Quick thoughts on motivation

Some great minds talked recently about extrinsic and intrinsic motivations with regards to designing social systems a la leaderboards. The notion of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations also came up in some posts (part 1 and part 2) talking about motivations of volunteers.

Personally I think we are at our best when our internal and external motivations are balanced. The challenge is getting there.

Community change through agile software principles?

I finished day one of "Certified Scrum Product Owner Training" and I am reminded of why I like agile development. While it can do great things for products, I really appreciate the community building aspects of it. Taking a closer look at the values of agile...

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

...to me, these have direct parallels to community work.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools -- people and their interactions with one another are pretty much at the center of any community.

Working software over comprehensive documentation -- Ok, so community work is not software. That being said, I interpret this as focusing on what we can do together (build working software, communities, interactions, etc) rather than focusing on how people think we get there (detailed documentation, program initiatives, etc)

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation -- again communities aren't always made of of customers. To me, I see this as really getting all of the people involved in decisions and issues that impact them.

Responding to change over following a plan -- communities are dynamic, as are product roadmaps. You have to adapt to be relevant whether in business or in our communities on a day to day basis.

I love it when my work and civic life blur.

Loosely related...
Achieving that flow state for user experiences
When individual interests and the public good intersect

Does X mark the spot for community?

Richard Millington has a nice overview of what it takes to build an online community. He concisely states what I've discussed in my presentations on blogging and social media. That being said, I now wonder if there's not a better question for all of us to be answering. Specifically, are destination communities relevant? Is there some magical place where we all need to find? Or rather, will a more distributed community model take root?

While I tend to agree with what is said in finding your first community members (or even how to build a user community), I look at this more from the perspective of tapping into the community that already exists. Do we need to bring them back to one central place? A few years ago, I would have said yes in a heartbeat but I am no longer sure that is the case today.

Thinking about my own communities, I engage with others through a variety of different experiences. Email, Twitter, and Facebook are just some online examples. Other examples include phone calls, drinks at a local bar, coffee at a local Starbucks, or purposeful gatherings (for work and/or fun). To build a destination site for one of my communities, well...I'm not sure that would be relevant. Sure, it can be valuable in things like asynchronous communication, outreach, education and the like. Archival, nostalgia and reconnecting are some other scenarios that could also work. But to have one place for the community seems rather limiting, and in my opinion, misses out on how communities work.

Related, I wonder if this is why we are seeing broader community initiatives such as what Nike does with their running clubs, Nike+ website, and Niketown?

Maybe that's really it then...destination communities unto themselves have their place, but really do not speak to the full complexity and needs of communities as a whole. Thoughts?

photo credit -- kierkier

Paper Plate Relationships

During a not too recent business trip to New York, I was having drinks with a colleague who remarked that she often had paper plate relationships. I was a bit puzzled by what this meant so I inquired more about it.

She went on to explain that paper plates serve a specific function, for a specific time and place. You wouldn't use a paper plate for a big fancy dinner to impress your in-laws, for example, but you would use them for a barbecue with old friends. She then explained that once you are done with the paper plates, you move on until the next time you need them.

This initially struck me as a little harsh -- the notion of disposable relationships -- but then I wondered if this is similar to the notion of social objects?

In many ways, I see the paper plate relationship to be the result of brief encounters with social objects. If indeed this is the case, what does this mean for those on point for fostering social interactions?

Product design, experience, and transit

disclaimer -- I *try* to take the bus as often as I can to avoid sitting in traffic

That being said, I'd rather have rapid transit of some other kind. A friend once tried explain to me the benefits of Bus Rapid Transit options with dedicated lanes, but I was never really sold. Today I ran across an article that better articulated the problems -- in short, the overall design and experience leaves a lot to be desired.

This makes perfect sense when thinking about overall consumer product design. Here's another article that talks of the need for good design as it relates to global issues.

...

For all planners (myself included), policy makers, elected officials...perhaps we need to get crisper on articulating what the problem is so we can better address the key issues?

Blogging as transformational

Gerald Kanapathy's recent post on successful blogging points towards Microsoft as one company that has been transformed by blogging. Specifically he talks about how blogs "opened up Microsoft" and goes on to say how "it's now amazingly open and responsive."

While great as that sounds, I'd have to agree with Yag in that the most interesting part is when Kanaphathy writes:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain
organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it
requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to
criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be
proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized,
and simply the underlying values.

To me, this is key. At the end of the day, blogs are a means by which people communicate. It is a means, not an end. So for all those wanting to start a blog because everyone else is, ultimately it comes down to something more intangible. How open and willing is your group or company to change? To uncertainty? To risk? To criticism? To engage with people in an open an ongoing conversation?

At this point, all the marketing types and measurment gurus are probably screaming as this underlying value cannot be adequately captured by a simple measurement such as web views nor time online. There are some intriguing indexes in the works to better capture this space, and there are other ways of measuring the impact however...what is ultimately settled on, if there is such a thing, remains to be seen.

While this may come across to some as staying away from blogging if the underlying values are not there, it's not meant to be. I just wanted to call this out by illustrating that blogs are not an end to itself. It's part of a much larger picture, and ultimately it's success (or failure) depends upon so much more than what we can traditionally measure at this time. Should a company, organization or person for that matter get into blogging, I hope they do so with their eyes open to the whole process.

