Yesterday I moderated a panel on building and planning online communities as part of the E-Marketing Summit  Austin. We were speaking to a large room filled with marketing professionals. The description of the panel said that “every company owner or C-level manager is talking about how to develop an online community strategy.” So there’s unprecedented interest in online community development, and I found that the other panelists were very smart about building and sustaining communities in a business context, and very clear about the strategic business value of the communitie they’ve built. This hasn’t always been the case. In the 90s, there was a surge of interest in online community development, but at many companies it was a shallow afterthought. This decade there’s been excitement about social technology, social media, and social networks, but not necessarily on the nuts and bolts of community development. Excitement about social networks doesn’t necessarily translate into community development. Social network platforms are good for manifesting connections to people you know, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that community will form. True community is a set of people who, beyond establishing relationships, share knowledge, experience, and history over time. This won’t necessarily happen on a blog or a social network platform, though it could happen anywhere that supports consistent conversations within a persistent group of people who come to know each other.

So if I make a blog post and random readers post comments, but they don’t return to sustain the conversation or join other conversations on my blog, community isn’t forming. However if I blog in a way that invites conversation, and I get a persistent audience of commenters that build relationships with each other through the comments as conversation, a community may evolve.

Community is scalable to some kind of mass converation only by forming “neighborhoods.” It’s inherent in social bandwidth – there’s a limit to the number of people who can have a sustained conversation without losing coherence or group cohesion. On a larger virtual community like The WELL, the thousands of members don’t all know each other. They hang out in conferences or forums, and focus on particular topics or conversations within those forums. Community forms based on affinity. A majority of community members tend to lurk – i.e. listen to the conversation without contributing. The lurker ratio isn’t always a majority, it will vary depending on the size and composition of the group, and the nature of the conversation. I suspect without any academic reference that lurkers stabilize the conversation by delegating the floor to other speakers, and “uncloak” only when they have a compelling thought that isn’t represented by the more vocal participants.

If you assume a 20% ratio of vocal participants to lurkers, and you assume that the best conversations are limited to a dozen speakers (an average number suggested by some of my colleagues, like Ross Mayfield), then a conversation with lurkers would top out sixty persons.

Given that number, you can’t really have mass conversations. Democracy, seen as a conversation about governance, doesn’t scale unless you can determine how to chunk the larger community into smaller, manageable conversations (which is hard) or, as an alternative, have a few surrogates in conversation and a massive number of lurkers – that’s the broadcast way of working, and done that way, you get a conversation that’s dominated by few individuals, probably all operating with similar cultural assumptions. I.e. how diverse could culture and thinking be among east coast pundits?

The social web, as an aggregate of many voices and many conversations within many communities, has created a post-broadcast reality where we have the many “chunks.” The online community movement, now facilitated not just as a few casual community sites but also as business and professional communities of practice, gives us more and more chunks of conversation, and more and more comfort with best practice for making those chunks strategically effective. For more democratic governance, the challenge is to aggregate chunks of citizens in a way that’s relevant to governance. In my final post as guest blogger at DrGreene.com’s Perspectives, I want to challenge you to think about your role in the conversations that are relevant to you. Given all that you do in your world every day, are you missing time to join citizen conversations and communities? Do you have a responsibility to be part of a larger daily conversation about how we can make the world work, safely and effectively?

Gilles Frydman at e-patients.net (where the Greenes and I also blog) has posted a consideration of the term participatory medicine and the evolving sense of its meaning. Gilles starts with his own definition:
Participatory Medicine is a model of medical care actively involving the patient (or the patient’s caregiver as appropriate) as an integral part of the full continuum of care.
It requires:

• a patient enabled by information, software and community
• equal access to all the clinical and scientific data related to the patient and,
• a well defined shared decision-making process.

The idea of an empowered patient participating in a healthcare process that was previously completely in the hands of the doctor, with access to information that in the past only doctors could easily access, is inherently political. It’s about the democratization of knowledge, and there’s growing interest in the concept, also described as “Health 2.0,” defined by Ted Eytan as “participatory healthcare.”
Enabled by information, software, and community that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own healthcare, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.

