FreshNetworks Blog

Charlene Li gave an excellent talk on the new Forrester book Groundswell. While I could write about it here Nancy White’s visual is even more powerful. As they say, a picture says a thousand words…

See all of Nancy’s photos from the Community 2.0 event here.

So this is my first contribution to this blog. I’ve finally mustered up the confidence to write after being inspired at the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas, and by some of the speakers here. In particular, by a fascinating workshop on rewards and awards in communities. Jake “Community guy” McKee, Dawn Foster at Jive and Bill Johnston from Forum One Communications ran an interactive session on Community Reputation Systems…what do all those points mean?

The discussion started with a question on trolls - how do you handle the legitimate complaints vs the people that are just making trouble? As Digg commented, simply banning people and a “stick-only” approach just creates more problems as trolls become ever more persistent and there needs to be open discussion for genuine concerns. So how do you provide the carrot and set up positive reinforcement of good behaviour? Jake pointed to the Flickr Community Guidelines as the sort of short, fun house rules (e.g. Play Nice, Don’t be Creepy) that build community in a positive way - terms of service and legalese might be necessary but won’t add to the social dimension.

So positive reinforcement is important and while house rules help real thought also need to go into designing a community reputation management system. In other words how can points systems, leaderboards and awards help? Some of the clues lay in an earlier presentation from Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain who talked about what communities can learn from gaming. As social beings we love to collect and games are designed to give feedback, reinforce positive behaviour and add fun - all essential elements for building user generated content and the sense of community. So thriving communities look for things to collect - explicit rewards can create a transactional tone so implicit awards like points or ratings can be powerful.

Some of the points-systems in use are based on activity (number of posts, number of replies), endorsements (ratings, kudos) or algorithms based on some combinations of these. The whole panel was in agreement that some sort of reputation system was important for community health but that it needed to be carefully designed. Bill pointed out that you should be transparent about the factors that you will be taking into account in creating status points but only relying on an algorithm for generating reputation and status allows people to game the system. And if explicit rewards or incentives are tied to status points an algorithm-only system is especially dangerous. So the panel agreed that while you might start with a leaderboard based on a (carefully designed) algorithm a subjective assessment for recognition and awards (rather than rewards) by the Community Manager was also key component of success.

Over lunch Dan Marx from Microsoft explained to me how his old company, CarDomain handled some of this - status and reputation was based on nominations from the community to reach the Top 20, and then an “Editor’s pick” selected the posts and pictures to make the frontpage. The combination of nominations (algorithm) and human element allowed the community huge influence but people that were just trying to game the system were easily weeded out.

To me, the whole discussion reinforced two things:

1. while technology is important the human element that a Community Manager brings is absolutely critical
2. all too many organisations only think about the user experience but optimisation for moderation, management and reputation is equally, if not more, important