Forum Moderators

If you belong more than few online fora and groups and if you have belonged to them for some time, you probably are familiar with the kind of "moderator" I'm about to describe.

Usually male, 35-55, claiming to be a professional something. Very energetic and charismatic, he pours all his enthusiasm in sharing resources and providing links and opportunities for fellow members, which of course would never dare shooting on their meal ticket *grin*

If you belong to the same groups I do, you could identify at least three persons fitting such description. In fact, this entry was thought for the three of them, after spotting their "sameness".

Saints, you might think. Not nearly so.

The "professional" moderator, turns out, either spams other fora/groups or recruits members vigorously. He can't wait for being praised for all he does. And here's the problem: what if he doesn't get all the praise he wants?

Techniques I've seen these characters using:
1) "another member" posting compliments for the mod from the same IP address;
2) "another member" arguing with the mod again from the same IP address;
3) the moderator lashing out at whoever doesn't praise him enough, and throwing suspicion on these "uncooperative" others, meanwhile praising gentleness, kindness and forgiveness (that of course don't apply to him).

The lashing out is particularly revealing: it's callous, it allows for no reply, it is a character assassination that mocks at others' ability to be a professional and is totally unexpected by most people (except from online veterans).

By this time, some members of his group (usually the ones with the longest online experience) has already checked many IP addresses and figured out how "sweet D, V, or - say - another D" are a wolf in sheep's clothes. Then these persons commit the mortal sin: they face him and ask for explanation.

He broadcasts the "attack" to his faithful friends (which, may I say, usually correspond with his co-moderators), of course without providing any explanations on what set the other persons off.

The co-moderators, usually, have a few time to spend checking the group let alone checking on whether those accusations are right or wrong. They are completely in good faith and believe in the cause of the group as well as he says, so they regretfully side with him till a person they really trust opens their eyes.

Most members of groups moderated by moderators like him, are like wild cats. Unable to achieve any kind of discipline, disguising insults into polite statements, heck, even unable to read the guidelines and behave accordingly.

When you look at one of these moderators and his group, it is like looking at those women with 30 cats in a 100 squared meter apartment, claiming they would give their life for their cats, while they can't even give them discipline, and the cats dictate her life "gimme more gimme more".

I used to get mad at these moderators.

Now I've understood they are punishing themselves by giving in to the stereotype of the codependent nurturer. They can't say no for fear of being abandoned and yet they can't behave decently either because they want no rules for themselves and that's why they don't give rules to others. And when you yourself have no boundaries for how far you can go, you have no boundaries for how far others can go on you.

So when I look at a group like that all you can see is a bunch of creatures, arguing over nothing, twisting words and concepts, beating a dead horse, just to "show off", precisely like him.

And, precisely like him, to have nothing else to do than posting to this or that group.

Leadership in CoP -- More

Today I read a piece "Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders: Changes at Ford, the Coke-Pepsi Fiasco, and Other Management Moments" on Knowledge@Wharton newsletter.

It looks a little bit like a matrioska... however, George Day and Paul Schoemaker built on top of their research (not "expert opinions"!!!) and analyzed the four traits of leadership:

(a) external focus
(b) conceptual ability
(c) organizational role and
(d) time horizon.

Now, does it apply to CoPs and if so, how?

External Focus.
"Vigilant leaders" - they say - "are more externally oriented: They are open to new ideas, seek diverse perspectives, listen to a wide array of sources and foster broad social and professional networks."

Reading this description, one immediately thinks of Kolb's learning styles and of the diverging learning style in particular:
"Diverging (feeling and watching - CE/RO) - These people are able to look at things from different perspectives. They are sensitive. They prefer to watch rather than do, tending to gather information and use imagination to solve problems. They are best at viewing concrete situations several different viewpoints. Kolb called this style 'Diverging' because these people perform better in situations that require ideas-generation, for example, brainstorming. People with a Diverging learning style have broad cultural interests and like to gather information. They are interested in people, tend to be imaginative and emotional, and tend to be strong in the arts. People with the Diverging style prefer to work in groups, to listen with an open mind and to receive personal feedback."

Now I ask: is there any doubt about the fact that, in a CoP, problems and ideas are concrete and have to be looked at from different perspectives, idea are generated mainly through group brainstorming, and the capability of giving and receiving strong and open personal feedback is an asset, especially for the resident facilitator(s)?

Also note how Day and Schoemaker define operational leaders: "more narrowly focused, have less interest in outside opinions and confine their networking to familiar settings". That is, they are concerned with one or few topics, don't like apparently "off-topic" threads and don't like unfamiliar territory, often resorting to ipse dixit (like many people in the CoP field do anytime Wenger is contested, as if his works were an infallible religious book which doesn't even need interpretation).


