Communities

Communicosm

A short while ago, I wrote a little piece about a possible idea to enter into the Building Democracy competition, which was to create a social ‘directory’ of online community groups. I put directory in inverted comments because that isn’t really what it is, but I could think of a better word. Anyway, I’ve come up with a working title for the project: Communicosm – it’s like a microcosm of communities. Or something. I dunno.

Anyway, for the Building Democracy site, I need to answer some questions about the project. Here’s my draft responses, which will hopefully give more detail on how this thing might just work. Once again, all feedback gratefully received! I need to get this up on the site next week really, so chop chop people.

What is your idea’s name?

Communicosm.

A short description of your idea (in twenty words or less)

A socially generated directory of online communities, tagged by areas of interest, that organisations can use to find people to talk to. (This is 22 words. Dammit.)

Describe your idea. What will you do?

Create a wiki based site which will contain details of online communities, which organisations such as central and local government can use to find the people they need to get in touch with for consultations, etc. Each community will have a page describing it and its interests, with tags describing it with keywords, which can then be used by organisations to find the right communities quickly whether through a search engine or a tag cloud. Time will be spent at the beginning researching and finding communities and adding them to the site so that when it launches, it is full of content for people to get their teeth into. After this initial burst of activity, it will be a community generated job. Further additions to functionality might be for people to make lists of communities that they have found on the site, which can be emailed to them or shared on the site.

What will the benefits be?

The site will save time for those searching for groups to contact and engage with. Searching online for communities is a time consuming business, not least because some human research element is required to judge activity levels and how relevant the community is to a project.

Who will you target?

Online community groups will be targetted and encouraged to add themselves to the site. Non-online community group could also be added, though if they have no online presence this could be tricky. It will also be publicised amongst government and other organisations to encourage use.

Is your idea linked to a particular town or region? If so, where?

No, it’s a national thing. A local version already kind of exists with GroupsNearYou.

What kind of assistance would you like from others?

Help in identifying, adding and tagging communities on the site once up and running. Encouragement of organisations to make use of the site’s content.

My Building Democracy idea

I just had a request from someone asking what the best community sites are for a certain – fairly specific – group of people. A little digging, partly Google, partly ‘I know I’ve seen something like this somewhere…’, soon produced some good results. I emailed them off and my contact was a happy chappy (hopefully).

This set me off thinking, that some kind of online resource for government, both central and local, and other organisations, could use to identify where the places are that people are talking about certain topics. It could be community maintained and updated, but would need some seriously work in the first place to firstly identify key target groups that would be good places to start, and secondly do the grunt work to track down the most popular communities and forums, and then list them on the site.

A further development could then be to add other communities which aren’t necessarily online based – though if they have no web presence at all, that might be tricky.

So, some time is required to get it up and running, which if I were to do it (and why not?) I’d probably like to be paid for. Which made me think of Building Democracy, the competition to identify projects which help ‘stimulate public discussion’. I reckon this idea suits that remit pretty well. I need to do some maths around how much time it would take to scope and do the initial work, but I doubt it will use up very much of the available £150,000 at all.

Before I post it up to the site, though, I’d like some initial feedback:

  • Is it a good idea?
  • Does something like this already exist?
  • Can you see any problems at this early stage of the idea’s development?

Any thoughts welcomed! Oh, and please don’t steal my idea!

Building a new Palimpsest

Palimpsest is a site I am really rather proud of. It was my first attempt at building a really social web community, launching in April 2003, and is still going strong. It’s a forum, pure and simple, where people talk about books, mainly, but also films and music and theatre and TV and art… basically anything. What keeps it together as a community is the culture of the place, it has managed to stay polite and coherent throughout.

This has largely been the result of a reasonably strict regime of facilitation – new members are generally given time to settle in, but if their posts continue to be witless, annoying or boring, then they tend to be asked to leave or banned after a while. Occasionally this causes ruptions – it certainly did recently – but then if you can’t act like an omnipotent dictator on your own forum, where can you? I am helped out on the site by three other admin people, one who helped me begin the site in the first place, and two who were members who clearly understood what the site was all about. Having people you can trust to keep things ticking over in invaluable – I owe these guys a lot.

As all good online communities do, we have also had some real life get togethers. These meets, dubbed the ‘Big Day Out’, started in May 2005 in London, and in that month every year since. We’ve also visited Oxford, York and Cambridge and in May 2009 it will be Edinburgh’s turn. People have travelled remarkable distances to attend these days out, and getting to meet folk really does elp foter the community spirit and to build up trust between members.

