Being that Chris and I have done some work with the good folks at O’Reilly this past year, we were lucky enough to be invited back to FOO Camp (this was Chris’ first year). Chris seemed to be co-chairing every session (he has his hands in many things right now) and I got into a few of them myself. One of them, “Can we measure community health?” was a particularly excellent roundtable discussion and I wanted to share some of my notes here.
First off, FOO discussions don’t really happen in a bubble. The themes discussed at FOO have been on the minds and lips of people all over our industry. What FOO Camp gives us is the chance to gather with people from far and wide and diverse communities and backgrounds to discuss this. David Crow, one of the stewards of the Toronto BarCamp community was my co-conspirator on the discussion (it was his suggestion as we drove up to Sebastapol). The brilliant Linda Stone was there to offer her wisdom. My good friend and amazing community leader, Kathy Sierra, was part of the discussion. Jono Bacon, manager of the worldwide community of Ubuntu, was there to tell his stories. Mitchell Baker attended and offered the Mozilla Foundation perspective (and blogged about how all over the place the discussion was…it certainly was!). I even pulled David Recordon and Chris in to see if OpenID would fit in the mix.
The challenge that we face when we sit down and talk about community is how deeply personal community is to each of us. We all have unique experiences of it and, for those of us who are part of tight communities, we feel emotionally connected to those experiences and the people we experience with. So we bring our nuances to the table. As Mitchell noted, we certainly didn’t stay ‘on topic’ and definitely didn’t come up with any definitive answer to how to measure the health of a community. And it is a topic that we are all thinking about and I’ve heard mentioned from many different people who work in this industry:
How do we measure the success of a community? (I call it ‘health’ because that is how I define success…it is more open to individual interpretation and denotes a different metric than size, which I don’t think is a proper indicator of success.)
You see the crazy notes above that aren’t really in any order, but for those of us who continued the conversation after our hour was up, we came up with these loose points:
- Every community is unique. The indicators of health in the open source and international community of Ubuntu are quite different from the ones in the photography community of Flickr.
- Furthermore, after a community grows to a certain point, it becomes a microcosm of multiple communities. You see within Flickr that many of the groups have become (or represent) individual communities that benefit from the platform of Flickr (and the larger community) to thrive (and vice versa).
- The word ‘community’ happens when there are symbiotic relationships – people giving and receiving. The health of the community is maintained by balancing the two. This may be the closest to universal as we get. (feedback?)
- Measuring a community should never be a metric of VALUE. Rather, it needs to reflect a metric of PERSONALITY, HEALTH and SERVICE (i.e. we discussed the observation of attrition and making sure we find ways, especially for newbie members, to reduce the number of those lost).
- Another measurement to consider as potentially universal is the length of time between someone being a newbie and an expert and the ease of that process.
- Metrics really are the way that we bridge the culture gap between community and the corporate. Some communities may never need to measure because they don’t require funding, etc., but many communities do. If we, as having the interest of the community before the interest of the corporate, want to build those bridges, it is better for us to come up with metrics than for the corporations to impose theirs.
- People belong to multiple communities and increase and decrease their activity and commitment to each over time. This ebbing and flowing should not be seen as a measure as much as an organic process. The better way to look at this is the ease of which you allow these cycles to occur and how well you work with other networks who do the same.
So, it is a start. Post discussion, I was asked to start jotting all of this down on a wiki that O’Reilly is compiling a book on Community…but I haven’t received the link for it yet. I will post it here when I get it.
Feel free to add your anecdotes, arguments and general thoughts in the comments below.
This to me is the key and your point about the community getting in first with its own measurement is critical. Measurement can be a mixed blessing though. Once you have a measure it will start driving decisions – stopping it from doing so becomes quite difficult once it is established. The measurement of national wealth gives plenty of food for thought on the importance of getting measures right up front (you’d know this from Marilyn Waring’s work). The history of how GDP/GNP came into being as a measure should provide some lessons. My understanding is that GDP/GNP was driven by NBER research into how to measure the size of the economy and once they had a measure, improving it took a back seat to using it.
The purpose of measurement or ‘metrification’ is the issue as i see it. The dominant logic (its only real if we measure it – we can’t manage what we don’t measure etc…) stems from the mechanical mind – breaking things into their smaller parts to grasp them and then forgetting that the whole is not the sum of its parts. Once the proxy has been determined (the measured thing) we easily slip into letting the proxy becoming the thing itself. For example value; the proxy is price (or economic value) but we all ‘know’ that value doesn’t really equal price BUT we have to constantly remind ourselves, especially in business relationships.
Returning to purpose, few organisations would consider profit as their purpose (lets say its survival), but profit (which is measurable) is a good proxy. Its not long before profit (the proxy) substitutes for survival and the purpose is ‘corrupted’
A final random thought, once we measure larger becomes better because we use numbers e.g. 2 is ‘better’ than 1 because of the way we treat / think about numbers… growth becomes good. Unfortunatley growth for growth’s sake is is the ideology of the cancer cell (Edward Abbey).
Anyhoo, thnks for the post it defintely made me think!
oops and another thing…
your question about can we measure community health is very similar to to the question asked by Adam Smith (remembering he was a moral philosopher, rather than an economist)… it is perhaps his use of the proxy of wealth for health that was the bifurcation point.
an interesting tangent is the substitution of gross national happiness for gross national product…
see http://abcnews.go.com/2020/International/story?id=1296605
thanks again
Phil
Re: “VALUE”…the “PERSONALITY, HEALTH and SERVICE” arre really types of “Value”. You can actually look at lots of different types of “value”. I think looking at “Value” definitely applies to communities. The word “Value” is usually used to encompass all of the many different forms of value (“feedback, sustainbility, credibility, trust,” etc.) But “Value does get misused.
Also, to the commentors above: “measurements” do help people deal with complex clusters of information. So, it is worhtwhile to take the qualitative and try to measure it quantitatively, so long as you are literate enough to understand that the “map” of the quantified qualities is not the “territory”, but rather a rough view. Some people might ask “well, ok, then why ‘map’ it at all?”
Well, because the brain works better with visual languge, and because the map may not be 100% accurate, but neither is a map of the coast of Great Britain. The actual coast is constantly changing as the ocean works upon it, eroding it, and building it up in different areas over time. But, a map still helps you find Great Britain, because the larger body remains mostly in the same place. So,a “map” of human “value” exchanges, and community health indicators still is useful to help you think about how human behavioral forces interact on a wider scale.