communities

Tiffany St James is the former head of citizen participation for the UK government. She trained the UK Civil Service on how to better engage with the public online, part of which a digital strategist who gathered a strong experience on how you can motivate people to participate in online communities.

At Lift11, Tiffany will talk about how people are using online communities to galvanise like-minded participants into action and what we can learn from grass-roots community collaboration to support our own endeavours.

Tiffany St James

Consultant (UK)
Stimulation Community
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Laurent Haug: How are online communities enabling offline activism?

Tiffany St James: Trust in what we perceive as the authoritative sources of our information has shifted enormously in this last, post-digital decade. Whilst trust in communication from government in the UK is at around 14% and around the same for advertising messages, with the advent of social networks and trusted individuals becoming authorities online, peer-to-peer recommendation is souring at around 70%. Influencers in social networks and online communities have become a major source of influence and we need to ensure we know how best to with engage people in communities and through them to make sure the relevant information can circulate in a trusted way.

We are now living in a world where, through online communities, people have a real power to bring change - we have seen how the power of individuals with similar agendas can connect through communities to lobby, to create social good or to protest like never before and there are many learnings from how people are using communities to achieve their aims.

For example we saw recently with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that lobbyist can grab headlines to further their agenda. Greenpeace launched a competition asking people to redesign the BP logo, and a fake satirical twitter account was started @BPGlobalPR with a huge international following. Nestle’s was exposed for their use of Palm Oil in the KitKat product and lobbied by a fake advert on YouTube for killing orangutans by deforestation in the production of Palm Oil. Lobby appeal has got creative and through new tools enabling us and create, connect and share how these messages are circulated to galvanise public action like never before.

We have seen community contribution for social good. Crowd-sourcing, particularly in times of international disaster, can effect real and immediate change on the ground where it’s needed. Probably the best example of this is from Ushahidi. By allowing participants around the world to interact via their platform and contribute by SMS, MMS or internet, people can post pictures and reports of what is happening in near real-time. In the case of the Haïti earthquake, pictures where put online tagged with the names of people in them. Relatives could identify the survivors, and the community provided a way to reconnect those affected to their relatives. The post-earthquake map of Haiti is now much clearer owing to contribution from people at the scene.

Communities can use tools to bring protest and local opinion to a world stage. We saw this in Iran during the last election in summer 2009. Citizens were concerned that the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not covered fairly by CNN, so they started to tag hundreds of tweets with the tag #cnnfail to highlight this. The movement got noticed, and CNN could simply not ignore it and had to react.

These examples show that online communities can have a huge bearing on media reporting and it’s impact on how customers feel about our products and services. It is critical to better understand how we can galvanise people to take part in communities and how to better serve our own communities of interest.

So how can we ensure people's engagement into online communities?

Communities form around interest, action, place, practice or circumstance. When considering in engaging with communities set a strategy on community engagement from the outset:
• Your organisations goals
• Find out what type of communities there are for your to engage with
• Work out what you can offer that community, what they would get out of engaging with your company

As a community manager yourself , the main issue is to have a good communication strategy in place. Setting clear objectives, know precisely which kind of audience you want to attract. Then it is about following the audience. Let your users take you where they want. Be flexible, adapt to the needs that arise, refine your tools and processes as you go.

That is one of the big difference online communities brought to the table, this ability to learn as you go and adapt quickly. Before you would launch a campaign, wait for the results, make changes for the year after. By allowing multi-way feedback mechanisms and by tracking visitors behaviours, you can know what is happening and make changes accordingly.

Chris Heathcote is a designer working at Metaloca. He is interested in how technologies like mobiles, GPS, RFID, physical computing, urban screens and interactive environments change the way people interact with each other.

At Lift11, Chris will look into the invisible side of communities, sites like Gaydar or Grindr that are used by the gay community and reveal interesting community behaviors happening outside of thetraditional spaces (read: Facebook).

Chris Heathcote

Designer (UK)
Metaloca
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Laurent Haug: What are these hidden communities?

Chris Heathcote: They are not on the web, they exist only, say, on the iPhone or on Blackberry, or are invisible to Google. They are very simple, without many of the traditional functionality of online communities. One example is Grindr: a very simple chat based system to locate people around you and hook up. It's interesting because they've cut out almost everything - there's not even usernames and passwords. These are used by hundreds of thousands of users without anybody really studying how they're used or why they emerge. All of them are unrelated and specialized, they tend to spread by word of mouth or by searching for other reasons.

When we think communities we think Facebook. Why are some usages moving away from the social networking giant?

Facebook has a usage model that make it hard to keep things private. In a way, the default settings of Facebook create niches for other services who want to give a different experience. The invisible communities fill a gap, they allow users to better compartmentalize, to manage different identities. Another factor is that in these communities you don't bring all your social baggage. You can always connect the dots of your existence, but you are not forced to do it.

You say these communities don't always really want to grow, can they sustain?

These services correspond to very specific needs, needs that can evolve over time as a person grows older or climbs the social ladder. One issue is that you tend to lack a renewal of members, you tend to see the same faces over and over again. So many of these services, even if they do turn into a recognisable community, can wane quite quickly. When people stop using it, the rest of the members also look elsewhere. The communities I study often happen by accident, so visibility is something they sometimes welcome but don't necessarily actively seek. Some services are so basic in functionality that they can't really scale as is. Major changes in the user interface would be required to accommodate more users.

What is the economics behind these communities?

Many small closed communities work off member donations. Services like Gaydar and Grindr are run by for-profit companies and are based around dating, so subscriptions and ads, and they're extending into making and distributing content to keep members. But users are resistant to the idea of paying, and so there are competitor services that are "free" to cater for that need too.

Genevieve Bell grew up in Australia, moving between the working class suburbs of Melbourne and Canberra and the Aboriginal communities of Central and Northern Australia. She has a PhD in anthropology and works as Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group. There she manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers.

We’ve met some interesting people at Lift who are developing practice as consultants and service practitioners in the broad area called “open innovation”. So lets talk about it, and hopefully keep our conversation alive after we leave Geneva.

• Where in the spectrum of “open” is your innovation practice? From crowds to expert panels and networks, what are the various forms of open?

• What are the kinds of clients you have/target and what methods are you using?

• What is your open innovation strategy, for your own practice?

• What is the global community of practitioners in open innovation? Where are they today?

We will meet at the afternoon break today (15:15) in the seating area immediately behind the auditorium.