Towards Crowdsourcing Management for Online Communities & Online Groups

No one has ever come up with a perfect model for managing online communities. With the recent closing of Geocities and the explosive growth of online groups for event planners, it's time to pause, reflect on lessons learned and develop a more inclusive, bottom up approach to management. Could crowdsourcing be the wave of the future?

Ever since the advent of the first bulletin boards, management of online groups has been a challenge. As a result of the ease in the proliferation of spam, the risk of an online group devolving into a gloried classifieds section is high. Preventing discussions from degenerating into shouting matches or communities from being inundated with pornography and other inappropriate content is also a challenge. A number of online group management models have been tried. To date, no perfect model for managing online groups has ever been created. Let's look at some of the appraoches that have been attempted. What have we learned along the way? How can crowdsourcing lead to a lighter, more flexible and more inclusive approach to group management.

Geocities Community Leaders:

I was part of the network of community leaders at Geocities, one of the original virtual communities. Geocities was created in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner. By1998, Geocities was the third most visited Internet site.

GeoCities to Shutdown; What Was GeoCities, You Ask?

Now that Yahoo! has pulled the plug on Geocities, Reocities is attempting to salvage and restore the original Geocities content to create a perpetual archive.

Reocities: One Man's Quest to Bring Geocities Back from the Dead.

The graphical interface, innovative for its time, consisted of a number of neighbourhoods with blocks, just like any residential community. In mid-1995, the original 6 neighbourhoods were created. To encourage interaction among homesteaders and create true virtual communities, over time community centres, chat, and discussion boards were added. Each neighbourhood in this virtual world was named after a location in the real world and given a specific focus. For example, Eureka, where I used to "reside", was for entrepreneurs and Augusta was for websites that focused on golf.

The free websites hosted at Geocities were called homesteads and they were to be strictly non-promotional. However, it quickly became apparent that some "homesteaders" (as they were called) were pushing the envelope and violating the "content guidelines" of the community by remote loading, as well as creating promotional websites and sites with violent or pornographic content:

GeoCities Member Terms of Service and Page Content Guidelines

To deal with this, Geocities formed a volunteer corps called Community Leaders. Each Community Leader was given an in-depth training programme and assigned a group of "blocks" within their community to patrol and discussion boards to monitor. Reocities is not the first to archive Geocities content. In fact, through archive.org's "Wayback Machine", the amount of information that has been preserved in incredible.

GeoCities Special Collection 2009: Saving a Historical Record of GeoCities

You can travel back in time and still see the original team of which I was a member:

GeoCities Eureka Community Leaders

and details of about the Community Leader programme:

Geocities Community Leaders

Eureka Community Leader Application Form

This model worked really well. There was a sense of community, ownership, and inclusion. Members of the community were provided with a form to report "content guideline violations". Owners of websites that didn't meet the "content guidelines" were given coaching and tools by the Community Leaders to improve their sites. If violations were severe, the sites were deleted and the vacant homesteads were made available for new members. The model wasn't perfect and it was a challenge for Community Leaders to keep up with some of the spam on discusssion boards and porn and phishing sites that seemed to be constantly springing up. Still, there is a lot that we can learn from this early model.

The sale of Geocities to Yahoo! for $2.87 billion dollars in 1999, lead to the eventual demise of the Geocities Community Leader programme. Yahoo! closed Geocities on October 26, 2009.

Yahoo tangles with GeoCities volunteer community leaders

Moderators:

LISTSERV, and usenet newsgroups, from which discussion boards evolved, used moderators. All posts were approved by  a moderator and spam was weeded out.  Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups had the option of "moderating" new members until they  proved themselves or putting members back on "moderation if they violated the rules of the community. These approaches eliminated spam but, because postings was not "real-time", the interaction between users was slow and significantly reduced using this type of technology.

