Community Kick-off
Public
Date:
10/19/2009 - 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location:
445 Henry Mall - Old Genetics
- Introductions
- 5 minute reports
- highlight your community's goals for the academic year
- Community building strategies - What works well? (open discussion)
- ComETS Community Guidelines and Best Practices
- sharing your meeting agendas
- open meetings
- Website check-in - what's new? What's working? What's not?
- Anyone on campus can log in
- Group Captains Group
- Sign-up feature for events
- New group features: custom group home layouts/themes & more rights for group admins
- "Share" by twitter, delicious, bookmarklet
Summary (Decisions, Action Items, and Tabled Items):
Minutes:
- Overview of the difference between Communities (SIGs) and Working Groups.
- Active groups: website might not be an indicator, could be a means to find activity in other related groups (even though it seems like duplicating efforts)... group leaders as aggregators of what's happening on campus re their subject;
- Want to encourage leaders to pull activity into the site for current and future other members to track
- Conversation on the site, list, group lists
- Do we need a marketing campaign? What do members know about ComETS?
- What are our demographics like? (do we need lightweight polls on the ComETS site?)
- Need to summarize/distribute survey results... need another survey?
- Actions
- Let members know what groups are out there, what are they all about, what to add, how to get involved (periodic e-mail?)... group, mission, next activity, how to get involved and/or subscribe (update group subscriptions)
- Find out who members are, who should be in ComETS but are not, what do they want out of ComETS ("why are they here" "what's the reward" ...motivators), where is the interest today/what's an event that would bring members out, what could the group do to help you do your work
- Create an outline of things to go over with Community Captains. Schedule f2f check-in meetings with each Community Captain to discuss their goals, share ideas on building community, share best practices. (Doug added this one in after the meeting)
Publish survey results?
What do you think about publishing (a summary) of the results of the most recent survey?
Then, invite comments on the summarized results, as a way of continuing the conversation and perhaps getting further input?
Survey as Wiki?
Would publishing the survey as a wiki page of some form be worth while? Or break up the questions 1/page and have discusison on each?
That's the idea
Yes - Scott - I think that is exactly the sort of thing I'm thinking about. It would be good to go through the survey, and perhaps choose the most relevant questions and then publish them back out in a way that invites further conversation.
As I look at the results
https://websurvey.wisc.edu/survey/ResultsOverview.asp?SID=CKMVBCIPM6HT7LH
it seems that (off the top of my head) 5, 6, and 7 might work well for this.
Other thoughts?
Interesting stats on community participation
I looked into participation in ComETS communities and was pretty surprised at the results.
Of the 320 people listed as "ComETS members" in the site:
In other words, only 25% of ComETS members have joined a ComETS community or working group.
This seems to support our intuition that an outreach on behalf of the communities, as well as a check-in on the relevance of the communities to the members is in order.
82 is also an interesting number - it seems to line up pretty well with the "same 60 faces" comments we've been hearing around campus.
Roles within community
One thing I find myself thinking about is the lifecycle of communities in general. A quick search resulted in the the following wikipedia entry that tries to describe different levels of community participation. Much of this is just restating what I think you already have, but from that page:
---
Learning trajectory — online community participation
Example – YouTube
Peripheral (Lurker) – Observing the community and viewing content. Does not add to the community content or discussion. The user occasionally goes onto YouTube.com to check out a video that someone has directed them to.
Inbound (Novice) – Just beginning to engage the community. Starts to provide content. Tentatively interacts in a few discussions. The user comments on other user’s videos. Potentially posts a video of his or her own.
Insider (Regular) – Consistently adds to the community discussion and content. Interacts with other users. Regularly posts videos. Either videos they have found or made themselves. Makes a concerted effort to comment and rate other users' videos.