Tech wise, the site currently runs on a rather ancient version of VBulletin, which I have to pay an annual sub for, and which isn’t, sadly, open source. Originally phpBB was used for a couple of years but security was an issue, as was a bug which meant that search engine bots could very rapidly fill up the sessions table in the database, bringing the whole site down. There has since been a new version of phpBB released, which I am sure has fixed a lot of these problems, but VBulletin works and I am loathe to change for the sake of it.

Still, the time has come for some changes. Largely driven by three factors:

  • the web hosting plan Palimpsest is currently on isn’t terribly cost effective for how the site has developed (it gets quite a lot of traffic and has a huge database). I can get better service cheaper elsewhere
  • the version of VBulletin running is hideously out of date and needs upgrading, as mentioned above
  • Behind the scenes, various bits of organisation of the forum have become hopelessly muddled and need sorting out, such as permissions, user groups and the files the forum runs from

So, a change of hosts means I can clean various bits up. The bit I am most nervous about is moving the forum itself. The MySQL database that drives the site is over 225mb in size, which will need downloading from the current hosts and importing into the new ones. Before I do this though, I will need to upgrade the current Palimpsest site to the latest VBulletin to ensure the import works properly on the new one! Plenty of opportunities for disaster…

I tweeted about the issues of the database download because I didn’t really trust phpMyAdmin to do it without dropping a connection – what with the size of the database in question. Most of the advice was to use terminal access to the server with the sqldump command. Sadly, my hosting arrangements don’t provide me with this service, so I had to try something else. Simon at Stratford District Council recommended CocoaMySQL, a desktop client for MySQL for the Mac. I’m currently downloading the database for testing purposes – when it’s time to actually make the switch, I’ll shut the forum down in order that no posts get missed out. CocoaMySQL is very easy to use, and assuming the download works properly, I can heartily recommend it.

With the current site, visiting www.palimpsest.org.uk forwards people straight to www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/ – there is no ‘home page’ other than the forum itself. Also, for various reasons, there are a couple of WordPress installs where I host blogs for some forum members. The obvious thing to do seems to me to install WordPressMU which can drive the site’s homepage as well as host the couple of blogs that are already established, and maybe some new ones too if people are up for it. The homeage would then be made up of four distinct sections: some kind of header, with a big logo and a link to the forums, a column of aggregated content from the hosted blogs and the Palimpsest Flickr group, a column of aggregated book news from various sources, and a column of the latest forum activity.

While I am it, I’ll switch all the email accounts to Google Apps, too. Much more storage, and much nicer to use that most webmail interfaces.

I’m rather looking forward to all this. Let’s hope it all works…

The need for community managers

Marshall Kirkpatrick, at ReadWriteWeb wrote a piece that caused a certain amount of flurry yesterday, asking whether startups need community managers:

A community manager can do many things (see below) but the most succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

He’s writing about tech startup companies here, but I do believe that many of the points Marshall makes are equally applicable to online projects started by government or any other organisation. This certainly chimes with a comment Steph made on this blog talking about the success of the recent online consultation exercise undertaken by DIUS:

I’d underline that the value of a Community Manager to bridge the gap between officials and stakeholders or those discussing these issues online has been enormous for us. As government starts to engage in new ways, I hope we start to see more Community Managers embedded in policy teams combining the skills of strategic comms, digital literacy, training/coaching, and stakeholder engagement. I think that’s how we’ll really change government communication online.

In other words, you have to encourage people to get involved, and that uses up a lot of time and needs a dedicated resource. Interesting where Steph places this role within the org chart – embedded in policy teams – this is not a web role, nor an ICT one, nor commuications. The community manager’s eventual aim is to make this stuff a part of business-as-usual, not an add on to people’s existing jobs.

I wrote a while ago about what techniques people can use to facilitate online communities. Here’s the gist so you don’t need to bother reading the other post:

Firstly, the facilitator must encourage discussion on the platform. This can be through seeding discussion by adding background content and then asking a question to try and spark a conversation, for example.

Second, back-channels should be used to ensure the conversation is maintained. For instance, if someone you know who is very knowledgeable about a topic that is being discussed, but isn’t presently engaged in that discussion, then the facilitator should drop them an email or telephone call to get them involved.

