Determining how people work together to reach the desired Outcome is critical to the success of Mass Collaboration. Poor organization leads to statements like - “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” – however, this poor outcome assumes a particular type of organization - that every decision is put to the vote.

However, this is NOT how most Mass Collaboration efforts (or communities) are organized.

“…the mantras within the user community are ‘Wikipedia is not a democracy’ and ‘Voting is evil.’…Wikipedians typically resort to binding votes after the failure of other options.” - Andrew Lih (Mengisen, 2009).

Organization is a critical to get what is valuable from large numbers of participants, without being crippled by the effort of communicating with so many people. The following sections explore organizational ideas, from why people participate in Mass Collaboration, to the different leadership models that are working when organizing Mass Collaboration.

Why Should Anyone Participate?

When I responded to a blog post on www.buzzmachine.com, I didn’t expect to be quoted in What Would Google Do (WWGD). But WWGD's author, Jeff Jarvis followed some lessons from his book and found a simple way to collaborate with his readers and turn them into co-authors.

- How did he know that people would help him?

- How did he do it?

Among other things, Jeff Jarvis, is a community organizer. But we'll get back to that later in this section.

 

Figure Signed page from the author’s copy of What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis.

First, let's review some recent politics. During the Republican Convention in the United States in 2008, then candidate Obama, was mocked for his experience as a community organizer. How would this prepare him to be Commander in Chief? Community Organizers don’t have any real responsibility, do they? Which led many to ask - what exactly do Community Organizers do, anyway?

I thought this was an interesting question (since many people were also wondering how a community organizer had come so far anyway). Community Organizers have no formal authority or leadership role in a traditional corporate organizational sense and yet they cause action and ultimately change. How do they do it?

This question lies at the heart of how Mass Collaboration works. As a result, a core part of the research of this thesis involved the interviewing of 13 Community Organizers, to understand among other things:

What motivates people in these communities?

As Jake McKee put it, in a successful community:

“Everyone goes home happy. The organization gets what they want and the community gets what they want.”

But it's really easy for this to tend to exploitation if you don't understand why people are part of the community in the first place. And this in turn, is a quick way to fail. So how do Community Organizers motivate their people?

Financial incentives

Crowdsourcing generally captures the idea of financial incentives in Mass Collaboration in the form of prizes or payment to winners or contributors. Examples include: Muji Award (MUJI), Cisco I-Prize, X-Prize or Innocentive (who manage Mass Collaboration efforts for companies like Eli Lilly and P&G). Variations include CafePress, iStockPhoto, where the market decides compensation. And then arrangements like Mechanical Turk, reward anyone for achieving specific, generally non-specialized tasks in an environment that greatly simplifies the process of outsourcing.

Innocentive (Spradlin & Reinhold, 2009) may run some of the best known Crowdsourcing operations and so it is important to understand what motivates their "solvers" - those who work on the various problems appearing on the Innocentive site. Karim Lakhani (Lakhani, Jeppersen, Lohse, & Panetta, October 2006) surveyed solvers and found 3 main motivations, with responses divided about equally between them:

work on problems that matter

peer engagement and recognition - people want to be recognized for solving a problem

money is 3rd but often ties back to the first issue by signaling how important a problem might be

There is one important aspect missing here. Innocentive does not explicitly allow collaboration between solvers. There is, in fact, no community of people working together, but rather a community who responds to requests for solver. Also, the community ultimately “sells” their solution to the solver, so the solver owns the intellectual property that results from the process.

As with most Crowdsourcing approaches, this looks like a traditional outsourcing approach that has found a more efficient way to get to more individuals or teams, more quickly. This is evolving, as Innocentive is are exploring ways to facilitate coordination between solvers, thus encouraging groups to form and compete against one another, versus just individuals. Other groups, such as Jovoto, are also finding ways to enable collaboration, while still offering financial incentives.

Money is interesting, but for Community Organizers it's the other motivations that seem even more useful.