I’ve talked this week about changes in political participation engendered by expanding adoption of revolutionary web-based technologies for connection and communication. Healthcare, like politics, is being transformed by the web. Patients are finding robust sources of information about their conditions and sharing knowledge in patient communities. More medical professionals are leveraging the Internet, too, and physicians are beginning to acknowledge the potential for partnership with their patients.

e-patients.net started with a white paper instigated by the late Dr. Tom Ferguson and co-authored with several associates who completed his work after his untimely death.  Tom spent his professional life advocating self-care and patient empowerment. When the Internet was privatized and the process of mainstreaming began, Tom was clear about the possibility that data networks could revolutionize healthcare. The team of advocates he pulled together to create the white paper was just as passionate about the democratization of healthcare knowledge and process. The group is blogging regularly at the e-patients.net web site, and in the process of creating a Journal of Participatory Medicine.

Are patients without medical training capable of evaluating medical knowledge and having informed opinions about their own medical issues? Is there a danger in potential misinterpretations of medical knowledge found online? Or potential bad advice received from other patients with similar conditions in online patient communties? Similar issues exist for all the online contexts where knowledge is openly shared, hierarchies are flattened – where there’s a democratization of knowledge. From an elite or professional perspective, “a little knowledge” – or knowledge out of the broader context of professional development – “is dangerous.”  I can imagine these arguments, but I’m not really hearing them from healthcare professionals. In fact, my experience with physicians has generally been that they are inclined to trust their patients’ thinking and research. After years of study, rather than assuming they know it all, they’re acutely aware that their knowledge has limits.

Online medical information is still pretty limited, and the concept of participatory medicine is still pretty new. There’s also much information that’s considered proprietary and never openly shared – see the Heath Commons proposal, for instance, which discusses how pharmaceutical companies keep their proprietary data close, and how failure to share more of that knowledge impedes development of new treatments.

If you’re not sure whether you think participatory medicine is a good idea, it’s probably because you haven’t felt a compelling need for it yet. You’re one disease away from a much stronger opinion.

Will you be watching the presidential debate tonight? Alone, or with others? Many folks will be watching at public or private debate parties and gatherings, and many will be hanging out online via chat rooms or Twitter, or they’ll be live blogging. We’re seeing a real surge of civic engagement attributable to sustained support for conversation and participation via the Internet – conversations are happening online, and offline conversations are being organized online.

It’s great to see this profound interest and engagement, but bringing more people together in more places for more conversation doesn’t necessarily lead to some ideal democratic ferment that will ineluctably result better governance. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, too much conversation is happening in echo chambers, reinforcing the profound polarization of the U.S. electorate. We need conversations that are structured to be effective, which means we need better-informed participants and skilled facilitators and natural leaders who will guide those conversations and cultivate a vision and sens of direction within their groups and communities.

The National Conference on Dialog and Deliberation suggests methods for organizing effective and meaningful conversations.  Broad adoption of these methods could result in more effective mobilizaton of the intelligence and energy of groups at every level. However these approaches require time and energy, and these have a cost. How many of us will commit to development of whatever qualities of leadership and facilitation we might have? How do we make deliberative work and democratic participation as compelling as television?

Have fun watching the debate, and be thinking of the larger conversations we can have.

When we think about how we can improve public dialog and debate, we have to consider the future of media – that’s where the conversation’s happening, and what we call media has been changing radically over the last couple of decades. In the last century we saw an evolution from print media to broadcast audio via radio and video via television. Costs of production were high, manageable only by companies with sufficient capitalization, so the broadcast model was inherently one to many, top-down, with a very limited number of content sources and channels. As radios and television sets became fixtures in homes and businesses everywhere, we had a sense of shared experience that was very powerful but limited. There was a sense of cultural unity and coherence, but the cultural experience channeled through media was narrow and somewhat constrained by the whatever cultural biases were predominant within media companies. The bandwidth was too limited to carry much diversity.

