Drumbeat/p2pu/Assessment and Accreditation/Webcraft Assessments - detailed/Community builder

Background

One hallmark of open projects is the distributed, collaborative nature of most work. In addition, the participants can bring diverse backgrounds and expertise to any project, which also means that not everyone has the entire suite of skills and knowledge that might be needed to be most effective. In these situations, one or a few people often assume a role as a community builder - attentive to and engaged with the members of the community in such a way that they facilitate successful outcomes for everyone.

This skill is multidimensional, and excellent community-building behavior in one context runs the possibility of simply being disruptive or even disrespectful in a different context. The skill is a mix of communication, work habit, and leadership skills. There is always a danger that a good community builder will act in that capacity to the detriment of her own work, so excellence in this skill demands balancing personal goals with facilitating the goals of other people.

Some comments

From Jane Park - This is a tricky skill to assess holistically. Though the info on the wiki page makes sense, I feel like it's describing one type of community participant (maybe an ideal). However a community, or any working group, is diverse in its participants, with different roles to fill. ie. One community member may be especially active in providing moral support while another is more active in providing concrete feedback. I am not sure whether every single community participant must have the essential "balance" of all of these skills, especially when people contribute in different ways to a community due to time and other constraints.

From Ahrash Bissell - Yes, excellent points. But actually, this is what makes this an interesting skill for our purposes. One way to think of it is like this: someone can be good at "track and field," but actually only excel at the sprints, or the long jump, or what have you. Regardless, such a person would be welcomed as an expert to any track and field event, and we would expect the person to participate in a manner suited to their specific talents.

To turn that idea to the "community builder" skill, we have a few options. One option is to determine, as best we can, a "community builder" skill set which is most widely recognized as such in the web developer community, assuming that our focus in this domain allows us to eliminate some of the other types of community builders that might be active in other areas. I suspect, as you suggest, that even with the web-developer focus, we will still find that there are many ways someone can emerge as a "community builder." Another option is to recognize people as "community builders" when they have achieved some level of expertise for a subset of the possible component parts. In other words, you need not have the essential balance of all these skills to qualify as a community builder. We would want to define, again as best we can, which combinations and subsets of skills are sufficiently meaningful to qualify. Or perhaps the skill is more like a salad bar - the more component parts you master, the greater your recognized skill as a community builder, regardless of the actual component parts involved.

This may also be a case where we are better off relying on some single, semi-amorphous, summative qualification, such as the general opinion of your peers regarding your community-building skills. For example, at the end of a course, we could simply ask everyone to evaluate each other on one or more skills, such as whether that person was a "good community builder." In this case, we would want to provide pathways to developing and demonstrating that skill for people who are interested in it, but we would have to acknowledge that it is possible that people will not recognize them for their community-building contributions even if they follow our recommended practices. The nice thing about this approach in P2PU is that it is subject to research and empirical review. We can recommend certain types of behaviors (or subsets therein) for aspiring community builders and then we can see if those actions lead people to recognize the contributions as "building community." Through trial and error, we might be able to formalize some of the pathways to "community building" with greater confidence that people will really value those skills in the manner intended.

From Barbara Dieu - I agree with Jane that this set of skills is more likely to describe an ideal and that different community members will hop in (or not) and fill different role at different times . However, a list of ideals is always useful. As you all will be catering for participants from differing cultural backgrounds , it may be a good idea to raise awareness to intercultural skills, exploring cross-cultural scenarios like, for instance,  noticing ways that people cluster and subtly exclude others from joining them, how non-native speakers of a language communicate and how people respond to them.  Concepts like high and low context, perception of time and priorities may also affect course organizers' and other participants' expectations and outcomes.

Some links:

Trompenaars' and Hampden-Turner's cultural factors
http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/trompenaars_culture.htm

Hofstede's cultural factors
http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/hofstede_culture.htm

Understanding Cultural Differences (Edward Hall - Google Books)
http://tinyurl.com/edwardhall

From Alex Halavais - I wonder about some of the skills listed, and how they fit in. Obviously, timely and appropriate responses to questions are "question answering" skills. (Or, alternatively, I suppose you could also say they are indicative of abilities like "professional communication" and "time management" which are often viewed as important in the workplace.) I wonder, though, if we consider these as badges--i.e., fairly binary "you've got the skill or you don't" things--if question-answering isn't a prerequisite skill to community building? If so, can we kill off some of the bullets and say "requires Question Answering"?

Also, in an effort not to reinvent the wheel, a lot of these--particularly the last set--remind me a bit of skills required of professional (and amateur) mediators. Especially since at least a few US states license ADR mediators, it might be worth pursuing. Take a look, for example, at:

• What is a good mediator?
• Communication Competencies and Conflict Management: Skills for Mediators and Facilitators
• Office of the Dispute Resolution Specialist: Communication Skills

From Jessy Cowan-Sharp -

1. Are you talking about building monitoring tools into the course websites to automatically gather metrics to help you assess these skills?
2. If so, are you planning to be transparent with that fact and/or with the metrics as they are being gathered?
3. IMHO there are quantitative things that can be measured, but they are more likely to give a human information for making informed decisions, rather than be an automated assessment or spit out some number like "you are a 3 out of 10 community builder" :).