Inverting the commons

In The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond (Raymond, 2001) explores the Inverse Commons. The tragedy of the commons discusses why individuals acting in their own self interest ultimately destroy shared resources even when it is nobody’s long terms interest for this to happen. The Inverse Commons, asks a different question: what happens if things get better if you use them more, instead of getting worse or losing value?

Software developers at WordPress.com (Bar-Cohen, 2009) do work which they give to the WordPress community for free (they estimated about half their effort is of this type). Why? WordPress software improves because of the way it is owned - everyone contributes to make it better (give ideas, write code, add designs, etc.) and the result is that everyone gets a product that they could never create alone (and they have convincingly beaten out the alternative privately owned platforms, including Google’s Blogger). Automattic doesn't need to own or sell the software, it sells services related to the software such as hosting and various consultants, designers and developers get paid to build on top of this platform.

Lego's creation of the Lego Factory lets people create their own Lego sets and in return, Lego is constantly receiving feedback about interesting ideas and things that people might enjoy building. They found a way to benefit from playtime that might have happened independently and not as part of "the commons". Fluther captures the responses to questions that might otherwise have been unavailable to the world by encouraging responses from the community, to community member questions. The results live on to be found primarily be people searching for the same questions.

Jovoto (Unterberg, 2009) helps advertisers work with over 5000 creative professionals. Before anything is delivered to the advertiser, participants post and share their responses so that others in the community can comment and provide feedback. Advertisers pay to participate in this process. The end result is that everyone benefits from the work and the feedback. Once this process is complete, the advertiser can license the intellectual property for use in their campaign.

As more people choose to take simple actions like leaving feedback on Amazon, updating entries on Wikipedia, answering questions on Fluther, the more the shopping experience improves because higher quality information about products is fed back to the market. Or quite simply, information quality gets better with more “use” – the tragedy of commons are inverted.

Solve problems that matter

I first heard the term "making meaning" from a Guy Kawasaki presentation (Standford University). And this ties back to the findings at Innocentive about working on meaningful projects. Guy talks about 3 ways to make meaning:

Increase the quality of life

Right a wrong

Prevent the end of something good

Open source software projects such as Linux, Mozilla and WordPress touch on all of these items. Many people working on these project believe they are making something better than might be available through any other process (I won't get into the good vs. evil of open vs. closed software development or their associated licensing model) – they are increasing quality of life and righting the wrong of inferior software. Projects like Wikipedia, various file-sharing networks, Folding@home or the Guardian’s project to investigate MP expenses (right some wrongs) represent additional examples of participation for meaning, where no financial incentives exist.

BigSoccer (Hertzberg, 2009) grew, in-part around groups who were organizing to bring soccer teams to specific US cities. Tweenbots (prevent the end of something good - help helpless robots get around NYC, really). When Jeff Jarvis asks for comments in response to blog posts, those of us that choose to respond are not looking for compensation – perhaps some peer recognition, but in many cases, we are simply trying to understand and participate in a discussion that is meaningful to us – whether it’s about the future of news media or what Google might do if it was an insurance company (i.e. it might do a better job than current insurance companies, which would mean a great deal to many of us).

Reinforce Meaning

In a recent online seminar as part of the MarketingProfs Virtual Conference (Marketingprofs, 2009), Barack Obama's campaign strategist, David Plouffe, gave a glimpse into the political campaign. As the campaign evolved, new issues emerged and people wanted to understand how they could respond on behalf of the campaign. And the campaign constantly reminded people about why they were doing what they were doing and obliged with supporting data and talking points. It's easy to forget, but it's not enough to make meaning, people need to be reminded about what is at stake and why they are doing what they do, particularly as things become difficult.

