[Membership-affairs] My $0,02 for the community

[João Carlos Rebello Caribé]

Some words about my vision and experience about NCUC's communication and the concerns shared and observed on our Jan 11th D.C morning meeting, also along the others meetings.

1) Veterans x newcomers 
I think NCUC's stakeholder, highlighting the USER, will often confront the less prepared newcomer than other stakeholder. Endorsing the Walid proposal, we need to focus on this issue.

On all interactions, by mailing list, Skype and also on the face meetings, some discussions are difficult to participate simply because some participants don't know your status update, e.g. IANA Stewardship. Other difficult is related to acronyms used and some structural and contextual issues of the subject in focus.

However is too boring to veterans often explain some subject, and will be terrible see one exhaustive discussion reopened by one beginner uninformed.

We can't stop NCUC to allow beginners to come a board, the discussions need to move forward, fast and consistently, and is impossible to keep this goal and lower down the discussion level.

It's frustrating and is not recommended to lower the level of debate, in order to facilitate the boarding for newcomers, but there is options:

a) Keep online record on the status update of NCUC subjects, also the description of subject. 
b) Build one FAQ (Frequently Answered Questions) - easy and simple
c) Tutorial team - Create one group of veterans that can and wanna to help and guide newcomers.
d) Develop one newcomers guide - who, when, where, what  and Acronyms survival guide ( http://quizlet.com/subject/ICANN/ ) 
e) Capacity Building through of http://learn.icann.org 
Newcomer are seeking for the acceptance of the group
f,g,h)???


2) Lack of engagement
Avri pointed this lack of engagement at NCUC meeting (inside NCPH), this is really one demotivating issue, like carrying the piano, while the others are sitting over it.

For some years, from the end of the 90's I drove one big Macromedia User Group, this lack of engagement was my nightmare, since the experts felt exploited by the "Lurkers", some even cut yourself off from the group. In view of this I started a "sociological" journey trough the web to understand this behavior. Than I found the 1% Principle, something like the Pareto's 80/20 principle but exactly focused on the Internet, and the frightening resemblance to my problem made me believe it is a matter beyond this particular case.  

[..]In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
Variants include the 1-9-90 rule or 90–9–1 principle (sometimes also presented as the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which state that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.[..] 

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29 

Interesting article about it nowadays - http://www.kevinspidel.com/one-percent-rule/

I refused to agree, but trusting in this principle, that 1% do the job, 9% are the "+1" people and the 90% just watch the circus burning. Trying to break this barrier I engaged in other journey trough observation, pools, and direct interaction with the newbies and the 90% group and discovered important things:

1) Newcomers usually seek to group acceptance ( opportunity) - If they was unsuccessful on this initial try, they will join the 90% group.
2) Some prefer to stay quiet than say foolishness ( weakness) 
3) Some were mistreated by other participants, some by reopen one stressful thread, other to ask something that was often explained. On this case the user usually will evade the group (threat) 
4) The biggest asset are vanity, everyone has their level of vanity, seen this by the good eyes, It's a human motivational feeling. (strength and opportunity)

Facing this the solution we developed was:
1) Online FAQ - updated by members
2) Online Tutorials and articles, writing by the members ( the beginnings of social networks  principle)
3) Creation of mailing list animators group - group of persons that was focused on keep alive some hot topics, enhancing the newcomer's participation (saying something like: good point, adding value to this discussion, or in other cases giving the links for FAQ and/or Tutorials).

The result was amazing.
--
João Carlos R. Caribé
Consultor 
Skype joaocaribe
(021) 9 8761 1967

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