How do you cultivate a thriving online community?
Technical
Development is currently focussed on making it as easy as possible to set up a successful new group on Loomio. The technical aspect of this is going to be satisfied by the New Group Wizard that Aaron has been working on (more on that here).
Cultural
The task I volunteered to work on this week is how to communicate the cultural aspect: how can we teach people to set up a thriving online community?
The challenge is two-fold; we want to communicate:
- specifically, how to use the features of Loomio, and
- generally, how to seed and cultivate a thriving collaborative online community.
Considering that each new group admin has limited time, attention and capacity for new information, and that the skills of cultivating community can be highly intuitive (i.e. hard to write down), this is shaping up to be a rather challenging task!
I'm thinking there are (at least) two ways to deliver this information, through resources (text/video/graphics) and through cultural transmission (having a direct experience of a thriving group).
Resources
I'm imagining we can complement the existing video, text and graphics on the How It Works page with additional pointers specifically for group admins. We've made some progress on this content (see the working document here), but there's a huge amount to communicate and no guarantee that everyone will read it.
Question: what advice would you like to have received when you set up your first Loomio group? or, if you were about to set up a new group, what would be your most pressing questions?
Cultural transmission
When I joined the emerging Occupy community in Wellington, there was no manual to read. My first meeting started with a 2 minute run-down on the techniques the group used for collective decision-making (e.g. hand signals, the speaking stack, proposals) and then we got right down to business. I learned collective decision-making by doing it.
I wonder if we can apply this model to Loomio?
Question: Could we use this (or another) group to consciously develop and share the skills of community building and collaborative organising?
zack Sun 12 May 2013 5:11AM
A different point of view. Let's say I am the owner of a website which promotes biking in cities. I would like to be able to offer people visiting my website a way to communicate, propose, vote. If Loomio would offer me a widget which allows me to do show visitors those comments and proposals, I would embed it on my website and suggest people to create an account an participate. This will create a thriving online community: participation for small or large communities wherever they are.
Clark Davison Sun 7 Dec 2014 3:35PM
@zack - I know it has been 2 years since this was posted
If Loomio would offer me a widget which allows me to do show visitors those comments and proposals, I would embed it on my website and suggest people to create an account an participate.
This is a good idea for several reasons. Your site would attract people with a particular interest - in your example "promoting biking in cities" there would be a number of issues affecting the group of people either currently biking or wanting to start biking. The issues would be different depending on the city, climate, culture, existence or creation of cycle lanes etc.
You would want the discussion to take place on your site, creating "sticky content" and a focal point for cyclists in your community. I think lots of other site owners / authors would be looking for something similar. There are already voting plugins / forums / feedback mechanisms but nothing that properly addresses the difficulties in collaborative decision making.
zack Sat 13 Dec 2014 6:45AM
@alandavison agree. Of course you wouldn't expect to have the same richness of functionality but it would create links from outside world to Loomio.
Ahsan Thakur Wed 24 Dec 2014 8:19AM
All I can see is how the technical stuff should be handled but what about the Management point of view.
Don't you need to identify the people required on board to do that ( how many individual and what specialization do you require) and what should be the structure. Secondly, would it be a working group or a permanaent part of the Loomio.
Clark Davison Wed 24 Dec 2014 12:41PM
@ahsanthakur your point about the people (and skills required) has been raised in another discussion about "Political use for Loomio" the discussion has died down recently mainly due to participants in that discussion being busy in the run up to Christmas. One of the main functions or roles identified and discussed so far in the thread I mentioned and other discussions is that of facilitation (or moderation - even though people don't like that word now since it has taken on a meaning of a form of censorship). Since we are talking primarily about Group Discussion and collaborative decision making then a lot of "Group Theory" comes into play. I am hoping that this topic will pick up again in the New Year and we can start working on some ideas together.
Joum Mon 29 Dec 2014 4:27AM
@alandavison Yes.. the conversation has gone quiet because of holidays but some of the people have started talking in a group called Global Direct Democracy Working Group
We can split the conversation into components in a whole group/page environment. Please join the group and continue/start a conversation on group theory or whatever you would like to tease out more.
Best wishes for the season to you.
Clark Davison Mon 29 Dec 2014 11:52PM
@lbjoum Hi Joum, I have joined the group you linked to and even added a couple of posts :-)
Looking forward do seeing what develops in the New Year.
Harry Silver · Wed 8 May 2013 10:28PM
Yeah tricky stuff. I listened to this yesterday which has a few connections to Loomio on the large cultural scale side of things. How to help people imagine/understand this new tool, how to make sure it is not treated just like a digital board meeting but an opportunity to create a new culture in decision making... http://www.mixcloud.com/RSA/re-imagining-work-shifts-in-the-digital-revolution/