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.

mediate.com has an article up about using myers-briggs in assessing conflict. the article is based on the work of damien killen and danica murphy who have written a booklet entitled ‘introduction to type and conflict’.

like everything with myers-briggs, the idea is to use the information as a tool to help understand others. i can’t find any information about the research they did except for this article and links to buy the booklet.

their work indicates the greatest area for conflict is between the thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving types. (aka the ‘conflict pairs’). the thinking type will want to fix the problem, is concerned with facts & maintains a firm position while the feeling type is concerned about the impact of the problem on other’s feelings & thoughts, ensuring there is give & take, accepting differences and needs & values. perceivers do not like to make quick decisions and want flexibility while judging people want to come to conclusion, focus on present & future and experience satisfaction when the conflict is over.

jason fried of 37 signals spoke at the collaboration loop conference in boston last week. you can watch the video. he addresses 4 items – team size, team location, meetings & decisions – in addition to the usual jason phrases like ‘software gets in the way’ and ‘less is more’ (if you can’t tell, i’ve heard him speak several times and while i agree on some things… others, like his seeming distaste of planning/functional spec/etc, i disagree with. but i won’t go into that now).

his team (well, the entire company) consists of 7 people. he said at one point they went across 9 time zones and even the folks who live in the same city typically see each other in the office about once a month due to different working hours or working from home. they would have been an amazing team for my thesis research!

he advises keeping your team small. small keeps the ‘noise’ down. it also decreases the chances of ending up playing telephone (the childhood game where the message gets distorted as it goes from person to person).

he advocates keeping your team away from each other. they found the more distant they were, the more work they got done b/c there wasn’t as many interruptions. this is an excellent point about virtual work IF your team works out of their homes. it’s not such a great tip if your team happens to work in different offices and there’s plenty of other people to interrupt them. i loved the bit when he says even in their offices they don’t all sit together but sit at opposite ends in order to keep the distance/no interruption thing.

jason feels meetings are toxic and symptoms of problems. he thinks the more meetings you have the more people don’t know what’s going on and that meetings should be used as a last resort. i tend to agree here (though again, not with every bit of this) especially considering a conversation i had during a job interview recently. during the interview i was told someone thought the team had communication issues and then proceeded to have like 4 meetings around how they were not communicating!! brilliant!

the last point is to make tiny decisions. decisions are progress so make them & move on. tiny decisions mean u can’t make big mistakes.

but i think my favourite take away from the speech was –

collaboration is about communication not control

excellent. this was just in passing concerning not looking for software to control or watch what your employees are doing but to faciliate communication but it’s such a great thought to end on.

john rhodes has a nice posting concerning social bookmarking being able to help project teams.

this makes a ton of sense and goes back to the ‘profile’ idea virtual teams should use to help team members learn about each other and build trust. seeing your bookmarks gives me an idea of what you like, what’s important to you and if i’d like to have a beer with you. as john notes, it’s also great for training. he points towards the skill of tagging but sharing bookmarks can assist in increasing team knowledge on a top – especially SHARED team knowledge!

what is the ‘right’ size for teams? recently an article in forbes quoted 4.6 people. but this article from wharton advises to look at the task the team has to accomplish, what skills & composition are needed & THEN consider size. although they certainly quote enough studies that point to 5-6 people being the ‘right’ number.

the article should just stop there. explore this size idea and stop. but it doesn’t. it tries to touch on what you need to do for a good team, including how diversity figures into all this. getting the team together to discuss how things will work, what their values are and planning processes is very briefly mentioned and then out of left field comes:

When it comes to creating a successful team, “teams that rely solely on electronic communication are less successful than those that understand why communication in person is important,” says Wittenberg. “Email is a terrible medium… . It doesn’t relate sarcasm or emotion very well, and misunderstandings can arise. There is something very important and very different about talking to someone face-to-face.”

sigh. yes, we know email communication can cause issues but saying teams relying solely on electronic communication are less successful than f2f teams is a sweeping statement (made w/o a reference). i’m def unimpressed by this article.