Conceptual Ability.
Vigilant leaders also "probe deeply for second order effects", that is, they do not stay content with analyzing their experiences through the lenses of process management, ROI or McElroy's first generation KM. In other words, they aren't ISO 9000 compliant.

Their counterparts, operational leaders, are those first generation KM dinosaurs one can stumble when joining KM groups. They are predictable and focused mainly on the task at hand, they rely on past experience and try to avoid mistakes like the plague. In their brain, Popper's philosophy hasn't sunk yet and they think that for their knowledge to be valid all they need is to try to verify it over and over again, often resorting to qualitative descriptions without any rigor whatsover. They still regard induction as the main pillar of science and behave like Russell's inductivist turkey (slide #14), they call deduction a "theoretical approach", a "generalization" and/or a "lack of context". They have what Piaget would define pre-operational thinking.

CoPs strongly need a leader whose culture and interests go beyond first order effects. The ideal CoP leader would look at the CoP s/he leads in terms of Value Networks rather than first order outcomes.


Organizational Role.
But vigilant leaders also enable people in their company by allowing them to explore areas outside their main focus. The dinosaurs I described above are controlling, focused on efficiency and cost cutting and don't explore outside potential. This is particularly unfortunate when leading a CoP which is all geared onto idea generation and sharing.

Even though methods to measure and test a CoP's effect, impact and outcome, existed and there were consensus among scholars and/or practitioners on which one to use first and why, there would still be a lot of problems related to these measurements.

For one the effects, impacts, outcomes of a CoP cannot be measured for months or even years after its institution. For two, some of those outcomes and impacts do not impact finances, so it might happen that financially there is no ROI (or even a loss) but the return on investment happens through the enhancement of a non-monetary value (say I set up a CoP and its members feel better about working, and are more relaxed and available in the workplace). Furthermore, cost effectiveness is reflective of another unfortunate paradigm called the scarcity model). This does not:
1) take into account that some tangibles are, indeed, limited (not scarce!), and yet some intangibles are abundant (not unlimited!), It just assumes that everything is always scarce, which introduces a theoretical bias in the very system that should be objective enough to represent and quantify a pros/cons analysis;
2) realize that not every outcome can be measured in monetary terms and that doing so is yet another source of lack of science in this practice.
It basically measures abundant intangibles as if they were limited tangibles and as if all tangibles and intangibles were to have the same unit measure (it's like measuring liquids in meters.... plain old stupid).

Time Horizon.
Finally, a vigilant leader's time horizon is longer while an operational leader's is shorter.

But in order to be effective at doing so, one needs to come from an abundance perspective. If time is scarce, one has no time to wait for results. If time is limited, one decides which results to wait for. If time is abundant, one participates to the creation of new perspectives, opportunities, concepts without having an agenda on which one to find or explore.

Since CoPs just die if they are managed (or led) toward an agenda, it's particularly evident how one needs to come from abundance in order to get any result out of them, and needs to be patient as well. This also explains why CoPs are so good in getting results about unstructured practices, where nobody has agendas to push.

Online Moderators and Their Communities

Online moderators have to be autoctone leaders, that is, they have to emerge from the community. However, they very often are "staffed" in a way that reminds me of that game "if you were a fruit which fruit would you be?". No screening, no recruitment, minimal training, minimal supervision, few sources of informal learning (usually other moderators mentoring, coaching, counseling new ones). The hidden or open sponsors of such communities are grossly miscalculating the role and the moderator/facilitator community impact.

By "instinct" (I really don't know how "natural" this is, it could be superimposed out of living in a culture that fosters extrinsic rewards), moderators tend to identify themselves with the community they moderate. Therefore, they tend not to allow it the freedom to make mistakes, because they tend to take the community's failure as their own personal failure.

It takes time (lots of time) and experience (lots of experience) to learn to just let go of the community results while preserving accountability for what really depends on us moderators. I saw some apparently skilled moderators backchannelling feverishly in order to pretend that the community has a "spontaneous life", like in the Wizard of Oz: "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", while I saw other seemingly seasoned ones rushing into each and every conflict with the intent of "smoothing it" (to the point that the troll asked her to moderate him!).

The problem is, leadership mandates the capability of taking a stand, whatever it is, and to be able to submit it to logical scrutiny. So, whoever won't be able to take a stand and back it up, will have no real leadership but just the power to click some buttons. Without leadership, there is no authority, and without authority (as in authoritative, not as in authoritarian) people don't respect one another. And communities (especially communities of practice) get subversive when it comes to incompetent leaders (either permissive or controlling).

