Madeleine Taylor on network weaving

I'm writing an article about challenges in fostering learning networks in education- based on 8 interviews we did last year- the writing is a bit of a long process but we're getting there. What is striking in the interviews is that the role of the coordinator or facilitator is so new to people. Compared to other tasks and working according to a plan, they have to learn to let go and see what emerges. But there is some confusion too, that letting go means doing less or waiting passively till others take initiave. In my experiences it means working hard, but doing more on the background, talking to people, knowing their passions and interests and knowing what will trigger their participation or even lead taking.

On Beth's blog, this blogpost I found this small interview on network weaving. I've never liked the term weaver, it's so domestic somehow... but it does highlight the invisible work on relationships of a network coordinator or facilitator.



Madeleine explains that you have to see connections and the value the connections bring to people. And knowing what connections to promote, because not everyone needs to be connected to everyone. I'd add that you can also do that from a deep understanding of the domain and the cutting-edges of the domain.

Are your community's lurkers healthy lurkers?

I facilitated a teleconference with Mirjam Neelen for CPsquare. Mirjam is doing a thesis on this topic and shared her literature research with us. It struck me how much more you dive into a topic if you have to facilitate it, you suddenly feel more responsible and really invest in the topic. I've blogged about lurking before, investigating whether lurking in online forums is a sort of legitimate peripheral participation that leads to people learning about the practices of a community of practice. This time we tried to analyze whether lurking in online forums is a problem or a bliss for companies. The definition of lurking is as people who NEVER post, hence they don't share their questions, ideas or suggestions online.

What did I learn about lurking? First, most of all recognized that lurking can be very positive. Lurking into an online forum because you feel you are a novice can make you more expert. Or scanning a wide variety of online forum to know what's happening in other fields (helps boundary crossing). Something that really struck me in Mirjam's paper was the observation by Stegbauer that if participants remained inactive for the first four months, the likelihood for them to become active was minimized. I recognized this from my own behaviour. That means there is a crucial period to try and get participants active, to stimulate active participation. Mirjam outlined a wide variety of barriers that may lead to lurking behaviour and withold members from posting:

• Interpersonal barriers- loss of face
• Procedural barriers- people don't buy into the recommended ways of sharing (could be called preferential barriers?)
  
• Technological barriers - lack of technological aptitude
• Cultural barriers- crosscultural differences

'Healthy' lurking processes are probably situation where people are novices and learn by lurking or interdisciplinary lurking. It becomes unhealthy when important information and knowledge is missed out because of the above mentioned barriers. Suppose an online community is missing out all major experts because they continue to change offline, then some bridging needs to be done to ensure the online community doesn't become marginalized and mediocre. I guess an analyisis of inbound trajectories whereby people move from lurking to being active or core members are key to seeing whether lurking is healthy. What are the community's practice to stimulate sharing of ideas and perspectives?

What did I learn about online facilitation? I made it into a sort of exercise in online facilitation for myself, designing and online-teleconference-online sequence. The idea was to collect lurker stories online, discuss the research focussing on lurking behaviour in online corporate community forums, and go back online to brainstorm about research questions. The first part worked well, but there was no energy to go back online to discuss the research questions. I think I should have changed the initial plan into a topic that might have attracted more energy for the participants of the teleconference, like research methodologies. What really paid off was to prepare it all together beforehand in a skype session. That's an investment that really pays off in terms of quality.