Thirdly, the facilitator should be a guide to the platform being used – helping users find the most appropriate way of posting their content. This is especially true of a platform like that I was discussing today, where forums, blogs, wikis and document sharing are all possible, and only really the first and last on that list get used – I’m sure just because folk are used to them and not to some of the newer tools.

Fourth, get people meeting face to face. Facilitation is not just about the online, the offline is just as vital. Social networks are great for bringing people together and getting them to work together, but there is a definite trust element that’s missing until people actually get to meet each other. Facilitators need to be as comfortable introducing people to people face-to-face as they are online. It also helps to always have stuff like coloured post-it notes, sticky dots, glue sticks and magic markers to hand.

Fifth, figure out ways of using the technology to help people get the information they want. For example, hotseating is cool thing to do: find a person who is rather knowledgeable about a subject, get them to write a blog post about it, and then invite people to ask them questions in the comments. Make it a time limited thing, so there is some sense of urgency, and you’re away. Or here’s another: set the community a blogging challenge, where every member has to write a blog post along a common theme, maybe with a suitable prize for the best one. It’s a good way of generating content and getting people used to using the tools.

Ed Mitchell wrote a really interesting post on community management back in January, identifying three main ways of approaching it: centralised, de-centralised and distributed. It’s a big post: print it out and muse over it with a cup of tea. It’s worth it.

The community manager is clearly an important role in the digital participation space. It’s one of many that are being developed by practioners who can’t be sure that they are doing exactly the right thing because precedents have not yet been set. Digital mentors are another, of course, and it’s an especially interesting one because it has been coined by government, in a white paper. How does a digital mentor differ from a community manager, or a social reporter, or a buzz director? I suspect that there is sufficient overlap between all these roles that a common set of resources could be put together to help develop people in any of these roles, maybe with a few modifications here and there.

In the meantime, there are individuals around who can perform the role right now, but not that many. Did I mention I’ll be looking for work soon?

What is a ‘Digital Mentor’?

One of the ideas in the Communities in Control white paper, published last week by the Department for Communities and Local Government, that has attracted a fair amount of attention is that of the ‘Digital Mentors’. Here’s what the paper itself says about them:

Government will pilot a ‘Digital Mentor’ scheme in deprived areas. These mentors will support groups to develop websites and podcasts, to use digital photography and online publishing tools, to develop short films and to improve general media literacy. The Digital Mentors will The digitalalso create links with community and local broadcasters as part of their capacity building, to enable those who want to develop careers in the media to do so. Depending on the success of these pilots, this scheme could be rolled out to deprived areas across England.

This is part of an initiative to help communities take control of their media, to fill the gaps in coverage themelves in a way that takes advantage of the remarkable opportunities that exist with social web  tools, to both provide a means of communicating a community’s messages, and to help that community collaborate both internally and with other agencies too. I would argue that such a role is required in all local communities, not just the deprived ones, though it may well be the less well off that need it the most.

What isn’t particularly clear at this stage is who these mentors will be, nor how they will work. Should they be the employees of local authorities, for example? Or should they be volunteers, who perhaps are rewarded for their time in some way? Should they belong to the communities they mentor, or can they be ‘outsiders’?

One option might be for digital mentors to operate out of local colleges, say, and turn it into a real educative experience, or perhaps community centres or village halls would be better locations.

Then, what role should the mentors actually have? Just providing the training on new media, or actually coordinating projects too? It’s interesting that the focus here is on enabling ‘those who want to develop careers in the media to do so’ – what about people who just want to use this stuff to revitalise their local democracy?

I think the role, as fuzzily defined in the white paper, needs to be developed and broadened in scope. In an earlier blogpost, I wrote about a possible process for social media to be used to bring togther the various elements of civic society in a locality. The focus was on social media as an end in itself, like a local social media club, but I think it works for democratic participation too.  The main steps I identified were:

  • Establish tags – common ways of describing and finding content that everyone can use: local gov, local press, individual bloggers, existing communities and groups
  • Aggregate content – use the tags to bring the conversation about the area into one place
  • Communicate – start to talk amongst the various content producers
  • Meet – get everyone meeting and talking to each other in real life
  • Develop – put together some of the infrastructure together to allow for further collaboration and coworking, both online and off

The digital mentor could be the person driving this forward in a local area.

I know that there are people really interested in this role and its development, people like David Wilcox and Paul Webster, to name just two. It would be great if the Digital Mentor concept could be designed in the public, between CLG and those willing volunteers who think this could be a great initiative.

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