Allowing a community to make mistakes is therefore a basic competency of a skilled online moderator. The ones that "play nice" (aka smooth conflicts asap, invites to agree to disagree etc) usually are histrionic persons that can survive as long as the "show" is short-lived, such as in face-to-face meetings. They crave and need the public eye in order to perform, they sense it and put themselves in a position to meet their needs.

However, whenever the moderation/facilitation becomes 24/7 (or 2/3 hours every day), the drama queen needs more and more private time in order to keep on herding cats while keeping him/herself together, and the problems start emerging, especially in asynchronous facilitation, notoriously the most reflexive. All of a sudden, it takes more than a good voice, some charming ways, some right move and a pleasant look to "run the show". However, many don't, can't or won't see it ahead of time. It's like the difference between a theatre and a film performance: the former can be instinct-driven, excessive, groovy, but the latter just has to be precise, factual, professional or else you're out. While in the former tantrums can help you run the show momentarily and fake it till you find a way out, in the latter they hinder the development of an optimal performance and faking its simply not a professional option.

But on-fac is far more challenging than f2f facilitation for other reasons as well. You get to "know" your creature, spend more time with it, you loose lucidity, get more involved and.. find out things about you (like your relationship with power, control, anger, other assorted feelings plus your personal pet peeves) that you won't necessarily die for exploring ;)

I try to always let the group bicker, fight, yell and... solve the conflict amongst them as much as possible. Unless I see insults going on, I don't intervene. If I intervene, I intervene as a member, I don't use my power/authority unless I just have to, because I think that a facilitator that isn't a primus inter pares KILLS any CoP, or collaborative community, or even "mere" online group.

Sometimes, members publicly ask for my intervention. There is NOTHING more empowering to the group as a whole than just calling them to a responsible act! So I say "I'm not your babysitter, I won't force [such and such] to do anything." Then I express my opinion whatever it is as an act of group membership (something like "I think [such and such] is wrong because [this and that]") and reiterate that I can't oblige anybody. At this point, either the disruptive person all of a sudden "gets it", or
s/he will feel empowered and get more disruptive. Now, the group will take
ownership on its reactions and assume leadership. In other words:
governance.

However, there are times in which communities get disbanded because
members, not mods/onfacs, behave like kids.

I can't help noticing how some persons can go on and on about inside jokes without having the slightest idea of the potential they have for originating feelings of exclusion in whoever isn't part of the joke.

My experience is, jokes are tolerated better when either they come from a
small group of tight friends, or when they come from many subgroups. In other words, they are felt as ok when they are either perceived as signs of "few people with higher status", or as signs of "many subgroups with similar status". When the jokes or hints are about a large subgroup then ingroup/outgroup dynamics are unavoidable!

Nothing harms a community (online/offline), more than a clique. One would think participants would know and yet there are long-term communities I know and have been part of, that keep on being cliquish because "they like it" and get regularly puzzled about the "perception from the outside" ;)

Again I would say I can't fathom how people that have participated in other
fora for years managed not to look and listen enough to previous and past exchanges and experiences... so much that they behave as if they have missed to observe such group dynamics, which I'm not sure could be blamed on others.

I can't help thinking that as long as we (generic) decide to engage in community exchanges our own identity doesn't all belong to ourselves only any more. It becomes a negotiated concept, therefore it doesn't depend on one subject anymore, it depends on the group as a whole set of subjects. It gets out of the realm of subjectivism, where the individual is king AND referee, and gets into the relativism, interplay of the perception (right/wrong) that one individual has of him/herself and the fact that the rest of the world will ask him/her for a reality check.

So if the group decides it doesn't like your (generic) idea of yourself (generic again), reality (in the sense of "negotiated identity") will bite.

This will especially bite many (supposed, self-defined) fans of Vygotsky, who somehow manage to hint at the fact that "negotiation of meaning" should/would/could/might imply subjectivization of meaning. Those persons just miss the point, in that Vygotsky's negotiation of meaning implies an iterative dialogue among subjects that keeps going till a mutual agreement on its meaning is reached (note: the mutual agreement doesn't have to happen in a particular way, and it's not objective... these are the many differences with Argyris' framework).

However Vygotsky, in no way, shape or form, leaves room for agreement as "casual encounter of two or more subjects that happens to agree on the meaning of their encounter". I do understand that to a person in pre-operational thinking, the two things might seem the same though LOL