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Invite different levels of participation

Good community architecture invites many different levels of participation. Consider the variety of activities we might find in a city neighborhood on any given day: solitary shoppers, people walking briskly to work, friends out for a casual stroll, couples chatting at an outdoor cafe, a crowd watching a street performer. Others are on the periphery, watching the action from the windows above the street. A community of practice is very similar. People participate in communities for different reasons—some because the community directly provides value, some for the personal connection, and others for the opportunity to improve their skills. We used to think that we should encourage all community members to participate equally. But because people have different levels of interest in the community, this expectation is unrealistic.

Alive communities, whether planned or spontaneous, have a "coordinator" who organizes events and connects community. But others in the community also take on leadership roles. We commonly see three main levels of community participation. The first is a small core group of people who actively participate in discussions, even debates, in the public community forum. They often take on community projects, identify topics for the community to address, and move the community along its learning agenda. This group is the heart of the community. As the community matures, this core group takes on much of the community's leadership, its members becoming auxiliaries to the community coordinator. But this group is usually rather small, only 10 to 15 percent of the whole community. At the next level outside this core is the active group. These members attend meetings regularly and participate occasionally in the community forums, but without the regularity or intensity of the core group. The active group is also quite small, another 15 to 20 percent of the community. A large portion of community members are peripheral and rarely participate. Instead, they keep to the sidelines, watching the interaction of the core and active members. Some remain peripheral because they feel that their observations are not appropriate for the whole or carry no authority. Others do not have the time to contribute more actively. In a traditional meeting or team we would discourage such half-hearted involvement, but these peripheral activities are an essential dimension of communities of practice. Indeed, the people on the sidelines often are not as passive as they seem. Like people sitting at a cafe watching the activity on the street, they gain their own insights from the discussions and put them to good use. They may have private conversations about the issues being discussed in the public forum. In their own way, they are learning a lot. In one community, a peripheral member attended nearly all meetings for two years, but almost never contributed. Then he was transferred to another division and, to everyone's surprise, started a similar community there. Unlike team members, community members can offer advice on a project with no risk of getting entangled in it… —Cultivating Communities of Practice Finally, outside these three main levels are people surrounding the community who are not members but who have an interest in the community, including customers, suppliers, and "intellectual neighbors." Community members move through these levels.  8  Core members often join the sideline as the topic of the community shifts. Active members may be deeply engaged for a month or two, then disengage. Peripheral members drift into the center as their interests are stirred. Because the boundaries of a community are fluid, even those outside the community can become quite involved for a time, as the focus of the community shifts to their areas of interest and expertise. The key to good community participation and a healthy degree of movement between levels is to design community activities that allow participants at all levels to feel like full members. Rather than force participation, successful communities "build benches" for those on the sidelines. They make opportunities for semiprivate interaction, whether through private discussion rooms on the community's Web site, at a community event, or in a one-on-one conversation. This keeps the peripheral members connected. At the same time, communities create opportunities for active members to take limited leadership roles, such as leading a development project that requires a minimal time commitment. To draw members into more active participation, successful communities build a fire in the center of the community that will draw people to its heat.

It is important to point out that the success or failure of an online community is usually determined by only a small percentage of the site’s audience. This loosely follows in the tradition of Vilfredo Pareto’s so-called 80/20 rule (also called the Pareto Principle). A study performed by Arthur Andersen found that only 5 percent to 15 percent of all members contributed frequently to the communities they visited. While there are always exceptions to this, the community-owner should strive to support those frequent contributors. This is the fast-track to expanding a membership base. Using the above diagram, you can see the evolution from passers-by all the way through to evangelists. The typical member starts off in the passer-by/stranger quadrant, then moves over to lurker status once they start having repeated visits to the community. Once a lurker comes “out” of the shadows and begins participating they enter into the participant quadrant. This is where they are both showing up and participating. By the time a member reaches the “evangelist” quadrant, they are quite adamant in their support of your community - even fanatical at times. This is a good thing.

Why did we experience such a dramatic jump in the 4th and 5th years? That’s how long it took for us to convert enough lurkers to participants, and enough participants to evangelists.

Once you hit a critical mass of participants, a certain number of those folks will become evangelists for your community, and will go to some pretty unbelievable extremes to promote it. These evangelists represent that aforementioned small minority that will effectively make or break your community.

While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a community's survival and development, many people prefer lurking, that is passive attention over active participation.

This work investigates the concept of cultural capital as situational antecedent of lurking and de-lurking (the decision to start posting after a certain amount of lurking time).

Cultural capital is defined as the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes.

The book “Cultivating Communities of Practice” represents a major milestone in knowledge management literature.  It provides a crystallized perspective by submitting an important structural model for the communities of practice based on the experiences culled from the World Bank, Shell Oil and McKinsey and Company.

The purpose is to invite greater inquiring into such an approach of managing knowledge in the organisation.

Chapter 1 introduces the communities of practice and explains why they are appropriate social structures suitable for developing and sharing knowledge in the organisation.  The value of the communities of practice lies in its ability to connect personal development and the professional identity of practitioners to the strategy of the organisation. Hence, communities of practice yield short-term and long-term benefits to both the organisation and the individual community member. 

Because communities of practice are voluntary... what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance, and value to attract and engage members

Many natural communities never grow beyond a network of friends because they fail to attract enough participants. Many intentional communities fall apart soon after their initial launch because they don’t have enough energy to sustain themselves. Communities, unlike teams and other structures, need to invite the interaction that makes them alive. For example, a park is more appealing to use if its location provides a short cut between destinations. It invites people to sit for lunch or chat if it has benches set slightly off the main path, visible, but just out of earshot, next to something interesting like a flower bed or a patch of sunlight.

ways in which people participate in online communities

In particular

the different phases people seem to go through

Legitimizing participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value communities bring is acknowledged. To this end, it is important to have an institutional discourse that includes this less-recognized dimension of organizational life. Merely introducing the term "communities of practice" into an organization's vocabulary can have a positive effect by giving people an opportunity to talk about how their participation in these groups contributes to the organization as a whole.

Humans constantly search out ways to communicate more efficiently.

The primary use of the Internet is communication

The people we know greatly influence how we act.

First, we view status seeking as a social passion that drives participants to invest time and effort in giving the gift of their experience to others without direct benefit to themselves; and second, this social passion is a reliable source of continuing participation, making it more likely that virtual communities will survive and grow.