That being said, things that come to mind that we could build into the site include:

• frequency and patterns of posting-- on average x out of y posts were by this person; or here is a graph of the "rhythm" of their postings-- they do or do not post "regularly" (sometimes it's more useful to have short but consistent supportive posts once a day than a flurry of input once a week, but both could result in the same "average" number of posts).

• also poor man's sentiment analysis (basically analyzing keywords) in terms of looking at the type of input a given person is contributing.

• additionally, you could imagine correlating peer assessments ("i thought so-and-so was a great community builder") with vocabulary/sentiment analysis.

Looking longer term, something that would be interesting and enable a lot of interesting research, but also require more work, is training topic classifiers around p2pu in general, as well as each class or maybe even each user's contributions and posts across classes.

I do think consistency and documentation of methodology will be key here, since assuming I've interpreted your goals correctly, this is something pretty radically new, awesome and fascinating, but of course we need ways to assess the methodology over time, and there will be plenty of detractors from such methods as well, but less so if there is full transparency about it.

Finally, it seems like once there is a good sense of a few different soft skills, we might be better off identifying the commonalities between them (especially viz where they touch the technology) and, say, after a round of doing it more manually, design a proper framework for logging and gathering the metrics we're interesting in, and that would enable more flexible analysis-- dare I even say an API? :).

Community builder skill

Breaking down this skill into component parts, we get:

• Your attentiveness to other members of the community.
  • Regularly monitors community discussion and progress.
  • Identifies salient issues within these discussions and summarizes them, or identifies particularly important "specified ignorances" and asks probing questions to shape discussion.
  • Recognizes those who could be significant contributors (especially new members of the community) and provide introductions to those who might be able to engage them effectively.
  • Receptive to questions and comments.
  • Able to receive messages and respond to them in a timely manner.
  • Identified as a "go-to person" in the community in terms of facilitating community action or providing introductions to appropriate members.
  • Appropriateness of responses.
• You are useful, in the sense of being able to provide accurate advice and comments.
  • You are able to identify major decision points in a discussion and relate them to the group in an effective manner in order to promote consensus.
  • You are aware of the skills of various members of the community, are able to identify elements of a project that can be delegated to the appropriate person, and can motivate the appropriate person to take on the identified task.
• You are deferential and accommodating
  • The goal is to build other people's capacities, not just show off.
  • You don't have to be expert in everything, and recognizing when others may be better positioned to help is itself a hallmark of community facilitation.
  • Balance between making a decision and consensus building, as a measure of leadership.
  • Strike appropriate tone.
  • Members of the community value your presence, and they feel that their own presence is valued.
• Community-based projects tend to run more smoothly and achieve desired outcomes more efficiently by virtue of your presence.

Each component part of community builder considered in turn

Your attentiveness to other members of the community

• Regularly monitors community discussion and progress.
• Identifies salient issues within these discussions and summarizes them, or identifies particularly important "specified ignorances" and asks probing questions to shape discussion.
• Recognizes those who could be significant contributors (especially new members of the community) and provide introductions to those who might be able to engage them effectively.
• Receptive to questions and comments.
• Able to receive messages and respond to them in a timely manner.
• Identified as a "go-to person" in the community in terms of facilitating community action or providing introductions to appropriate members.
• Appropriateness of responses.

This aspect of community building reflects the ability of a person to make it known that this is a role they want, and perhaps is an area of proficiency. Probably the best single metric we could use here is simply the perceptions of the other members of the community; for example, if asked to identify someone who was particularly adept at community engagement and facilitation, who is it?

There may be some automated mechanisms for tracking the sub-metrics, such as timeliness of the responses.

You are useful, in the sense of being able to provide accurate advice and comments

• You are able to identify major decision points in a discussion and relate them to the group in an effective manner in order to promote consensus.
• You are aware of the skills of various members of the community, are able to identify elements of a project that can be delegated to the appropriate person, and can motivate the appropriate person to take on the identified task.

The good community builder knows how to encourage discussion and debate, and knows how to draw consensus and closure. She also is able to "call the question," and decide when it is appropriate to move from discussion to action, and is able to convince others to follow that lead.

You are deferential and accommodating

• The goal is to build other people's capacities, not just show off.
• You don't have to be expert in everything, and recognizing when others may be better positioned to help is itself a hallmark of community facilitation.
• Balance between making a decision and consensus building, as a measure of leadership.
• Strike appropriate tone.
• Members of the community value your presence, and they feel that their own presence is valued.

Nothing here yet.

Community-based projects tend to run more smoothly and achieve desired outcomes more efficiently by virtue of your presence

Nothing here yet.