Discussion boards are online communities with specific themes. On discussion boards, members typically create an avatar and a user name to ensure their anonymity. To access a discussion board, every new member must agree to its "Terms of Service", a set of rules that are to govern their conduct on the board.  As they grow and develop, discussion boards begin to function like real communities with all of the positive and negative aspects of any human ogranization. Due to the anonymity, cliques, power elites and scapegoats eventually emerge. Arguing, tension and conflict plague many discussion boards. Some communities have get-togethers for members in different areas of the community and eventually, the anonymity breaks down when information about the identify of other members is passed around in a clandestine manner. On some boards, conflicts have even escalated to the point that members have called the boss of rival members to report them for spending time on the board during business hours.

A key difference between discussion boards and LISTSERV and usent newsgroups, is that postings are real-time. The moderator model on dicussion boards was developed to deal with spam, online stalking, harrassment, insults, and other inappropriate conduct on discussion boards. There are different areas or sections of the board that focus on specific topics. Most discussion boards have volunteer administrators who have final say and volunteer moderators for each area of the board. Members who have concerns about content can "blow the whistle", flag a post or send a confidential e-mail to the moderators. They delete all spam and inappropriate content. Moderators also keep an eye on discussions. They can warn, suspend and ban members who violate the terms of service. The main challenge with the moderation model is that there is often controversy and tension when content is removed. Until suspended or banned, any member can go to the feedback section and create a lot of drama.

Group Managers

The group management model is typically used on websites such as LinkedIn that have a network of groups, each with a specific focus. Groups can be built around common interests, professions, countries, or companies. Typically, members join groups using their own names. This curbs some of the negative behaviour that is rampant on discussion boards. On LinkedIn, initially, each group had an owner who started and managed the community. As groups grew, LinkedIn added functionality so that Group Owners could appoint Group Managers to assist them. Based on the clear set of posted guidelines and rules that have been developed in consultation with group members, Group Managers are the ones who make the call about what is acceptable content and what is spam . Group Managers are empowered to approve members, feature discussions, and, starting in mid-2009, create sub-groups. To deal with spam and inappropriate content, Group Managers can:

• post reminders
• write to the group members who aren't following the posting guidelines
• delete threads and individual posts
• temporarily remove members (suspend)
• permanently remove and block members (ban)

The advantage of the Group Management model is that a lot of the moderation goes on behind the scenes. For this reason, the tension, conflict and drama that plagues discussion boards is eliminated. It is highly effective and can virtually eliminate spam. The downside is that no group member who have been issued a warning, suspended or banned is ever going to be happy about that. There can be a very strong backlash in the form of disgruntled former members engaging in highly vindictive behaviour such as posting negative comments about Group Owners and Managers on blogs and other websites or tweeting it on Twitter. This has happened in the forums at dating sites and a number of online communities. Individuals can't afford to risk having their reputation tarnished in this manner, potentially jeopradizing their livelihoods. For this reason and demanding work commitments, fewer and fewer individuals are willing to volunteer to moderate or manage groups.

Crowdsourcing for Online Communities: The Shape of Things to Come?

On his Crowdsourcing blog, Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, defines crowdsourcing as "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call". You can hear more about what Jeff Howe has to say about crowdsourcing here:

When applied to online communities, it means that all group members share equally in community management. With crowdsourcing, it is the members of the community who drive the content. They define what content is appropriate and flag content that should be removed. The role of the Group Manager is simply to execute the collective decisions of the community.

New technology is making crowdsourcing possible even in large communities. Crowdsourcing is already being used in LinkedIn's Q&A section. Content is completely member driven. LinkedIn members have been given the tools to create questions, respond to questions and flag and remove content. Similar technology could easily be applied to LinkedIn Groups or any online community. Until the functionality is available to automate this process, it can be handled manually. One of the groups I belong to on LinkedIn, Event Planning and Management, launched crowdsourcing on November 13, 2009. It will be interesting to see how things unfold as our community moves away from the group management model and makes the transition to crowdsourcing.

Is crowdsourcing the wave of the future for online community management? Will this approach make communities more accountable to members? Will it help online communities navigate around some of the pitfalls that were inherent in other online group management models? Most important, will it create a bottom up rather than a top down approach to virtual community management? Only time will tell.

Photo Credit: opendemocracy