Play, contact and recognition

Ford models are encouraged to upload Youtube videos to the Ford Models Youtube channel (its ranked #65 of all Youtube channels). Models in effect compete for the attention of the Ford model fans. It doesn't matter if it's a game or real life (wealthiest, sexiest, brainiest, funniest or best use of sheep in animation), people want or need to be recognized. In the case of Ford models, it likely impacts their value dramatically if they can develop a following on Youtube or via Ford models other channels on Facebook and mySpace (Toledano, 2009).

Automattic, the operator of WordPress, is interesting in this regard. It's not so much that there are points, but every aspect of the project includes long lists of contributors - as Raanan Bar-Cohen points out, just take a look at the names on the about page. WordPress also uses metrics to compare, rank and rate contributions from its community, which brings us to our next section.

Ratings, rankings and leader boards

It seems like rankings and scores are the currency of many communities. It's simply the way peers are able to tell who is the most read, most viewed, most published, most sales, etc. Almost anything that can be measured or judged will qualify for scoring. The main differences tend to be around who is judging or if in fact judging is required because "more impartial" measurements can be taken.

Continuing with the WordPress example, it provides statistics around most of its contributions which include everything from ideas, to designs and code. These include "votes" such as number of downloads and ratings.

Fluther, makes use of a points system which combines a variety of scoring schemes. For example, users can score other users contributions such as +5 points for a good answer to a question. Or the Fluther operators, give +2 points if you show up at the site 2 days in a row. Not surprisingly some of the highest scoring “Flutherers” are some of the most influential and important community participants. Some have gone on to become employees, while others receive more administrative rights to help guard against abuse and nurture the community.

On BigSoccer, "rank" is conveyed a little differently in the form of seniority (based on join date) or level of participation such as total posts and blog entries. In short, participation is the main explicit metric. Shortyawards (Galant, 2009) (Shorty Awards) combined this idea on a few levels. Individuals recognized other people by nominating them in the following way:

@shortyawards I nominate @twitterperson for a Shorty Award in #category for some reason

Nominations were then summed to produce ranked lists of people and ultimately these ranked lists resulted in awards. Simple voting took place on Twitter over a 2 week period and resulted in the first comprehensive directory of leading people in a variety of Twitter categories.

Social interaction - Comments. Feedback. Ideas. Opinions. Answers. Links.

I don't know why people feel compelled to shout answers at TV game show hosts. But Ben Finkel of Fluther describes how people just like to share what they know. If you ask a question there is some innate desire to share what you know. On Fluther, this is what people do. It has played out in a variety of formats on sites like Yahoo Answers; blog comment sections’ twitter responses; links commenting on other people’s work, etc.

On WordPress.com the community supports itself in this way. Have a question? Chances are that the person who responds to you is just another member of the community, helping out and telling you what they know. In a broader sense, blogs are not that different and nor are reviews. In many cases, I am simply showing off what I know.

What do all these things have in common online? They tend to be on the record - that is, these answers, posts, opinions are findable by others and therefore can serve as evidence of your knowledge and opinions, beyond the point in time where you answer the question.

Showing people that their contributions matter

All this feedback doesn't mean anything, if people don't believe it is making a difference. Some communities have a policy of showing you that they are responding. Fluther does this rather nicely via constant updates about your questions and answers. It's harder when people are submitting ideas.

When Google released latitude it received a great deal of attention, but they didn’t claim it for themselves, they credited the person who initially suggested the idea and featured Lana from New York on their blog. Recognition can take many forms. And it seems to be even more valuable when it's on the record – online is great for this.

Work where people already are

Today it's not unusual to see multiple "sharing " features for almost everything online, but YouTube made this easy to understand and do. The result was staggering – according to Roelof Botha (Botha), most of YouTube's traffic came via links shared via e-mail, in part because they made it so easy to do

37Signals make it really easy to form groups across organizations using Basecamp. Getting started is simple for everyone, so inviting people to join your project or set up your own is not just easy for the person sending the invitation - it's also low risk because you know people will find it easy to join and get started. Jason Fried, one of 37Signals founders, confirmed via e-mail that 37Signals does no advertising. There is no need when you design in ways for others to help you market and sell your product.

