I’ll be attending the Online Community Unconference 2010 in Mountain View, CA tomorrow. Been meaning to go for a while now and the date finally worked out this year.

I believe there is a lot of potential in figuring out ways we can make online participation more community-oriented. There will be a ton of pretty bright folks there, and I’d like to get their input. So here’s a session idea:

Community problem solving: how to make online participation a team sport

Or something along those lines…

Traditionally, web-based participation often looks an awful lot like this:

1. Make participants read a lot of text
2. Provide some sort of online discussion forum
3. Done

I’m exaggerating, of course (there are more sophisticated approaches). Too often, though, it seems as if online participation only knows how to engage participants at the individual level. And that leaves a lot of value on the table.

Here are three areas where enlisting a community of participants, rather than a group of strangers, might improve overall results:

• Outreach
• Collaborative learning
• Bridging the digital divide

Public participation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Participants are members of various, often overlapping communities. So if we can assume that there is community, how should we design our tools and processes to better harness the power of these connections?

I was just playing around with Freenode IRC (trying to set up a permanent #edem channel), when I came across their channel guidelines. We’re still drafting our community ground rules for Zilino, and I found these very applicable:

Channel Guidelines

IRC is a low-bandwidth method of communication, in comparison with physical presence. Many of the cues of physical communication, tone of voice, facial expression, hand movements, etc., are missing in IRC, since only text is transmitted back and forth.

Speakers in physical proximity with each other communicate quite a bit of emotional context via this extra bandwidth. This context enables them to avoid misjudging the intent of their conversational partners. It also functions as an unconscious negative feedback mechanism to reduce the incidence of emotional “firestorms” which tend to disrupt the efficient flow of conversation. Human beings look for this feedback and indeed they may be designed to require it. In the low-bandwidth world of IRC, they must get emotional feedback via the text they receive.

This process is subject to exaggeration. Small amounts of emotion become magnified in the perception of the observer. So, it is very important to keep channels calm. An informal conceptual measurement of the emotional content of a channel is its “channel temperature.”

Think of a person’s emotional state as kinetic energy. Enthusiasm, happiness, anger, frustration, all add to the energy level. The more emotion is experienced, the “hotter” the participant. The average emotional state of a channel is its temperature. Emotions in IRC become exaggerated and conveying them directly increases channel temperature. Pent-up frustration, in particular, is often released as a series of inappropriate, “high energy” outbursts. An important objective of the freenode channel guidelines is to avoid “feedback loops” in channel interactions by reducing channel temperature.

The guidelines which follow are designed with the benefit of years of experience with IRC, beginning during the 1993-1994 period when the design limitations of IRC began to become clear due to the increasing scale of IRC networks. Adopting the guidelines will help improve the quality of your channel.

We intentionally avoid drawing a distinction between channel operators and users. Everyone is a user, regardless of their privilege level, and each user has the ability to influence the usability of the channel.

The site then goes on to list a few concrete recommendations. Here’s a selection:

• Polish your catalyst skills. The catalyst role is key to keeping channel interactions friendly and efficient.
• Look for the best in people. If you assume people have no self-control, they’ll confirm your belief. If you look for personal responsibility, and ask for personal responsibility, most people will respond well.
• Set a good example. Be what you want other people to be. If you want them to be calm, be calm. If you want them to be courteous and friendly, be courteous and friendy. The habitual behavior of people on a channel is the most powerful influence on newbies arriving on the channel.
• [...]
• Take critiques to private message. Criticizing someone’s behavior on channel holds them up to public scrutiny in a negative way. It’s usually overkill. In your messages, don’t address the subject of whether you have channel operator privileges; just be courteous. Request nicely that they change their behavior. In many cases you’ll discover that problem user you are dealing with is merely inexperienced. An aggressive tone makes for a longer and more involved discussion, and pent-up frustration which will raise the channel temperature sooner or later. You can always use channel operator privileges, or have someone else use them, as needed; but with a courteous tone, you’ll need to do that a lot less.

So, maybe not a complete blueprint but definitely good building blocks, for sure!

The concept of channel temperature or mood in online discussions is worth investigating further. Having a mechanism in place that indicates in real time when a conversation is in trouble could help improve the overall efficiency of allocating scarce facilitator resources.

As we’re gearing up for our trip to Seattle, WA to attend Open Gov West this Friday and Saturday, I saw Travis Kriplean on Twitter ask whether sessions will be recorded.

