Steven Clift wrote:
Good. Bad. Ugly?
Does my Open Groups proposal to the Knight News Challenge resonate
with you?
https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/open-groups
Steve,
In theory yes. In practice, not so much. At it goes right to the
opening statement "Open Groups will help people find and join online
groups. People connecting in groups powers innovation and the
*effective* freedom of expression online."
In my own experience - in participating in, organizing, and hosting
various online groups, back to the days of computer bboards, early
ARPANET, and USENET - I've accumulated a few lessons that might apply:
1. People don't really have that much of a problem finding or joining
online groups - when they want to. If they're looking for an
established community/organization, there's a web site and/or facebook
page and/or twitter feed that's pretty easy to find. If they're looking
for a group on a specific topic, Google works. For more substantive
engagement, groups usually go to the participant, not the other way
around - e.g., lists associated with one's employer, professional
association, university, church, etc. And for more targeted
communities, word of mouth (and email) does wonders.
2. The issue, on the participant's side, is really a combination of
lazyness and overload - a lot of people aren't motivated to engage,
and/or they're already inundated with so much spam, list traffic, and so
forth that they simply delete everything as it comes in, and don't join
new groups.
3. There's a lifecycle for online groups. They tend to start small, and
have trouble reaching a critical mass. Those that survive their growth
pangs, tend to do well - until too many people join the
list/board/whatever - at which point noise grows to dominate substance
and people zone out. Also spammers tend to start polluting lists at
that point. I.e., it's not all that clear that increasing the number of
participants, without end, is a good idea - it tends to work against
effective engagement.
4. Some groups can be self-organizing - e.g., the xxxx-users and
xxxx-developers groups for a piece of open source software (though
open-source communities have their own organizational issues). Other
groups really require an initial organizer to recruit participants,
establish and maintain codes of conduct (netiquette), through moderation
if necessary, catalyze interactions, quash flame wars, and so forth.
Once a group is ongoing, though, "social pressure" from long-time
participants is often enough to keep things on an even keel -- someone
to do administrivia (add/delete users to closed groups, kill compromised
accounts that have started generating spam, manage the list/forum
software -- that sort of thing (I seem to have fallen into that role for
quite a few lists that I host).
5. The right tools make a big difference. Personally, I've observed
that classic email lists seem to "work" the best - in terms of
longevity, participation, and so forth. Archives are an FAQ help for
engaging newcomers (or simply those who want to catch up on a
discussion). There will always be the occasional clamor for "why don't
we do this on Facebook instead," or why don't we replace this with a web
forum - but inevitably those seem to work a lot worse (Facebook's
arbitrary way of deciding what information to feed to each user, web
forums that nobody ever remembers to go look at). The old USENET
approach also worked pretty well - but USENET seems to have been invaded
by spam these days. I'd suggest a good email list, with a
web-accessible archive (Google Groups is pretty good, so is Yahoo Groups
- if you don't care about eventually moving your archives and list
elsewhere. Personally, I'm a big fan of Sympa - a list manager provided
by a consortium of French universities. Groupserver is pretty good in
this regard, as well.)
I guess, my suggestion is that a tool to "help people find and join
online groups" will have very little beneficial effect, on anybody. On
the other hand, perhaps a guide to "help people organize and moderate
groups" and to "select and manage technology" might be very useful.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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