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

The right word for CoP is FERMENTATION

No I'm not flipped out.. I just noticed a great analogy that I'm going to explain.

Today I was reading a post on com-prac posted by my friend Pete Bond:

"I agree with Fred that they can be seeded but then there's no gurantee that what emerges is what is envisaged by the seeder (no guarantee that a successful attempt to cultivate a CoP will lead to the success of the 'host-sponsor')"

I read it and as I did a big fat "NO" resonated in my head.

Mind you, 95% of my thinking is intuition, so my thoughts don't come with an explanation, unless I decide to find it. Thus, I started thinking it over while I was doing other things. The "no" became deeper and deeper, but no explanation was emerging.

I looked at my watch and remembered it was about time for me to strain my kefir. For the ones of you that aren't familiar with it, kefir is a fermented milk. In order to make the "real one", you need kefir grains.

Looking at my grains, I had the feeling that I was near the explanation of my "no" to Pete's post. My heart was beating fast, meaning a solution was close.

Back typing now and reading some stuff in my emailbox, mumbling. All of a sudden, I get thinking of kefir again. Namely, I think about the grains.

Kefir grains are composed of a polysaccharides that hosts 4 bacteria genuses in a symbiotic relationship: Lactobacilli, Streptococci-Lactococci, Acetobacter and Yeasts. Some individual genuses may be or not be there, it's not important. What's important is the "family" they belong to, and the quantitative relationship among families. My heart is beating faster. A solution is very close.

Here it is!

Like with Kefir, one can not "make" the grains, but it does not mean that kefir can not be replicated! You have to detect the "grains" and put them in the right medium (did I say nucleation of a CoP?) and you have to use special precautions to preserve their aliveness (did I say facilitation). After which you WILL obtain kefir, everytime, even if it will have different thickness, flavour, tanginess and even if you might like it more or less depending on the batch. It will still be kefir.

We think we can't reproduce a CoP because we don't know what the equivalent of the kefir grain is and which kind of facilitation it requires. That doesn't mean we can't produce CoPs. It does mean we didn't understand (yet) WHAT the equivalent of the grains is.

To come to a conclusion, only a person (or a group of persons) that has seen the pattern (consciously or unconsciously) can reproduce it.

And here we get into Jostein Gaarder's world ;;)

Trust in Virtual Teams

On Duck-Grinned Nancy's group, Nancy Settle-Murphy asked to give her input about remote teams presenting special challenges, following you can find what I wrote to her.

Main challenges are:

• attitudes
  1) what members think of the medium
  ie: do they think the medium characteristics shape the conversation or that it's the conversation to "move along" different paths within the same medium?
  THIS impacts on how you accomodate differences, because in the first case members would/might/should choose a software (or a channel or a path) that they deem appropriate, while in the second case they would adapt to whichever the media. Needless to say in the latter interaction members would get more easily to trust, because their mental attitude is an empowering one (ie: "I can shape the media --- I can shape the conversation -- we can make anything we want out of it"), while the former is a disempowering one (ie: "If I don't have the right tool I can't communicate effectively --- I am limited in my communication capabilities --- there are things that can't be achieved online").
  
  2) what members think of written communication
  ie: do they find it to be more clear (because it's "all written") or do they find it more obscure (because they "can't see the facial expressions")? Again, it's all a matter of an empowering vs disempowering attitude... can I understand more because it's all clear, since even when something is unclear it can be clarified ("I can choose what to make of it"), or can't I really understand people because feelings can't be conveyed in a written form ("I am limited")?
  
  What really matters is the ATTITUDE of the majority of members. As a general rule, persons with a disempowering attitude (feeling limited by the media, conversation, situation, whatever) tend to perceive others as limiting as well, REGARDLESS of whether they are or not. Achieving trust, in these conditions, can be VERY hard.

• values
  3) importance of socialization
  Trust can't be acquired through rational demonstration that you have to trust colleagues. It IS acquired only by *interaction*. A person devaluing socialization could not acquire trust and would therefore be mistrustful.
  
  4) tendence to cooperation/collaboration
  there are moments in a team in which, for the team's sake, the individual has to be downsized and/or "quieted down". His/her compliance with such rule will generate trust in others, that will SEE how the member is willing to put the team ahead of personal convenience and individualism. People without such attitude will undermine trust, and get the whole team rebellious.

The rest (aka "barriers", such as language, culture, etc) is not that much of a big deal IF attitudes are empowering and socialization and collaboration are present and proactively fostered, because basically everything can be discussed in an atmosphere of sharing.

However, such sharing is harder to acquire in Western cultures, because of their individualism (ego vs collaboration) and management style (valuing "professionality" over socialization).

In particular, once the collaboration is broken, very often the only solution is to expel whoever provoked the breaking up, because rarely will members of a collaborative group forgive it.