Encouraging participation in the wiki world January 21, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, Wiki , add a commentThe DAR wiki doesn’t have trackbacks enabled like a blog but I can trace some connections back through my webstats referrals. Thus I found two blogs which have picked up on my wiki facilitation page and added some thoughts. The irony is not lost, of course. There I am having written about how to try and facilitate collaboration on a wiki and one of the tips is “don’t do it all yourself” So somebody writes “is it just me or did you do all this yourself?” Ha! thanks for helping…
Then some more people find the page, possibly through Nancy White blogging it - and they seem to find it useful and have some comments of their own to make. But they don’t edit the wiki to enhance the information there, they blog or blog-comment about it instead!
Meredith Wolfwater: Encouraging participation in the wiki world
Agnese Caruso: improving-participation-in-wikis
Both of these posts have attracted some comments, so there’s a bit of conversation going on which would normally get buried in the archives after a few days.
Now that’s something which it is possible to get all frustrated about, but I don’t any more because it’s an issue I’ve been tracking for several years now, and I can switch between viewing through the group perspective and the individual one more easily now.
I started out wondering whether individual bloggers will tend to withdraw to their blogs and post less to discussion groups, to the detriment of the traditional listserv and other types of many-to-many community. (Dave Snowden has been wondering this more recently, but I can’t find the reference)
the-question-of-blogging-and-communities
control-in-blogs-and-communities-and-flickr
About a year ago I asked this question:
How are we going to hold the more fragile communities together when some of the key contributors may be increasingly tempted to publish their ideas mainly on their own blogs to the detriment of the overall level of interaction?
It’s all to do with the ownership of spaces, both real and interpreted. So now I’m trying to pull together some seperate ideas which I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and I won’t succeed today, but will make some progress, and in public. My learning about collaborative wiki facilitation came originally from the ukcider wiki, about a domain which has clear goals, practical outcomes and tends to be subscribed to by people with a more naturally cooperative consciousness. The domain with which DARnet concerns itself on the other hand, is mostly on the meta-level and is perhaps mainly of interest to people who are generally more predisposed to owning and controlling their own spaces, even on the topic of collective knowlege building. I think I knew that when I started, deliberately setting myself a much harder nut to crack, but with contingency plans and other side benefits. So what I’m trying to say here is simply that this:
* the domain type affects the style and level of collaboration
* individual blogs are not going to bleed discussion groups dry anytime soon
* wiki proliferation has already ended the ‘field of dreams’ scenario
* webstats are invaluable for tracing backlinks
Online Conference on Online Facilitation December 13, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Community, online facilitation, Wiki , add a commentSome disillusion with academic conferences surfaced in recent discussions, together with the idea of unconferences, DIY and open space events. Now on the onlinefacilitation yahoogroup the idea of holding an online conference about online facilitation seems to be gaining enough groundswell of support to actually take place.
Nothing is set in stone yet, but a time horizon of 3 or 4 weeks in January/February 2007, free registration, simple platform with discussion space and wiki space seem favoured. So far nobody has tried to turn the online conference into a series of telephone calls, so I’ll be committing myself to playing an active role. The planning stage is taking place on Nancy White’s wikispace so there’s still time to help shape the future event if you are interested in collaborative decision making, and that would be the place to keep informed of developments. See you next year.
Here is the link to follow: onlinefacilitation ยป Online Conference on Online Facilitation
November 1-3 Wikis and Nonprofits Online event ¦ NetSquared October 19, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, Wiki , add a commentHere’s an online event which I shall try and devote attention to.
Save the Date: November 1-3-Wikis and Nonprofits Online event | NetSquared
Well I can make the middle day at least, and since it’s about wikis I assume there will be a wiki which persists afterwards. Looking at it, the time-specific event seems to be taking place on a forum within techsoup but there’s a wikispaces wiki as well now.
http://nonprofit-wikis.wikispaces.com/
Don’t co-conspire October 17, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation , add a commentDiane Miller presents some good tips for facilitating online collaboration in an article humourously entitled
We have ways of making you collaborate
for example:
Don’t co-conspire
I worked on a big, complex project with a team of instructional designers new to online collaboration. For the first couple of weeks I felt like I was herding cats answering the phone, responding to email and keeping track of what I said to whom. And then I realized that our project space was getting seriously underused. So I started saying “no,” to my team when they would call or email and began answering questions in the space itself - and only there. The project space took off pretty quickly after that, and my time was freed up because I could answer the questions one time for everyone to see (and I didn’t have to wonder if I was losing my mind - all of my decisions were there for ME to see as well).
Change of policy September 15, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation , 1 comment so farThe following was sent to an email list I have been lurking on for many years.
As of now, each individual poster to the mailing list
is limited to three messages per day. If you post more than this then
your posting won’t be sent on, and you will be sent an automatic reply
asking you to try again tomorrow.This is being done to help cut down on the ever-increasing spam problem
and deal with potential mail loops. The restriction may be lifted, or
the maximum message count raised, in the future.
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about online facilitation
on Darnet
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
