Recently, I read an article on Quirks.com called “What happens when community participants start acting like researchers?” The authors discussed a few new approaches to positively incorporate members into the moderating process within online communities.
The authors share feedback and examples from three case studies to show how they suggest engaging members to this new level in online communities. The three ways they suggest include moderating, analyzing and fine-tuning conclusions. The article explains the different ways in which co-moderating can exist through identifying a specific moderating role for members or providing a moderating “mission” in which moderators are indirectly involved in engaging the other members by sharing specific feedback in discussions.
The authors then share how community members can get involved in “crowd-interpretation.” This concept described by the authors allows members to analyze each other’s contributions once they have submitted their own ideas. The third way in which the authors suggest members can act as moderators is by participating to “fine-tune” conclusions made. This involves presenting the members of the community or activity with the final conclusions made by the researchers and asking for feedback to also “reject” or “challenge” a conclusion made. All three tools are described as great ways to have a sense of collaboration between the researchers involved and the members participating, which eventually leads to a report that mirrors both what the researchers have found but also a non-bias analysis provided by the feedback of the members.
KL Communications is already incorporating similar steps and supporting collaboration and co-creation with its newest Crowdweaving™ platform. The platform provides a certain project to become a challenge for members. The members compete against each other to present ideas for the challenge given and work together to co-create by providing feedback and making changes to their own ideas based on the feedback they receive from their peers. Phase I of the challenge consists of everyone’s ideas and feedback, while Phase 2 and any phases thereafter provide top ideas based on members’ feedback, researchers’ analysis and clients’ needs.
Members then have the opportunity to continue to vote and share feedback to then determine a winner (or winners) of the challenge once all of the phases have been completed. In a recent experience I had with a specific challenge, members submitted ideas for the challenge and competed against each other. Not only did they vote and comment on their peers’ ideas, but they also went one step further and adjusted their ideas based on feedback and challenged the comments they received with direct questions without our instructions to do so. This provides a great example of how members can indeed become involved as moderators. We were then able to incorporate all of their efforts in participation when analyzing Phase I’s ideas and providing a report to the client in order to move forward to the next step of the project.
KL Communications is going in the right direction in relation to the industry and adapting to the new concept of collaboration and co-creation with members. We are incorporating these new concepts and processes in our latest developments. We’re ready to explore other ways in which we can incorporate new concepts and trends of the industry in our business development moving forward.