Purposeful play

As you play GWAP the games generate useful output, too. Making a contribution need not feel like work. In fact, there is no reason why this can't be fun, too. Perhaps the least amount of work, is not even knowing that you are working, because you thought you were doing something else.

Figure User interface for GWAP, a game that produces useful music meta information as people play

Which brings us back to Jeff and WWGD. For most of the folks commenting on his Buzzmachine posts, this is what's going on. Its serious, but playful. It doesn't feel like work. It's simply dialog. For me personally, it was just fun to see and respond to ideas - playing with ideas is fun for me. Tagging tunes is fun for someone else – that’s why GWAP works, too.

There is probably a thesis-worth of gaming-related ideas from some of the more successful online game franchises. Certainly communities around World of Warcraft are interacting at multiple levels - on the one hand they are playing a game which constantly tracks their progress and publishes it for others to see and elaborate groups come together to learn and go to battle together, but they also share feedback with the game developers to help improve the game they are playing.

In an interesting twist on this idea, 42 Entertainment created an elaborate game designed to spill into the real world, generating real world news and attention for The Dark Knight, around the world. In this case, the game was rewarding to players and claimed to attract 10m participants, who participated in activities that made real world news and help to promote the movie. The players got an entertaining experience and The Dark Knight was widely promoted as a by-product of their play.

 

Leading from any position

The leadership roles that are effective for community leadership, appear to have some unique attributes. In fact, when asked about leadership, almost all participants expressed a view that emphasized leadership from anywhere versus a more traditional image of someone at the front of the organization showing the way.

This is how some interviewees described leadership in their community organizing efforts:

“People who have reach and influence, People who carry weight” – Gordon Paddison

“When you win, you lose control” – Jeff Jarvis

“When does top down leadership matter? When Michael Dell says – ‘This is the new norm. We need to do this’.” – Jeff Jarvis

“Realizing that you don’t lead [is the greatest leadership challenge]” – Bastian Unterberg

“Support and collaborate with your community and avoid trying to ‘suck up all the oxygen’ by trying to do everything” – Raanan Bar-Cohen

 

“Every individual in our community has the power to be a social leader because the content they share is relevant to their own sub-network (i.e. friends).” – Brian Benatar

 

“Our role in leading the community is to enable the participation and communication … not to dictate the terms of the community.” – David Camp

 

The following section explores leadership roles by looking at the formal leaders, such as organization founders or people responsible for attaining specified outcomes. Then informal leadership is examined and finally, “emergent leadership” is explored – that is, situations in which people assume leadership roles for specific tasks.

Formal leadership

From the interviews, most of the formal leaders seem uncomfortable describing themselves as leaders – they have helped to establish core teams, communicate the vision and get communities started. They seem to share some traits common with the “Good to Great” leaders (Collins, 2001) They are not particularly well known or visible. They tend to be humble and invest in the community, versus their own celebrity. Interestingly, one seemingly obvious criterion is that they have followers, although it is not clear to anyone how they came to have followers.

Beyond the interviews, it seems that organizing and leading communities requires a slightly different skill set because of the change in scale and distributed nature of the communities they interact with. So in-person contact might be much less frequent than in other organizations. For example, many organizations interacting with large communities are small – in May 2009 WordPress had 33 employees, Jeff Jarvis is just one person, the Jovoto, Fluther and Bigsoccer teams numbers a few employees. In all cases they are interacting with groups of people that number 100x or more the number of full time employees.

Therefore these community organizations rely on different communication models to effectively and efficiently interact with a large number of people, but also work closely with a layer of trusted intermediaries. For example, to reach the Lord of the Rings fans, Gordon Paddison worked with a group of about 60 influential fans. WordPress also has a small group of very active community members with whom they can communicate more frequently – as does Fluther, Big Soccer and Jeff Jarvis. So informally or formally, there is a smaller more manageable group with whom leaders can interact with more frequently and in more depth.

