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Neil Crosby: Voyeurs to Participants

By Paul Brabban June 21, 2009 spacer  Email This Post spacer  Print This Post Post a comment Twitter It!
Filed Under  community, participation, social

Neil introduces himself and points out his first technique to inspire interest in his session – he’s used a different kind of card on the session wall to the others and you can see his session from the other side of the room.

He also made cookies!

The discussion asks how to get people to participate when they don’t directly want to – by finding an angle that they do want, something they desire. One of the group mentions using football to get people to want to learn to read.

People see recognition as a driver to participate – rankings and ratings schemes give people recognition and give an incentive to participate.

Neil likes the ‘lightning talk’, a 5-minute talk on a topic, as a way to make participation a driving a discussion less scary – less preparation required, less chance for things to go wrong.

Would it be great if online reputation systems like for example Yahoo! Answers shared and aggregated the reputation data, for an overall reputation?

How can you encourage people to join communities? Reputation systems work when someone has joined, but how do you get people to take the initial step? Reducing the administrative overhead of joining is one way – filling in forms puts people off.

Jag Gill mentions the active approach taken here at unsheffield – volunteers greet new registrants and put on tours to introduce people to the layout of the building, how the activities work, when events are taking place.

Mark Foster asks how to offset the tendency for a small proportion of the participants in an online community to dominate the participation, for example say 90% of tweets on twitter come from 10% of the users? Seems complicated, arguments for and against, for example why should early adopters have to change the way they interact with the system?

Jay Cousins talked about his early experience of twitter – he tried it, couldn’t see the point, and didn’t touch it again for some time. The group agrees that that’s how pretty much everyone first starts. At some point, Jay started to see the value. Neil says that twitter is very bad at helping new users see the value it has for them.

The conversation moves to how easy it is for new users of social networking sites like twitter and facebook to reveal information that they perhaps wouldn’t want to – when they’ve broken up with their partners, when they’ve inappropriately posted when drunk. Is that a barrier to entry?

Jag asks who has registered with the unsheffield website in the group – there are a couple of participants who haven’t. He mentions the live blogging and asks whether people would ‘vote’ on sessions?

Caz Mockett says that she wouldn’t – she might read the blogs for the sessions, but wouldn’t vote because she feels that at this kind of event, every session is equal, whether there were two people attending or twenty.

Jag asks how the organisers can make participation in the unsheffield forums more appealing? Perhaps by integrating with existing networks? The blogging hopefully provides content incentive to come to the community online space to consume and contribute information. Blogging vs. Wiki?

How about a ‘jargon-busting’ session up front? Could that help raise participation?

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