Here’s my plea:

I encourage every attendee to bring their audio, photo and video gear and help record as many sessions as possible. I find that often at events like this too much value is lost by not systematically capturing the great content that people put out. Not only is this quite unfortunate for attendees who have to decide between sessions that run in parallel. It’s even more of a bummer for anyone who can’t make it to the event in the first place or will find out about it after the fact.

Sometimes, not everyone will be comfortable with being recorded and that should be respected. However, most of the time, capturing the sessions (from taking and sharing notes to snapping a picture of the whiteboard, from audio to video to live streaming) does not hurt anyone. It isn’t that hard to do, it’s simply that somebody’s gotta do it.

So, in the spirit of sharing and in an effort to help spread the spirit of this conference wide and far, please pack your gear and volunteer to make the content available on the web somehow. People will thank you!

And by the way, in case you’re still undecided about attending, check out the kind of research the above-mentioned Travis, for example, is doing: he explores “the design of systems and processes that support more effective large-scale dialog”. Pretty interesting, right? Thought so. Can’t wait to catch up with him at the conference and maybe do a quick interview for This Week in Participation.

See you all in Seattle!

If there was an award for most-overused term, I’m sure community would be a contender.

For future reference, here is one of the best definitions I’ve come across so far. It’s somewhat hidden in a blog post by Canada-based Myriam Laberge from a while back: Collaboration As A Living Emergent Co-Creative Process

A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning, and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.

Community doesn’t happen overnight. And it certainly doesn’t come out of the box with any online tool you might install.

An interesting relationship to point out is the one between community and participation. In my view:

• Participation often happens within or across existing communities
• Participation done right can have strong community-building effects
• Participation without the slightests levels of (a pre-existing) community fabric is difficult to imagine
• Especially for online participation, a lot of moderation and facilitation activities are often required that are commonly referred to as community management

Myriam will be in San Diego for the 2009 IAP2 annual conference next week, and I hope to get a chance to talk to her in more detail about this important interrelation.

Over the past few days, the site that’s hosting the Open Government Brainstorm has been overrun with off-topic ideas and spam (most noticeably, there has been an avalanche of requests to “release President Obama’s birth certificate in order to prove his US citizenship”). See this snapshot of the tag cloud I took yesterday:

Steven Clift just posted an idea that suggests a tried-and-true way of how to better deal with this situation:

Move Off-Topic Submissions – Add an Out-of-Scope button to move off-topic posts to their own space

Since a few people seek to dominate any public space hosted by government regardless of the topic, re-establish some equity by allowing participants to flag submissions as “off-topic.” With 10 off-topic votes, instead of deleting such posts, simply move them to a proper tab for all *who wish to see* can view them. An online consultation should make engagement more efficient. The online consultation manager should be able to freeze this feature should a minority of users attempt to game the system by flagging clearly on topic posts as off-topic.

Why Is This Idea Important?

When government spends tax dollars (or lends their support to partners like NAPA) to host structured sessions to gather online input, it is a waste of resources if relatively few individuals seek to hijack the public space for their pet issue which is clearly off-topic from the promised theme or agenda. Such submissions should be channeled rather than deleted (which would be a potential violation of the first amendment in what appears to be a legally public forum).

Here’s the comment I left:

Leaving off-topic ideas and spam unmoderated also forces those participants who come to this site with a sincere intention to contribute to dig through layers and layers of unrelated material. This makes participating more cumbersome and a lot less productive (and less fun). Any convener of e-participation effort of this kind would be well advised to being more mindful of their participants’ precious time. In that sense, moderation and community management become a courtesy.

Aside from off-topic discussions and spam, I’ve also noticed an increased use of foul language, general rudeness, and name calling.

I’d argue that taking a hands-off approach to managing an e-participation effort such as the Open Government Brainstorm (especially in light of these spam attacks) is a violation of a couple of rules laid out in the Core Principles for Participation that were released a few weeks ago (see the  expanded text for reference). For example, the third principle advises to avoid “hostile, disrespectful or stilted conversations,” (which, of course, doesn’t usually happen on its own without any management).

