Hey there bootcampers. I’m conscious of my commitment to write weekly not being met this past week, but I’ve been pondering offline a bit. One question that comes up for discussion is actually directly related to this: how do you keep busy people engaged in this sort of thing? What kinds of hooks could we institute to lure each other in to conversation? How can we make accountability easy? The topic of accountability has come up a lot this past week for me – working with busy leaders either as employee or as coach, also having managed online websites before that are only as valuable as the experience created by users… how do you support engagement without hand-holding? How do we inspire each other to want to participate? How can community hold us accountable and how can we hold ourselves accountable? Just seed planting right now – all questions, no answers 🙂 perhaps the topic of week 2 of our next set of gatherings!?
Eugene Eric Kim and 
Brooking are discussing.
Eugene Eric Kim 5:39 pm on November 23, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Lots of great, intertwingled questions here! I’m going to try to unwind them a bit and offer some rambling thoughts. I’d love to hear what others think as well.
I want to put aside the “accountability” questions aside for a second and focus on your questions about engagement. This is also a great opportunity for me to re-introduce the thought experiment from my failed workout from bootcamp #2. 🙂
Pick a group that you’d like engaged in continuous conversation. Imagine that everyone in that group was in the same physical place all-the-time. They all work in the same building, they all hang out in the same neighborhood, they all live a few minutes away from each other.
How would you like this group to engage? What kinds of interactions would you like them to have? How might you design for that?
And how would you answer your other questions above in this situation?
The reason I love this thought experiment is that it eliminates a lot of assumptions we make about online tools and forces us to focus on more critical design questions. What is it that you want people to actually do? Why? How are they going to make time for it? (Group physics!) Brooking asked how to keep busy people engaged. Creating an online space doesn’t change the fact that those people are busy. In fact, it often exacerbates the problem.
Some rambly stories that might shed some light on these questions:
I love the potential of this water cooler to build and maintain community for all of you (and perhaps beyond — an epic goal), but that’s not it’s primary purpose. The purpose of this space is to be a safe space for you to exercise your online engagement muscles. One of those muscles is sharing in public. When you share in public, you create the opportunity for connection. Your assumptions about what would be most valuable to share may not be right.
Five years ago, I was working with a network of leaders in reproductive and population health on the ground in five different developing countries. I spent three weeks in three of those countries (India, Ethiopia, and Nigeria), blogging extensively and taking pictures throughout.
When I got back home from my first trip, one of my colleagues on the project said to me, “Honestly, I didn’t read all of your blog posts, but I loved your pictures!” That turned out to be a common theme.
Several months after the project was over, I checked in with a network leader in Nigeria, and she told me an interesting story. It turns out that my pictures had turned out to be an extraordinary tool in forging stronger connections. Participants in the network — who were spread out across the country and who did not have easy access to the Internet at the time — would visit Internet cafes and Google themselves out of curiosity. Since most of these folks didn’t have much of an Internet presence, not many things would show up. Many of the top hits turned out to be my pictures. Seeing those pictures struck an emotional chord, and it ended up being an impetus for people to proactively reach out to each other via mobile.
None of this was by design. I was taking pictures because I like taking pictures, and because I was visiting new places. I tagged and shared them publicly out of habit. In the end, my pictures contributed more to catalyzing the network than the thousands of words I had written had.
(Here are two posts from my Nigeria trip.)
This past week, I posted a picture on Flickr, and I tagged it, “Richmond District.” The person who runs the Richmond District blog (Sarah B.) saw it, liked it, and decided to republish it. I happen to know Sarah, but I didn’t reach out to her about my picture. It didn’t even occur to me. She found it, because she follows the “Richmond District” tag on Flickr.
As it turns out, there was a woman who used to work for Hawaii Community Foundation (one of my former clients) who saw it. She had participated in two of my processes there, and she was fantastic. She had left her job there earlier this year to have her second child, and unbeknownst to me, she had moved back to SF, which was where she grew up. She saw the picture, realized that I was in the neighborhood, and reached out to me. We have a ton of colleagues in common, but it was my sharing a random picture that resulted in this re-engagement!