The Internet and the World Wide Web changed all that. Over the last decade-plus, we’ve seen the emergence of citizen media and user-generated content. Computers, the new means of production for media, are inexpensive and portable, and anyone can acquire the tools to create and distribute fairly sophisticated media. We see iterative media, media that “is always being updated, improved and remixed.” As a result we’re more culturally diverse, far more voices are in the conversation, and you don’t see the broader cultural coherence of the late 20th century. In fact mindshare is fragmented – it’s increasingly difficult to claim a truly mass following. The long tail of bloggers with microaudiences are claiming more attention than professional journalists or “a-list” bloggers.

With so many niches to scratch, it’s easier for echo chambers to develop. Rather than very few channels carrying a limited mix of news and entertainment, we now have myriad channels, each tending to be more narrowly focused. You might choose to mix channels, but it’s even less likely than before that you’d go out of your way to find conversations with which you disagree.

We therefore have more diversity, but at the same time, more “echo chambers.” We have many more conversations, but they don’t intersect, and we see little of the kind of civil debate where opponents actually hear and respond to each other’s points, with the possibility of a synthesis of opinion. So while the increasing proliferation and convergence of media forms is exciting, the sense of a broadly shared public conversation where conflicting ideas are respected and shared is harder to find than ever.

Add to that the fact that this is all so very new and complex. Media literacy is harder to acquire; the media ecology is volatile. Political polarization increases. We think that Internet and Web connections should create opportunities for social and civic engagement, but it’s harder to focus.

I want to encourage discussion here: what are some ways that citizens can engage meaningfully in broader public dialog? Where do those opportunities exist? In the last month before the national election, where are the liveliest debates happening? Are town hall meetings useful and meaningful, or are they no more than photo ops for politicians on the campaign trail?

Post your comments below; more thoughts tomorrow.

I feel most passionate about two things – one is the the Internet and the other is people and how they communicate, make connections, and form networks. My interest in people led me to the Internet: I wasn’t interested in computers until I learned that you could use them to communicate with whole communities of people you might otherwise never have met. Some people call me a web guru, but I wouldn’t have spent so much of the last two decades at keyboard and monitor if I hadn’t seen the screen before me as a window on a world of potential social connections. I got that immediately, in 1985, when I read about bulletin board systems and bought my own pc and (300 baud!) modem so that I could be part of that scene.

For years, I’ve been explaining the social Internet and web to diverse people in various contexts, and watched them struggle with the notion that you can have profound social experiences with people you’ve never met face to face. But explaining is easier than it used to be. People are more aware that this other world of social interaction exists and somehow works. Most people are having some experience of it, even if they aren’t immersed in it, as I’ve been since the late 1980s. Kids, of course, are swimming in it… their future makes me think of the concept, espoused by Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky, of a noosphere,  a collective consciousness or sphere of human thought. This idea sounded pretty far-out in the 20th Century, but less so as we see every day web-enabled mind-melds all around us.

My online community focus also led me to explore the potential connection between technology and politics. There are two ways to think about this. If you’re an activist advocating for a particular position, you’ll see the potential to advance your cause and find adherents online.  However if you’re an activist advocating democracy – for better and broader participation in the conversations that lead to decisions about policy and governance – you’ll want to explore the potential for online dialog and deliberation.

For a time I was interested in the former, but I’ve become more interested in the latter, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, once again observing the polarization of the electorate in an election year. This polarization is inevitable as parties fight for votes – as Dick Gephardt and others have said, “Politics is a substitute for violence.”  Regardless who wins the 2008 presidential and other elections, we’ll find ourselves in January devoting energy to polarization, and/or attempts to resolve it, that we could otherwise devote to the unprecedented set of problems we face.

There’s a lot to say about how we proceed, but I’m especially interested in how we use our sophisticated communication tools to have conversations that are not echo chambers – how do we create conversations among people who profoundly disagree, and convince them to listen, think, and try to find common ground? We’ve proved that social technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. The Internet’s been mainstreaming since the early 90s, and we’re more divided than ever.

I think the solutions are social as well as technical, and that’s what I want to talk about this week as Perspectives guest blogger.