use as interfaces for the tweet chats themselves and to aggregate the content. See the “how-tos” above.
Strategy
I think the last bit of thinking — that really might be best considered first — is thinking about WHY you want to do a Twitter chat. Thinking about intent, about purpose, can be a productive precursor to planning and action. Smile. Visit some twitter chats. Experience them. Then think about your community and network. What would work? Twitter chats are inherently open – is that ok for you? Do you want to have a defined group, or attract people to the twitter chat topic? Food for thought, eh?