When we design engagements outside of meetings, focusing on in-depth conversation might not actually be the most useful thing we can do. Creating space to share “trivial things” can sometimes be far more effective at catalyzing conversation. That resulting conversation can happen in any number of other places — coffee shop, phone, or some online space we’re already using. It doesn’t have to be in a space that we create.
Another muscle I want you all to work out is the muscle to respond to other people online in a timely manner. Responding quickly, in this case, is more important than responding deeply. (This should not always be the case, but it’s a useful muscle to develop.) Shockingly, feedback encourages engagement! In an online space, feedback can come in many different forms, but the simplest — and least tool-dependent — is to simply reply to someone’s comment, even if it’s just to say, “Right on, sister!”
There are a whole bunch of other interventions you can leverage as well. One is to start with a small, committed group, and get them to commit together to read and respond to each other’s work. (Now we’re getting into the accountability question.) Not only does that group develop its own online engagement muscles, but it also attracts other participants, because shockingly, people would rather go places where conversation is happening than talk to themselves in the quiet corner of the room with a bunch of empty chairs. The IISC blog is a great example of this. The vast majority of commenters are other people at IISC, but it shows that they at least are reading and responding to each other’s work internally, and that encourages people from outside of the organization to participate as well.
I designed and led the Wikimedia strategic planning process from 2009-2010. One of the most important and misunderstood process piece was our weekly office hours. My facilitator and I held regular office hours (rotating every other week to accommodate different timezones) on the #wikimedia channel on IRC. We did it on IRC, because that’s where Wikimedians liked to hang out. (I personally am not fond of IRC.)
These were not meetings. There were no agendas. There was no requirement for “serious conversation.” This was me and my facilitator hanging out with people, answering questions, but mostly getting to know people in the community and vice-versa. Honestly, it was grueling, not because we didn’t enjoy the interaction, but because the overall process was so intense and because these office hours happened at strange hours.
A few months into the process, my facilitator and I were running out of steam and were questioning whether to continue them. If we had just gone with how we were feeling, we would have stopped. But we looked at the data. And the data showed that people were coming to office hours, and that people who participated in office hours were more likely to engage in the topical conversation that was happening on the wiki. It validated the basic premise of our design: Relationship is often a greater motivation for engagement than content. These office hours were designed to build relationships, and they drove a lot of engagement that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.
Facebook is the prime example of this. They are demolishing traditional “laws” of online engagement, like the 90-9-1 rule, because interactions follow relationships, not the other way around.
Finally, a thought on why and how I engage online. I love having deep conversations with great people, and I like to write. However, I would still rather have coffee with someone or talk over the phone (most of the time) than exchange long emails. Sometimes, it’s not practical, so asynchronous tools allow me to have conversations I want or need to have with people far and wide, whenever I’m available.
But that actually only accounts for a tiny percentage of my online presence. I use online tools to help me get clear about what’s swimming in my head. When I do it in public, then those thoughts become persistent, meaning I can just point people to them in the future rather than restating them over and over again. So engaging online helps me get clear and it also ends up saving me time.
A simple takeaway from this is to find things that you are already doing, and simply do it in public. I know a bunch of people who journal to get clear. Instead of journaling in private, journal in public! (This takes practice.) Or instead of sending a long email to one person, write a blog post so that anyone can see what you’ve written.
Returning to Brooking’s questions, what’s the motivation behind wanting online engagement? When you’re clear on this and when you think about engagement systemically (e.g. not just about meetings or “traditional” conversations, regardless of the medium), then the possible strategies and interventions become much more clear.
Brooking 11:35 pm on November 24, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
RIght on, Brother! 😉 Thanks for thoughtful response Eugene, much appreciated.
Eugene Eric Kim 4:51 pm on November 25, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You’re welcome. And great exercising of the quick acknowledgement muscle! 🙂