Informal leadership

The 90-9-1 contribution model (Ant's Eye View) suggests a specific type of contribution in online communities. That is, of all the people who might interact with the community in some way, a small percent does most of the work. And the people who tend to be the informal leaders can lead because of the actions such as specific contributions or suggestions. These professional leaders tend to develop followings as people are interested in their opinions and thoughts.

Sometimes informal leaders are referred to as influencers, which gives a sense of who might be able to help drive certain outcomes or influence opinion. In the case of Lord of the Rings marketing, for example, Gordon Paddison set about identifying community members who had the most followers (traffic) and who carried weight – i.e. they had some level of support. This then formed the core leadership group that worked with him through the Lord of the Rings online marketing campaign and will largely be the same group that will work him again for the upcoming Hobbit films.

It's not unusual for the most involved people to be spending almost as much time as employees which can lead to some complications as people realize people are being compensated to perform similar roles. In cases such as Innocentive, leadership follows individual professional performance versus ability to impact the community. So in competitive situations leadership is more professional in nature versus a role which is causing others to succeed and work towards a common vision. In more collaborative environments, different leadership emerges, not necessarily around professional expertise, but organizing capacity – i.e. community organizers.

Recruiting community members

A number of interviewees described recruiting as the most difficult part of getting the community started. Like building any team of company, the initial people involved, are critical, which is why it is not unusual for some communities to tightly control initial invitations (thefunded.com wanted CEOs from start-up companies, before they launched, Hunch.com wanted to make sure the contributions would be of a high quality from its initial users). Various companies, who launch early version of products, simply want to make sure they get constructive feedback, so they hand pick people they will allow to participate.

From the interviewees, it seems clear that communities are not really created but rather discovered and engaged in new ways. As Jake McKee described, communities often exist and have organized before brands decide they want to work with them. Rather than building a community, activity is more focused communicating with the community. This theme was echoed in almost all interviews – communities already exist in most cases, so getting started, is more about co-operating with existing communities and community leadership, as the following examples show:

BigSoccer (existing fan groups and e-mail lists and their administrators)

Lord of the Rings (LOTR) (existing LOTR fan sites and their moderators)

Innocentive (schools, consultants)

Jovoto (communities of creative students around schools)

WordPress (existing developers, bloggers)

Shorty Awards (existing followers on twitter)

Spinspotter (people congregated around news or idea)

Jeff Jarvis (similarly displeased Dell customers, for Dell Hell)

Ideabounty (existing community of creative professionals)

Thunda (groups photographed as part of their service)

Community governance

Like any society, communities need guidelines and rules to operate effectively. Some are not codified but simply understood behavior from other community members. Sometimes legal definitions are required. And other times, communities want to be clear what types of behavior are expected in their “space”. Like any guidelines, they also need to be enforced. In many cases we noticed that communities were quite effective at policing themselves intervening in when they believed the community was being harmed.

It is not within the scope of this work to enumerate all of the governance codes, however the reader is urged to look at the communities referenced in this work and review their “terms of service” or “community guidelines” to understand what is codified.

Specialized creative processes

This research did not attempt to enumerate or classify the various specialty organizational processes. However it is important to understand the role of specialty processes in getting to valuable outcomes. For example, Wikipedia goes to great lengths to define criteria to preserve neutral tone in the pages. Google continuously discusses what they would like to see in terms of behavior from people creating links and online content that enable the company to more effectively analyze information and present search results. Jeff Jarvis solicits feedback and contributions via a variety of conversational mechanisms, from asking questions to taking clear positions in contentious debates. Innocentive uses specialists to guide interaction between their seekers and solvers. Lego did not try to work with a large community, but hired a small subset of people to work more closely with an internal product development team. WordPress monitors responses in its support section to ensure that questions are answered (and intervenes if the community is not up to the task).