In my view, it is the convener’s responsibility to design and manage a process, online or offline, that maximizes each participant’s chance of having an impact, and there’s a cost involved in not doing so: By tolerating abusive behavior and by allowing the quality of the conversation to degrade, a large portion of the participants’ overall time and effort (which in large-scale efforts such as this one can easily exceed tens if not hundreds of person months) will be spent on low-quality, low-impact activities (e.g. browsing duplicate entries) when the real opportunity lies in enabling participants to share the best they got.

The following are a few Facebook groups we watch that deal with various aspects of dialogue, deliberation, public participation, e-government or e-democracy (membership numbers as of today):

• C2D2 – Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation (18 members)
  Community of interest on dialogue and deliberation. Conference held every two years.
• Conversation Cafe (308 members)
  Conversation Cafes promote community, democracy and wisdom world-wide through generating millions of open, respectful public conversations.
• e-democracy (346 members)
  For those interested in e-democracy, especially the efforts of E-Democracy.Org.
• E-Demokratie.org (in German, 12 members)
  E-Government oder E-Verwaltung beschreiben die Darstellung von Regierungs- und Verwaltungshandeln. E-Government wird aber auch häufig synonym mit dem Begriff E-Demokratie (eDemocracy) verwendet. Im Detail muss dabei jedoch stark differenziert werden: so geht es bei E-Demokratie nicht nur um elektronisch gestütztes Regieren. Es geht um viel mehr, es geht um Legitimation, Partizipation und Öffentlichkeit.
• ePractice.eu (97 members)
  epractice.eu is a good practice exchange scheme with a web portal, weekly newsletter, country factsheets, online library, practitioner profiles, events calendar and monthly workshops created by the European Commission for the professional community in eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth. epractice.eu involves practitioners from all 27 Member States, EU-member candidate states and EFTA countries but others are welcome to join. The portal combines online activities with frequent offline exchanges: workshops, face-to-face meetings and public presentations. A large knowledge base of real-life case studies submitted by portal members is freely available. The Facebook extension is provided in order to bridge the gap between Facebook’s social and epractice.eu’s professional touch.
• Everyday Democracy (53 members)
  Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center) is a national organization that helps local communities find ways for all kinds of people to think, talk and work together to solve problems. We work with neighborhoods, cities and towns, regions, and states, helping them pay particular attention to how racism and ethnic differences affect the problems they address.
• Government 2.0 (205 members)
  A new governance construct is possible… Create it
• I support participatory democracy! (395 members)
  This group is for people who believe that democracy only becomes meaningful when it involves its people in participatory decisionmaking processes.
• ICT4Democracy (192 members)
  Gathering of citizens from across the world believing that Information and Communication Technologies can help in providing us with more and better democracy and are willing to do something about it … in their lifetime …
• International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) (20 members)
  IAP2 is an association of members who seek to promote and improve the practice of public participation in relation to individuals, governments, institutions, and other entities that affect the public interest in nations throughout the world.
• National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) (348 members)
  A group for those dedicated to solving tough problems with honest talk, quality thinking and collaborative action. Join us if you agree with Einstein, that the problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
• Participatory Budgeting (158 members)
  Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. This is a group for exchange of information among those interested in practices of participatory budgeting.
• POLITECH INSTITUTE (European Center of Political Technologies) (112 members)
  POLITECH INSTITUTE is a not-for-profit international association (AISBL) and a European Center of Political Technologies located in Brussels, Capital of Europe, bridging public institutions, international institutions, governments, regional and local authorities, universities, research centers, think tanks, civil society and political leaders with technology actors for a better use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards the advancement of modern public governance and democracy.
• The World Cafe (249 members)
  A group for practitioners of/people interested in the TWC.

Needless to say, most of these organizations maintain resource-heavy websites of their own.

It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but should give you a head start if you want to connect with people in this community via Facebook. If you happen to know of any additional Facebook groups in this area, feel free to leave a comment.

Following a recent IAP2 Northern California chapter meeting, I came across this definition of public participation:

What is Public Participation?

Public participation is the process by which an organization consults with interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities before making a decision. Public participation is two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal of achieving better and more acceptable decisions. Public participation prevents or minimizes disputes by creating a process for resolving issues before they become polarized. Other terms sometimes used are “public involvement,” “community involvement,” or “stakeholder involvement.”

We are currently working on our first product, a web-based software application for problem solving and decision making in large groups. To some degree, what we have in mind is a public participation engine (at least for those parts of an engagement project that can feasibly be run online).