Teut Weidemann was the head of community development for panzer elite and for the entire jowood community. He started in the games business in 1987, but worked on computers since 1981. Several months ago, while I was working on GameFace magazine, I had the opportunity to interview him, about community building and management. Although the topic was mostly video game communities, he suggested that his ’strategies’ …”can be used for all communities, from games to fans of tv series to bookkeepers”.

I found the article yesterday, and I wonder if his suggestions can also be applied to blogging communities? Judge for yourself:

What do you actually mean with community management? What is it basically about?

Community management is the task to manage and support your community members. If you don’t support or manage them your community will fall apart. So you have to have someone who cares about them and knows how a community works. That’s one part of community management. The other part is how to plan the information flow to your community. How do you plan it, manage it, and control it all for the benefit of your community. After all your community is your customer right in from of your doors. Don’t shy him away.

Do companies that create communites mainly for marketing reasons, handle them differently as developers that create them for fun?

Yes, the firtst ones will fail, the second will succeed (strangely to any observer). Building up communities just for marketing won’t work. The community only grows if they gain something, something they can’t get elsewhere. That’s why developers have a build in talent to manage communities right: they love to talk about their game so they share a lot of information with the community.

Communities aren’t stupid, in fact with most communities there are people more talented and smarter than in the complany who manages that community. So don’t try to feed them false info, or worse don’t try to market talk to them. They hate it. Open, uncensored, truthful, straightforward and in time. That’s what your information needs to be.

What is the role of the community manager? Is he supposed to interfere in the whole process of the community?

The community manager is the interface between your community and the people behind the product. He needs to know all about the product and has to have access to all people involved in it. He doesn’t control the community, he supports it. Total control will destroy a community pretty fast. Of course he needs to take control if things get out of hand, but that’s rare and only shows to things if it happens: Your community is getting large (and part of it are troublemakers) or you have done something wrong. A community manager only interferes if there are problems the community can’t solve for themselves. Some problems of the community are made by the owners of the product. Either they released wrong information or no information at all. Leaving the community alone and not giving them something to feed on is a mistake. Not listening to them is a mistake, too. Not intergrating them into your product feedback is a waste of potential.

Is there a principle for the ideal time to post news, where they will be mostly read? If so, how does this principle work and what is it based on?

Yes, most news are read on Mondays as people browse the news during office hours. On weekends it’s bad as most people rather play than browse. But Monday is very crowded as many news from the weekend are being posted. So we picked Tuesdays and Thursdays to post. Sometimes however we used Fridays as the news will stick on the sites for the whole weekend. We got access to the number of news readers and clearly saw when we had most feedback (i.e. visitors from other sites due to our news) which showed exactly when it was optimal to post. That might vary depending on the product. For a TV Show for example, it would be important to post around the air time of the show, for games its different: Gamers bahavior can be measured and you should follow it to maximize your efforts.

What reasons would make a good community fall apart, even though the manager has followed the strategy rules?

Lack of new information, no one to talk to, bad product being released not fulfilling the promises (break of the rule being truthful, remember?), change of site with registering, changing too much on the site too often, not caring. Many things, some little and some big ones you can do wrong.

This is just a part of the whole interview. We also talked about the relation of community management and product value, marketing inside the community and the role and taks of the community manager. If you’re interested in reading the whole thing let me know.

In the late ’90s Marvin Minsky published a book called ‘Mentopolis’. He documented the human brain as a distributed network, consisting of a multiple agents, where each one of those agents is responsiple for just one operation. In the picture below, for example, he proposed that in order for our brain to recognize an apple all these agents should be set in motion. The ‘color’ agent should collect his information and send it to the ‘look to’ agent, who in his turn would communicate with the ‘place’ agent and so forth. My interest in this network (called the find-machine by Minsky) is not its credibility but its properties and attributes.

Emergent networks

The system Minsky composed was a typical example of an emergent network, namely a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions. Minsky visualized a perfectly functioning system, with absolutely no central control. The nodes (meaning the agents) are interacting in order for their microbehavior (sorting color, size, etc.) to result in a macrobehavior (perceiving the object). Such organizations are present in nature (see the work of Deborah Gordon on the emergent behavior of ants), computer software and even in the structure of cities and are giving us a glimpse of networks, which correctly aggregate information.

Emergent systems function so perfectly, because they work with neighbor interaction, feedback, pattern recognition and indirect control. They are designed to learn from the ground level, to take advantage of local knowledge for an upper goal. Through interaction, they are capable of recognizing patterns and indirectly controlling the whole system.

Emergent social web

I’m not implying that the social web undertakes a completely emergent behavior. We are dealing neither with oblivious users nor with pattern recognition systems (at least not yet). But still there are perfectly functioning communities, which adopt the traits of an emergent behavior (probably slashdot, wikipedia and the linux operating system being the most profound examples). There is not any administrator – at least not in the traditional sense – leading the community. The users are self organized, sometimes each one responsible for a specific activity and always working together to provide quality material. Under that perspective we are experiencing the formation of online emergent networks, which are developing a life of their own – a life without any central control.

But what makes such behavior so successful? As I argued on my previous post regarding aggregation of knowledge (and your additions are mostly welcome on this), their success lies on:

• diversity
• independence
• indirect control
• self-organization

Conclusion

If such systems (and among them is the World Wide Web itself) manage so successfully to collect knowledge without any central power, why should we accept the control of any authority, which would define who posts which article and who links where? Years of experience show us that such ‘problems’ of the web can regulate themselves.