When individual interests and the public good intersect

With a new fiscal year upon us, my role is shifting a bit. as a part of that, i've been taking a closer look at community planning, broadly speaking. during this process, i keep on coming back to a best practice of sorts that occurs when individual interests intersect with the public good.

while this can be applied to just about anyplace where individuals and the public intersect, i'd like to call out flickr in this regard. one of the killer features (in my opinion) on flickr is "interestingness." according to flickr, many actions go into determining whether or not a picture is "interesting." these actions include:

• where the click throughs are coming from
• who marks it as a favorite
• it's tags
• and much more

taking a closer look at those actions, they are all focused on the self. clicking through to a picture is to actually display the full image. favoriting is so you can find it again. tagging it helps you to find it among countless other photos. in short, the individual actions of people then go into surfacing "interesting" photos for everyone.

what is the public benefit? seeing what others on the site find most interesting. other benefits include inspiration for photographers -> better photographers, or the joy from looking at beautiful photos. many of these items are also very individual goals, but overall, the public benefits as a result of these actions.

how this relates back to overall community planning is that i think a rather nice framework, or at least pillars to keep in mind, can be derived from this example.

1 -- know your audience
2 -- what's in it for them? identify the actions and items of highest individual value
3 -- what's in it for everyone else? identify the actions and items of highest collective value
4 -- determine the points of intersection
5 -- focus efforts on making it as easy as possible for the individuals to perform those actions, find those items, etc

note -- this is in part derived from earlier readings on flow, game design and the like. nod to amy jo kim for calling this out initially

"Death and Life..." a promising start

After finishing Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class, I finally got around to starting The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. For years, I've been wanting to read this classic in urban planning, and community design. I can't believe it's taken me this long.

While it's very easy to read, regardless of one's knowledge of urban planning, I'm only about 100 pages into this book (compared to 200 pages in the latest Harry Potter book). Partly that's because every page or so in Jacobs' book has me thinking about the cities she mentions and how they function (or do not) today. I also find myself taking a closer look at the city in which I live now, in addition to all the communities (online) that I've been a part of over the years. In short, this book has really got my gears spinning when it comes to thinking about community -- and more importantly, designing for community.

Something as simple as looking closely at sidewalks, for example, has me wondering about the parallel in an online community. Where is the proverbial sidewalk in a community of developers? Is it found in a blog? On a forum? In the tags used by others? How do people associate with one another (at different levels of participation) in a way that is meaningful to them, whether they are strong ties, weak ties, or loose ties? How does a community manifested online help people acclimate to the "neighborhood" so to speak?

As I work my way through this, I'll continue to post some reflections on this great read.

Achieving that flow state for user experiences

What would happen if you took great game design principles and applied them to product development for something other than games? Would you get a really fun and engaging product? Or would you get a product that completely misses the mark? I don't know the answer just yet, but I suppose that is one of the good things about iterative product development :-)

In terms of what I've been able to gather so far, there's a few different variations on the theme with regards to this general notion of flow and or fun. According to social architect Amy Jo Kim, the elements to pay attention to with regards to game design include:

• Collecting
• Points
• Feedback
• Exchanges
• Customization

Another writer on this topic of games and design, DanC, has these elements listed:

• Action
• Blackbox
• Feedback
• Mastery

According to a recent report about the motivational pull of video games (pdf), the following criteria are listed:

• Autonomy
• Competence
• Presence
• Intuitive
• Relatedness

All of these items seem to be related to this broader concept of flow. Flow is perhaps best described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where he lists the following as the principle elements that facilitate this space:

• Challenge
• The ability to concentrate on that challenge
• Clear goals
• Immediate feedback
• Deep involvement on the part of the participant
• Sense of control over one's actions
• The concern for one's self decreases
• Sense of time is skewed

To put it in a more user friendly way, Karim Lakhani and Robert Wolf (pdf) describe flow as a state that occurs when "a person's skills matches the challenge of a task." Put another way, it is when your skills, experiences and knowledge all sync up to a particular situation at hand and you are in the moment when you are at your best.

Wouldn't it be great if all the users of your products and or services felt like that all the time? Seems to me that elements of flow or good game design need to be factored into the overall product development cycle.

Building upon what I've encountered so far (I'm still going through Csikszentmihalyi's book on flow, among some other references) I would say that for product development that helps prospective and current customers achieve that flow state, the following items must be considered throughout the entire design process:

Assuming that a user does a specific action and something happens behind the scenes, the following items should be considered:

• Feedback
• Personalization
• Connection
• Mastery
• Optimization

In the case of a discussion forum where someone posts a message this flow state could look like this:

Feedback -- Message appears in location selected

Personalization -- This could be as simple as providing a personalized greeting acknowledging contribution in your native language, listing your name, etc in a conversational style or as complex as a personalized email doing the same.

Connection -- Provide links to other people who posted similar content or who are interested in similar content

Mastery -- Enable a notion of leveling tied specifically to the action of posting. The more messages a user posts, the more adept they are at the interface. Acknowledge the time (no matter how small) it takes for them to post a message. Something as simple as listing the message count, or something as complex as a reputation system tied to the frequency of content creation could be implemented here.

Optimization -- "Leveling up" needs to open up new opportunities for folks to do more. As a particular individual masters a specific action, let them do more to further optimize their experience. It could be skipping steps in a workflow because they know how to best do it, or it could be granting of additional options for them in posting a message.

...

Zooming back down to my day to day with blogs and forums...my sense is that much of this already exists to varying degrees. Granted, it could tie together more. For that matter, it could even tie together flow states for both blogs and forums. There's likely a lot more here...so I appreciate any thoughts and comments folks have on all this. thanks!


(crossposted)