Interview about the birth and growth of the HR community

On October 6th, we are going to work on a casebook learn and organise through social media with a group of about 12 learning professionals. Though the analysis of various cases of learning and change processes in which social media has played a role we hope to gain more insights into this relatively new field. I interviewed Remco Mostertman, the initiator of a large HR community mainly on LinkedIn (Remco is on the right). Here's the interview:


Start
"It all started about 5 years ago. The basic idea was that we all need to improve and develop the HR field. I am convinced HR is the most relevant discipline in organizations, but HR is not always taken serious. There is a need for innovation in HR. The main target hence are line managers in organizations. I believe in learning by connecting and exchanging experiences.

At first I just started with a LinkedIn group. I accidentally running up to LinkedIn, I was receiving all kind of annoying reminders and wanted to get rid of those. Searching on LinkedIn I discovered LinkedIn groups. Immediately I saw the potential of the group section of LinkedIn. In many LinkedIn groups nothing much was happening, and I thought I could do this in a better way."

Approach
"There are different types of communities: communities of purpose, communities of practice and communities of interest, the HR community you could say is all three. The core team is a community of purpose, the community as a whole is more a community of interest. I started inviting my acquaintances, then they another 1 or 2 people out of their networks. I saw that we grew to 20 members, now there are 15,000 members in the largest group and come every month 750 members join. In the beginning there were no subgroups possible on LinkedIn, so we started groups next to the main group started, such as change management, social innovation, diversity, leadership and talent management. Now there are subgroups possible on LinkedIn and we work with subgroups, like HRD Employability and Vitality.

I learn continously. Learning by doing, that's my learning style. Every week I have some new experiences. Sometimes I think about a problem, and forget that I have a huge think tank I can ask for help."



Mix online and offline
"A mix between online and offline is important. People get to know each other online, but when they meet each other there is more depth. I organize World cafés four times a year (see photo), about 80 people attend. The world cafés started when we had 5000 people and wanted to celebrate this. It's been organised 8 times now, at zero cost. I see that the online interaction deepens.

I received many applications from different countries such as India, which I rejected. I thought: I'm going to start a global HR group there is an interest. Currently I have 16 international groups, such as Italian and Russian groups. Great things happen here-it is booming. I search local group managers and organize international conference calls. My dream is: 10 country-based communities that eventually linked together and all contribute to the discipline of innovation by sharing knowledge and experiences."

Business model
"The business model is changing. The newsletter from LinkedIn is free. Eventually we will have a spin / off. so. There will be a fixed group knowledge partners, and there are organizations that will have paid subscriptions, for example on a HRjob-site and people who pay to participate in activities of the HR Business University. Besides the HR community I work one day a week for the University of Amsterdam, where I coach students."

Role of social Media
"Social media are supportive, they are a means and not an end. Social media have to help achieve my ideas. Without the media I was going to build a community anyhow, but it would not have been possible on this scale. Social media also promote transparency and increase the speed. People will in the future have to be authentic, unethical conduct will be visible.

I started with LinkedIn groups, and then there are about 10-12 twitter account currently. Now the HR community participates in a newsletter from one of the partners; we provide trending topics from the groups. We always ask whether people approve, but without exception they agreed to have their issues highlighted in the newsletter.

We use a tiered model, the most current topics owners make a summary for the knowledge portal and the newsletter. We are building nine websites, including two knowledge portals. Knowledge of the groups is then secured to the website. There is also a magazine 2-4 times a year. We have put up Facebook pages for future use, there is nothing to be found currently. Each topic has its own website soon, a LinkedIn (sub-) group and a twitter account."

Critical situations in the growth of the community
a. Tipping Point
"There is a tipping point: a LinkedIn group with over 2,000 members runs itself, even though it differs per theme. What makes a theme work? Whenever they are needed. I do an inventory and latera twitt poll (a poll via Twitter). From there I gather a few sub / theme groups and start. If I invent the topics myself "accidentally" they may grow, but not as good. So start from the questions / orientation. Besides that what is always needed ... active moderation on the content. Remove advertising and promotions or remove spam and place jobs in the section for jobs. Start discussion and / or boost them. From the tipping point onwards, this is less or not needed. Until 2000, you need to recruit and activate members. Only 5% are active, 10% send or read things, so at 200 members, it is not dynamic. However, it can be a good number for a project or group that wishes to exchange information, but not for a community of practice / interest. I'm amazed how fast it develops. HRD and L & D subgroup on LinkedIn already has 1100 members (in 2 months!) and there are four face-to-face peer meetings planned. We do not actively market this.

b. Core Team.
"In the beginning I worked alone, but at some point you need a buddy. I have created an inner circle of about 20 very enthusiastic people who share the same passion and goals and cooperate in different ways and with different intensities. Yet, with the enormous growth there was also a need for more structure and stability in the heart of the community, now there's a solid core team of six people who put in time, and participate at least 1.5 years till December 2012. I invited a number of them myself and some expressed their interest to join to me. Each member manages a label. A label is what we use to market a business unit or window. There are four named values ​​from which we work: skills, openness, curiosity and ownership. We work with shared leadership."

