Oct 31 2006
A formula for community engagement
Confused Of Calcutta » Blog Archive » None of Us is As Smart as All of Us
J.P. Rangaswami has a great formula for engagement and participation:
“I’ve always believed in a simple rule-of-thumb about opensource communities:
* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession”
This maps pretty closely to the experience I’ve seen at Reel-Time since 1995.
Twitter
LinkedIn
Delicious
Youtube
Flickr
GooglePlus
…and 2 are obsessed to the point that for the good of the community you will need to eventually stick their head on a pike as a warning to others.
That’s the only missing bit…notches in axe handles.
Mark
Chief Lord Executioner – Reel-Time.com
Mark — you need to blog about your wonderful move in VBulletin to ban users to that special place where they can continue to rant and rave — think they are doing so successfully because they can see their posts — but in fact are invisible to everyone but themselves. The old “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream Trick.”
[...] David Churbuck’s posted here and here on the subject of lurkers and forum engagement in online communities, as did J.P. Rangaswami on his ConfusedinCalcutta.com blog. David suggested that I post on my experiences in working with him on the Reel-Time.com forum since 1995 or so. [...]
I’ve moderated a 7000 user yahoo list for Terragen for well over 5 years. I coulnd’t agree more with this post; the proportions are correct. The interesting thing is lurkers. YOu can’t see them but they are there, and every now and then somethng comes up which makes them surface an participate (in ocations like product announcements, new versions sneak-peeks and so on).
[...] David Tebbutt wanted to know whether this was about public communities or business ones (by which I’ve taken him to mean within-enterprise ones), and bemoaned the implications for enterprises if it held true within-enterprise. David Churbuck, who’d been working on a similar issue serendipitously, felt it reinforced what he’d learnt at Reel-Time since 1995; John Dodds was in similar vein, pointing me at a post he’d written on the same subject, quoting Jakob Neilsen on participation inequality and suggesting a 90:9:1 split from lurker to passionate. Mark Cahill, who also has experience of Reel-Time, warned about something I’d apparently missed, while endorsing the core: he felt that 2 out of a thousand were monumental jerks who need to be disciplined “pour encourager les autres”. [...]
Hi,
I discovered your post… two years later, while searching for information about a certain blog-plugin that someone uses in a WordPress blog to implement a similar function as the one you called “In space nobody can hear you scream”.
Evidently, if people whose political views (expressed decently and respectfully) annoy the political agenda of a certain blog, such a technical trick can ban them without (them) even noticing it; deceiving them that they participate in dialog, whereas in reality they only take part in a severely biased, censored kind of “pseudo-debate”.
Please remember that there do exist places in the world (and the web) where decency and freedom of expression are NOT self-evident, and the “problem users” are not always spammers or annoying people. On the contrary, they can often be quite normal, usually polite people, with views that happen to _annoy certain others_.
The wider social implications of all this are mind-chilling, to say the least. E.g. there already exist (e.g. Greek and British) politicians whose blogs apply heavy censorship, NOT on the basis of banning abusive users, but on the basis of shutting down opinions not helpful to themselves, or censoring unpleasant facts.
I’m looking for a technical _antidote_ (in WordPress blogging) which will reveal this hideous, hidden “moderation” _immediately_, stopping all the implicit deception.
So, if you have any information about this wordpress plugin “in space nobody can hear you scream”, as regards WordPress blogs, please let me know.
Thanks for your attention.