the bbc is reporting on a survey which sez our virtual friends are as important as our f2f friends. the survey from the center for the digital future found 43% of people involved in an online community felt ‘as strongly’ about their web community as their f2f ones. btw, this is the 6th year of the survey & only surveyed americans.

other findings:

20.3% took actions at least once a year in the offline world which related to their online community

56.6% login to their community at least once a day

70.4% say they interact with others in their community (i would love to see how they defined this considering our 90/9/1 ratio and the amount of lurkers in communities)

social activism thrives in the online world. 64.9% say they are involved now in causes that were new to them when they first went online. 43.7% say they participate more now in social activism since they started participating in their online community.

more people contribute to the net. 7.4% have a blog (up form 2.3% in 2003), 23.6% post photos online, 12.5% maintain their own website.

they made an avg of 4.6 friends online & 1.6 of those online friends they have met f2f

fyi, u can order the full report for U$500 (indiv use)

guy kawasaki has an interview with the authors of ‘citizen marketers: when people are the message’. they mention the 1% number that gets bandied around a lot when discussing virtual communities or any customer contribution system. basically, 1% of your users will contribute the majority of the feedback/posts/comments/content. the majority will lurk & then some will contribute every once & a while.

jakob nielsen has the 90-9-1 rule. 90% lurk, 9% sometimes contributors & the 1% that contribute the most.

having been involved in communities from a ‘owner/host’ and ‘participant’ perspective, i’d say the numbers are about right. maybe one day i’ll run the numbers on those communities i host (but probably not – more exciting stuff i’d rather do – if someone wants to do it for me….). i think these numbers also pertain to the physical world. think about the last volunteer group you were associated with – what percentage of the people do the majority of the work? and then there’s a group that does some but the biggest chunk will be the people who do realitively nothing. at least that’s been my experience in several groups. i think this is just the way things are, neither bad nor good. it does raise the question of how you get more people to become that 1%, or get new 1%-ers as some leave the group, and how to keep the other 90% or 99% feeling involved. ie the age old question of how you keep your < whatever you want to call it > alive.

there’s a quote in the citizen marketer’s interview i found interesting:

The 1 Percenters flout cultural conventions. Americans love rebels, therefore the 1 Percenters often become the influencers of American culture.

the 1% definitely influence the group (behavior, conversation topics, norms, etc) but i think the rebel idea fits into the marketing side of things (which is what their books is about) and not the community side. at least i haven’t had that experience.

a study out of the university of missouri-columbia’s school of journalism has found users prefer to have messages moderated in communities/boards.

they have also found people are more likely to contribute if the following are present:
- moderators (so conversations won’t get out of control or get nasty)
- interactive messages (ie comments get commented on)
- messages posted at a slower rate (so there’s not the feeling they need to respond right away before the topic gets lost by another topic. they can take their time replying)

while the study looked at ‘participation intent’ and not real participation, i would agree with their findings. moderators are usually not appreciated until there is a need for them, people always like to be acknowledged and speed isn’t always a good thing. the study looked at website community participation but i think it also applies in a work atmosphere on blogs, wikis or any collaborative space.

there’s good details on the research at the uni’s site and the study has been published in the journal of cmc: article here.

Virtual Communities OzCHI 2006 Workshop
Approaches to the Design of Social Software for Dis-Organisations : A One-Day Workshop in Association with OZCHI 2006

A fundamental challenge exists for distributed organisations seeking to
foster collaboration: understanding and capitalising on the
inter-relationships between collaborative tools and techniques to
support generation of ideas and innovation. Commercial imperatives
underpin research into these inter-relationships, in terms of how to
create a culture and environment in which ideation and innovation can
flourish.

This workshop will address the collaborative needs of organisations that
are distributed or otherwise informally structured. In particular we
will explore approaches to the design of tools that support increased
communication and social interaction within such groups. Traditionally,
support systems have been introduced from the top downwards but there is
increasing evidence to suggest that alternative approaches can be even
more effective. The increasing use of bottom-up, emergent technologies
such as wikis and weblogs, is a well-known phenomenon. This workshop
seeks to address approaches for the design of such tools.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together people with an
interest in social software and those whose concerns relate to
user-centred design approaches. Social software as embodied in current
systems, such as wikis, is typically developed and introduced from the
bottom of an organisation and works its way upwards. Even when more
traditional design adopts a user-centred approach, instigation for the
introduction of new systems often comes from the top of an organisation.
The workshop will address this seeming dichotomy: how can this bottom-up
adoption be facilitated and encouraged by those at the top. More
specifically, we aim to address how approaches to the design of the
tools themselves can stimulate increased adoption. There are also
fundamental differences in the nature of the software itself which the
workshop will also cover. In comparison to traditional groupware like
Groove, social software tends to be more lightweight and at least in the
case of wikis and weblogs more extensible. One important question is how
these characteristics contribute to the apparent success of social
software. Many of these tools come from a technically minded background
and have not received any formal usability testing, let alone had any
form of user participation during the design process. How could such
testing or participation be of benefit?

We invite papers, which may describe approaches and work in progress as
well as finished research, length 3-5 pages. In keeping with the
workshop theme of bottom-up social software at work, topics of interest
include, but are not limited to:
* Design methods for social software
* Evaluation of social software impact
* Categorisation of social tools
* Social Software at Work
* Integrating social software and task oriented software
* Issues around self-image as represented through social software
usage
Important Dates :
* Submission of papers: 22nd September
* Notification to authors: 6th October 2006
* Camera Ready papers due: 12th October 2006

The Virtual Communities Project is funded by the Australasian CRC for
Interaction Design http://www.interactiondesign.com.au . Virtual
communities is researching how to improve work in distributed
organisations, looking at how to help these organisations translate
their ideas into actions. We develop models and business cases that
describe key principles, success stories and how-tos.

Programme Committee:
Jeremy Yuille (RMIT), Ralf Muhlberger (University of Queensland), Fiona
Peterson (RMIT), Laurene Vaughan (RMIT), Markus Rittenbruch (University
of Queensland), Alastair Weakley (University of Technology, Sydney)

but i have such a soft spot for e-mint (disclaimer: i’m one of the founders).

the group is global but has a heavy london presence as we used to hold f2f meetings every month. there hasn’t been a f2f in a while but last week about 40 people came out to meet other e-minties and hear nancy white give a talk. both robin and david blogged about it. thanks to lizzie & robin who seem to be the main instigators in organizing this!

btw, robin has a few pix on flickr which gave me a kick to put my e-mint pix up there…. coming soon…