My own role
"Maintaining the LinkedIn group takes me about two hours a day. Some professionals start a group, and nothing happens, they underestimate the work. It's hard work and you must begin with a vision. Every community has a leader. I am the leader for this HRcommunity. You also need luck. What I bring: I like to experiment with the computer, I want to discover how it works. I have a passion for HR, Social Media and the development of organizations. My role is very diverse: till the tipping point I invite people and alert them about discussions, after the tipping point it grows by itself. I also moderate content and topics, and start boosting discussions. I try to read everything, it provides a good view into the field, I enjoy reading everything. I get a message when someone starts a new thread. Sometimes things go out of hand with advertising issues, then I filter it out. This is a lot of work, but otherwise it's annoying for the members. I put all applications manually on a list of members in an excel sheet, and I review the composition of the group occassionally."

Results
"We have contributed to an HR field in motion and development. There is an active community with 20,000 members nationally, 30,000 internationally. The largest group has 15,000 members, 50% are consultants, 40% work within organizations, 5% are students and 5% recruiter. I would like a mixed composition - so I am pleased with the growth in number of students since this was only 1%. The number of people is not an end in itself - the dynamics and depth are more important than the numbers, the debates and reactions, and numbers of people showing up at meetings. In my perception, there are more and more in-depth topics, they run longer and more people participate than in the beginning. Participants gain new insights, news and interesting facts and get new contacts. The network has a value. Thus I have been approached for cooperation, but the bottom line is that I'm not selling products, then people will lose interest in the community."

Reflection
"It is a different way of working. If you ask a question, you often get a solution and suggestions within few hours. Even I forget sometimes that this is possible. Within the HR field, the awareness that being active in a community is part of your work is not so high. The community-based work is not in the DNA of organizations. What has really surprised me is the incredible speed at which things are going and the mega impact. The goal for next year is: develop the groups and platforms, further animation and professional development, connecting people, developing a talent bank and career portal for matching on the labor market and an assessment site for HR service providers .

Read dutch? There is an article by Kim Castenmiller. The home of the HR community is a linkedIn group. You may follow Remco Mostertman on twitter or the HR community op twitter

An online forum as a grafitti wall

Note: this is a translation of a Dutch blogpost. I'm thinking how to continue with a Dutch and an English blog. I used to have different content, but maybe I'll just translate? Anyhow here's a translated post:

(foto door cheryljns)
I've started in January with an online course 'Think till you are thin" 'Denk je slank in Dutch' It works I lost 4 kilos!). It is an online training so also signed up out of curiosity to see how they shape the course. The way it is set up is fun, with exercises, text-messaging, videos and a coach, though I miss the interaction.

There is a forum for sharing with other participants. This is a nice example of how you should not use a forum. It is a kind of online grafitti wall where any participant can post on any topic. It is not facilitated (at least I have not even noticed) and it is public, so anyone on the internet can read it. Not all forums have to be private, but if you want to discuss issues related to your weight, it helps when you have some feeling of privacy. As a result, it is a kind of graffiti wall where everyone starts as reporting that the course he started, then the conversation stops. A typical example of a message: "I started the course today and hope I get the book soon! As a result of this type of message, during the course people do not go back to the forum. People look at the forum in the beginning and forget about it.

What can you learn from this example? I see the following lessons:

• Consider carefully whether you should make a forum public (visible to everyone) or private (visible to members only). If the goal is to discuss personal struggles with weight loss (as mentioned on this forum) I would make it private, only accessible to learners.
  
• If you want to bring together people around shared interests and topics you will need to facilitate this and use categories or groups on the forum, so people will get attracted to a particular category or group.
• Working with cohorts of new members, make sure that people from the same batch can find each other and link. Make for instance a group for anyone who starts in a given month.

Tips for facilitators in Ning

I've been exploring Ning a little further than I did and compared it to other forums like socialgo, collectivex and grou.ps. Gro.ups is open source, has a lot of similar functionalities to ning (and more- you can upload files easily) and is also without advertisements (for free!). The advantage of ning is that it is slightly more attractive in look and feel. Besides it is getting very popular. If people already worked with ning before, it might reduce the learning curve in learning your way around. I'm a member of 15 ning forums, and was surprised how reluctant I was to dive into grou.ps, being used to ning.

A few tips for ning administrators:

1. Public or private? If you hesitate between a public ning (attracts new members online) or a private ning (makes it easier for members to share information that they don't want to be public) you have the option to choose for a public homepage and a private rest of the site. When people who are not a member click on other tabs they are asked to become a member or log in. You can change this lateron too through 'manage'.