Boundary (Leader) – Recognized as a veteran participant. Connects with regulars to make higher concepts ideas. Community grants their opinion greater consideration. The user has become recognized as a contributor to watch. Possibly their videos are podcasts commenting on the state of YouTube and its community. The user would not consider watching another user’s videos without commenting on them. Will often correct a user in behavior the community considers inappropriate. Will reference other user’s videos in their comments as a way to cross link content.
Outbound (Elder) – Leaves the community for a variety of reasons. Interests have changed. Community has moved in a direction that he doesn’t agree with. Lack of time. User got a new job that takes up too much time to maintain a constant presence in the community.
---
Speaking for myself, initial interests for joinging ComETS was out of an interest in just being aware of the community and what the group was doing (they were a local UW community in support of learning--so was I). The "same 60 faces" obviously get something out of the interaction, otherwise they wouldn't keep attending, but probably fall in the Insider category since the majority likely participate on a SIG or subcommittee in some form--because they have an interest in that topic.
What might be helpful is just to spend some time talking about community life cycle in general. Not to bring religion into it, but I've had similar conversations relative to our congregation's growth. A part of the cycle from one resource (I think?) suggested that as the group grows/matures there's a point where the group starts feeling nostalgic and begins to question its over arching goals. If those questions can't be answered, the group spirals downward essentially and fails.
I'm kind of all over the place here, but some of it seems related.
Good thinking here
Scott - I like that you're bringing in the "Learning Trajectory" thing here.
As usual when presented with a cycle like this, I'm most interested in the spaces between the stages. What experiences help turn lurkers into novices, novices into regulars, regulars into leaders? And, of course, how do we keep the elders close and invested?
The answers may be different for differents sorts of people. Some may move from novice to leader quickly, others may need different experiences and opportunities.
Lots to think about here!
Member site use trends
Looking at user logins: 200 have never logged in, and another 30 or so haven't logged in for 25 weeks (perhaps since the site was launched?). It seems as though, those who have logged in are using the site and are participating in a community.
Also... just a reminder that this post and comments are public and that subject lines are feeding to the footer of every page.
Another good stat, John!
That's a very telling stat! I hope this is (at least) starting to get at the "demographics" questions that were coming up in the meeting. This info is helping me get the landscape much more clearly into view.
I think we're also establishing some baselines by which we can measure improvement - which is a very good thing.
On the "publicness" of the conversation - I think that is also a good thing! No need to hide the fact that we're working on growing community over here in MemComComSubComCom!!
;-)
Question - should we add a "steering" tag to the Group type voca
I'm wondering if the list of comets communities would be improved if the steering related groups and subcomittees were grouped somehow.
I'm brainstorming out loud here - perhaps a page that lists "Communities" "Steering Committee Groups" and "Working Groups" each with their own section? Perhaps this could be accomplished with the "Group by" feature in views 2?
Or, perhaps a better way to ask the question:
What, ideally, would the list of communities and working groups look like?
Terminology
As I look around the site, I see that we use "ComETS Community" "Group" and "SIG" to all refer to the same sorts of things. Is there a need to standardize the terminology? If so, what should we call these things?
I'm thinking about the survey result on jargon - how can we clarify the subcomittee, community, working group thing for everyone?
Ditch Working Group/SIG/Subcommittee notation completely?
Maybe the taxonomy is what's moreso important than the actual--is it a group or SIG? Maybe just that its on "Clickers" or ... is more important than whether steering considers it a Working Group/SIG/Subcommittee....Would a heirarchy of taxonomy might be more useful in this case?
Guidelines
This might inform the conversation here...
http://comets.wisc.edu/groups/17/4/guidelines-forming-special-interest-g...
Great resource
Maybe we should look at getting that document posted in a little more open format that we can better update?
Done!
Those guidelines need some serious revision!
I've copied and pasted into the node, so we are ready to go. Feel free to dive in and edit away! I agree that clarifying that document would help.
But I'm still stuck on the question of terminology. SIGs? Communities? Groups? Teams? "Hot" Teams?