eLearning stuff

A recent conversation with a project student who is looking at Knowledge Management (KM) and Communities of Practice (CoP) started some thoughts about lurkers in communities.

Part of my day job has been to set up and run the HELP-CETL’s Knowledge Exchange Network (KEN), a KM/CoP solution - if you’re interested there’s an introduction available.

The project student is looking at KEN usage, which brought us onto the subject of lurkers. We were chatting to Etienne Wenger a while back about community success factors and the importance/role of lurkers and he reiterated the ‘usual’ figure of community participation is about 20% of the community membership.

This figure of 20% for a core group of community members and 80% for lurkers is one I’ve heard anecdotally a number of times and leads to some questions:

• Is the level of community success dependant on a high level of participation?
• Will a community be successful with lower participation of core group of community members if the lurkers can benefit from the knowledge/discussions/information etc. ?
• How do we measure community success?
• Is participation a measure of community success?

Having access to data relating to some communities I’ve started to look at some of the participation rates.

 The communities I’ve looked at are:

1. The Classic and Vintage Racing Dinghy Association’s Community. The CVRDA has been running as an online community since 2000. Although the forum is open, registration is required for posting.
2. The Rammstein Community. A pay-for service (€18/year) community for fans of the German band Rammstein that has been running since 2006
3. The Herzelied Community. A free to access fan site for for fans of the German band Rammstein that has been running since 2003
4. The Emerge Community, which aims is to support the creation of a sustainable community of practice (CoP) that will develop and exploit new emergent technologies (e.g. social software, pervasive computing) for use in educational settings. Membership of the Emerge community is by invitation and the community has been running since 2007

A quick way of assessing community participation was to look at the number of posts per registered community member.

• Postings to CVRDA Community - Jan 08
• Postings to Rammstein Community - Jan 08
• Postings to Herzeleid Community - Jan 08
• Postings to Emerge Community - July 07
• Postings to Emerge Community - Jan 08

As can be seen, all the communities share a common theme…..they all have ‘Superposters’ - one or two individuals with a number of posts that far exceeds average posting levels. For the Herzeleid community these Superposters are the moderators who are very active in this community. The Superposter for EMERGE syndicates the content of their blog to the EMERGE community, thus increasing their posting rate.

In order to make distinguish between active members and lurkers we have to settle on some form of metric. Below is an attempt to do this using more than one post to indicate an active participant and then using more five  or more posts to indicate an active participant

I’d prefer to use 5 or more posts to indicate if a community member is contributing as the first few posts from a member are usually introductory or used to explore the software powering the community.

These participation rates are interesting, and I know the data/method is a little rough round the edges. If we use the greater than one post indicator for active participation then the EMERGE and Rammstein communities are at the 20% anecdotal level. The CVRDA and Herzeleid communities both have over 50% participation - is an indicator of a successful community?

If we use the greater than 5 posts to indicate active participation the numbers do change. The Rammstein community is still around 20%, the EMERGE Community drops to 10% and the CVRDA and Herzeleid are around 40% participation.

So…..are there any conclusions? Well, the 20% figure could be applied, it would be interesting to get more data, and look at this data in more detail.  Some of these communities have very active moderators who encourage new users and engage in discussions and act as facilitators within the communities. Some of the these communities don’t have active moderation or facilitation, and the experience we’ve had with KEN (with it’s closed communities with nominated ‘community leaders’)  has shown that leadership/facilitation is very important in terms of community engagement.

Tags:   Communities · CoP · CVRDA · Lurkers · RammsteinNo Comments