In following posts I will concentrate explicitly on each of the above-named traits of emergent networks with the hope of justifying my thesis, that expertise is not the only path to knowledge.

For this post the book of Steven Johnson: Emergence and of Marvin Minsky: Mentopolis (where the photo also comes from; original was in german, I translated it) where of great assistance.

A book in progess and one more advocate for collaborative projects and the wisdom of crowds:
How Experts Fail: The Patterns and Situations in Which Experts Are Less Intelligent Than Non-Experts.

Similar books are Cass R. Sunstein: Infotopia, Howard Rheingold: Smart Mobs;the next social revolution, James Surowiecki: The wisdom of crowds.

But ‘How experts Fail’ is in wiki format. Take a look and edit it!

In my previous post about Google’s Knol and the role of the author I posed the question, in what extent do collaborative networks need author(itie)s to aggregate information correctly. And by correctly I mean, objectively - taking note of all sides of the subject.

Condorcet Jury Theorem

First I’ll try to explain why aggregation of knowledge can actually bring better results, than the opinion of a single expert. I’m based on the assumption of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which supports that the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100 percent as the size of the group increases. The theorem is based on the hypothesis that people are answering a question with two possible answers (one right and one wrong) and that their answers are not random – on the contrary they have more than a 50 percent probability of being correct.

Naturally, extensive criticism has been leveled at the binary logic of the Condorcet theorem, since a question has usually a wide spectrum of answers. But recent studies have shown, that even when the group is dealing with multiple options (instead of a true and false selection), there is still a high probability that it will actually conclude to the right answer, as long as the individuals tend to choose the right option.

The Catch

But there is a catch to the theorem: Correct aggregation of information does not simply rely on a large group of people. This group should fill a number of preconditions (which can in a way also be identified as an emergent behavior). During my research and study (and partly also during my own personal thinking) I collected these preconditions:

• diversity
• independence
• indirect control
• self-organization

The Concept

I’ll start a series of posts about each specific point. In that way I want to advocate for wikipedia’s system (or any collaborative network, that does not encourage ownership) within the scope of the discussion about google’s Knol. Namely, my assumption is that any participatory system that promotes ownership (authorship) and control, will eventually produce one-sided information.

If you have any additions or thoughts on the subject, improvize - contact me.

A big fuss today about the role and contribution of Google’s Knol in the social web and actually in knowledge itself (Knol as a short for knowledge). The read/write web and the official google blog are some sources which explain how it is supposed to work. [writing authoritative articles, highlighting authors, socializing (comments, ratings, reviews, references, etc)]

The controversial position of the author

One very interesting point I read from Nick Carr (a comment on a comment) is that “it will (apparently) be up to the authors to decide whether to accept them [the articles] or not”.

If the project actually succeeds (and by succeed, I mean big; moving wikipedia [probably its biggest competitor] aside) we might be seeing a turn in the purpose and structure of the web itself.

The role of the author will suddenly increase online. Copyright issues will come forward; authority issues too. Under that perspective I completely agree with Stan Schroeder, who puts the subject under that lense. He (and so do I) don’t really care who wrote which sentence.

The 80/20 Rule

Although there has been a big discussion lately about the long tail of the web, I’m afraid in wikipedia we are still facing the 80/20 rule (80% of the contributions are made from 20% of the users). But it is a rule that speaks against the community-driven structure of wikipedia; it puts wikipedia (and wikis in general) under severe criticism.

It seems that Google Knols wants to continue this tradition of the 80/20 rule. As Simon Owens noted “only the hard-core editors will contribute, while people like me, who don’t really have any interest in putting a lot of work into the entry, won’t be able to contribute at all”.

The question

Maybe in blogs and online documents, the author should be present, raising restrictions and copyrighting his/her work (I’m still against it).

• But in collaborative works, where we are dealing with the aggregation of information, what positive outcomes can authorship bring?
• Will the collective intelligence function better when the individuals constituting the community are all potential experts?

The social side

On the other side Knols will encourage commenting, editing, posing questions, rating and so forth. Communication, can surely promote aggregation and knowledge. It is in the hands of the google team and the user, how this project will actually work. Will it bring only authoritative articles on the community or will it promote a trustworthy aggregation of information?  (one that students can finally reference in their assignments!)

Joshua Porter, wrote a post at the end of September about improving online sharing. Very useful for anyone trying to develop a participatory community. The first step is to provide something worth sharing - a video, a picture or a URL, namely good content. He also mentions usability (making it easier to share) and creating a popularity (’most shared’) list.

If we see the blogosphere as a vast collaborative project, where ideas and thoughts are constantly exchanged, Joshua Porter’s list could be very useful for every potential blogger.

But we should not only see participation from the perspective of the administrator. A successful community does not only depend on the way information is shared. It also depends on the intentions of the participators.

The administrator should consider why people are willing to contribute - then it will become easier to improve online sharing.

The reasons people edit in wikipedia, can be a starting point. Information about such researches can be found at Brian Bex’s Blog and a poll he conducted and at oreilly’s post “what motivates wikipedians”

I don’t say adjusting your content to people’s needs. But understanding the social needs of the blogosphere is a step towards a more engaging and collaborative community.