2. Integration of external pages You can use external pages and make them a tab in your ning. A ning for libarians (betabiep) decided to create a netvibes page about the darwin year. They added this page as library page in their ning site. Since ning does not offer a wiki or document sharing functionality, you could add an external wiki page with lists of documents or links.

3. Language You can select the language of your preference for all navigation. If you go to manage click on languages, you can already choose from 25 languages, or you can work on translations and add a new language.

4. Hosting on your own domain. If you pay 4.95 US $ per month, you can host it on your own domain.

5. Email subscriptions. Not everyone may use RSS feeds. At the Forum bottom of the page there is a possibility to warn you by mail when new discussions are started. Depending on the topic, you can then decide for which discussion you would like to receive a notification in the mail of new contributions. This system works very well (for email based workers like me!). You can use feedblitz (or similar service perhaps too) to offer an email subscription to updates too. See in the left corner of the africanpath ning (picture).

6. Chat option. Though I ticked the chat function, I don't really see it working. What you can do is integrate an external chat function like meebo and embed it in the ning site. This is something I first saw in the ning about Worldwide story work but now I don't see it there? Update: (thanks to Demetri) if you tick the chat function at the bottom of the page you can see how many people are online. If you click on it, you get a chat functionality. Apparently the chat function may slow down your pages.

Do you have more tips to customize a ning site to your needs?

Wikis as a repository for an online community

Via Nancy White I found his funny video talking about blogs versus wikis. It matches well with my previous post about an online community using a mailing list, with a wiki as a repository. Why? Because I have experiences with an online community using a mailing list, teleconferences and a weblog as a repository. It could have been a wiki too.

The choice between the two probably depends on personal preferences and experiences (do members have more experiences/habits of reading weblogs or working with wikis?). Stories are probably better for a blog, and frequently asked questions are more easily structured in a wiki. In the video, wikis are shown as more democratic. That might be a consideration too. Do you want a really large group to work the repository? Then a wiki might be easier than a teamblog.
Enjoy the video!

Wiki as repository for a virtual community

Through a comment on a blogpost by Nancy White I found this article about a virtual community using a discussion list (listserv) in combination with a wiki. The wiki serves as a collaborative repository. You can access the article here if you want to read it in full.

I've been advising a community where using an online discussion forum where few people had experience with a wiki. We started a wiki to put knowledge products together. Though it was hard to get people to work on the wiki, it was very attractive to some because of its structure as compared to the discussion forum that may look very chaotic. So I'm a little jealous that the community in this article has such an active wiki process. But it does provide a clear picture of what's possible!

The community is a help-based community discussing the applied use of CSS, hence a technical topic. The interesting part is the analysis of how the wiki helps with the social processes of keeping the conversation on-topic and avoiding holy wars. Because the email list is a push technology and the wiki more a pull technology, more off-topic discussions can be allowed on the wiki than on the mailing list, hence it provides a space to address wider needs. Holy wars are redirected to the wiki and because members are forced to summarize their arguments into an information product, the wars are used more constructively.

The wiki also has helped in the process of retaining the old members. It helps to introduce new people by having a place to redirect them when they pose 'old questions' that have been discussed before. As a result, the questions on the mailing list can remain focused on new problems. The wiki also worked to attract new members because people find the wiki and become interested in the mailing list.

By the way, CPsquare is organising a conference about wikis for communities. You can track the resources by following http://delicious.com/tag/waatwaat.

Traces of how ideas travel

What do I have in common with Mark Gould, Dawn Foster and Richard McDermott? I wouldn't know but we are all mentioned in this blogpost in an unknown language :). I found it through tracking the referring URL to my weblog. I think this what is exciting about the online interactions. In the offline world, there is no way of tracking who is using your words, ideas, or who is talking about you. Unless you get some feedback. But online, it is much easier to track down what kind of ideas or blogposts get referred to. When you work in face-to-face communities a lot of impact may happen without anybody noticing for instance, ideas may continue to be told to colleagues, publications shared, ways of working copied. For online communities it must be easier to do so? On the other hand, you can't track how it travels from the online into the real world. Anyone who know what kind of language this is?

What does online community mean to you?

Via Bob Stumpel I found this video with almost 100 (?) respondents to the question : 'What does online community mean to you?'. They're all young except one, who answers: 'young and old being friend together'. It video is about 8 minutes.



The answers range from crazy, addictive via revolution and inspiration to boring comedy and popularity contest. Listening to them, I realized that I'm using the same tools in a very different way. I'm on youtube, and blip.tv, but not feeling part of the 'youtube' community. I'm using it to connect smaller groups of people, networks and communities of practice. By using online means I'm actually hoping to get different conversations than when it's face-to-face. By the way, there were also a lot of answers refering to the worldwide connections.