Thursday, April 07, 2005

Experiments

Been reflecting recently on ideas that don't quite come off.

There has been some discussion the ACT-KM list about the Carnival that took place earlier in the year. Normally posters have to display their identities. During the Carnival, posters could call themselves what they wanted. The original idea was to get lurkers to decloak but it didn't really turn out that way. See the message thread for further debate.

And the Book Club seems to have died. Mostly from my neglect.

I think it's important to try things, take risks, and sometimes end up looking foolish.

It's a truism that 70% of projects "fail". But how many should we expect to succeed?
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1 comment:

James Dellow said...

Matt. I agree - it is important to experiment, even at the risk looking foolish. I felt that the Carnival tested a certain hypothesis about lurkers but showed us that simply being anonymous is not the only factor in getting lurkers to participate in an online community. Your book club experience might also suggest that neither will creating a small group create a more active online conversation.

However, to an extent I wasn't surprised by these outcomes. When I think about online communities I always come back to the simple model published in Cliff Figallo's book Hosting Web Communities. He classifies online communities by three attributes:

- interactivity (shrine --- theatres --- cafe)
- focus (bazaar --- malls --- speciality)
- cohesion (loners --- associates --- family)

For example, in the case of the book club it may be that while it had a speciality focus, it hasn't (yet) achieved the same balance of interactivity (cafe) because there isn't enough cohesion (family). This model isn't perfect or particularly academic, but I've always found it a good starting point.

Tue Apr 12, 07:41:00 pm GMT-7

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