Fun Engineers and the Engagement Economy

This post is a summary of the Engagement Economy ("the future of massively scaled collaboration and participation") research by Jane McGonigal. The 21-page paper dates from September 2008, but I feel the research is very timely for anyone introducing new systems. As Jane says:

Organisations...may benefit greatly from looking to the online "fun engineers" for lessons in how to drive meaningful, passionate engagement with... increasingly crowd-dependent projects

The paper begins with an example of a major collaborative site (Cambrian House - commercial crowd sourced business development) which failed as users were happy to look and rate but did not participate, leaving the "work" to the site founders. The site had attention but not engagement.

Increasingly companies hope to reap the rewards of collaborative working (internal wikis, social networks for employees) - aiming to create a large scale community, collectively producing data, ideas or content. The value of the output is entirely dependent on the quality and quantity of the contributions.

The main obstacle is whether this is a sustainable model - if people belong to multiple networks where do they contribute most? and recognise that people are not an infinite resources. Not all collaborative projects can thrive, so we need to "optimise participation bandwidth".


They identify three key elements to be successful in this "Engagement Economy":

1. Create Emotional Incentives

Financial incentives don't work, you want a passionate crowd - positive emotions are the reward. You should design 'feel good' tasks that can be accomplished quickly and easily (training is all well and good, but making it simpler is a better first step).

You should aim to:

• make them feel smart
  - exercise some unused mental capacities
  
• let them 'make a mark'
  - the pleasure of changing something in the world
  
• have a 'desire to do a good thing'
  - create a love of the project "if we all work together we can achieve this goal"
  

2. Understand Diverse Rewards and Design for the Pyramid of Participation

In any communitiy there is no typical user - consider what the participant wants, and how much they are willing to contribute.

There are usually a few wildly active participants (top) and a large group, barely active (bottom). You should capitalise on this - give ambitious tasks to top users and one-off or micro-tasks to the bottom. This is your pyramid, the base of the pyramid supports the top.

"Triggers" (such as an email) can explicitly prompt a bottom participant to do something - this is likely the only way to get those users to engage.

3. Build in Fun Mechanics and Create Meaningful Work to Extend the Life cycle of Participation

By 'fun' we mean self-imposed work. Engagement like this requires "flow" (a positive emotional state) which you achieve with immediate feedback, a clear sense of objectives and failure states, and a challenge level that is not too easy or too hard. Typically "levelling" (reward users with new status or powers) maintains this kind of engagement. Anyone who puts in enough effort can rise to the top of the pyramid, breaking the authority view of top jobs having the top status.

There must always be work available to allow leveling (avoid nothing-to-do syndrome), as soon as a project is boring the users will probably go and participate in something else. Leveling is now a tool in use well outside the gaming arena.

What does an organisation need to do?

Hire: Researchers and Interactive designers with backgrounds in online gaming and playful social network design. The strategic input of an engagement engineer ("fun engineer") either permanantly or as a consultant to ensure resources are being invested in projects with a high likelihood of engagement.

Management: Set reasonable internal expectations for participation levels. Be aware that their members are probably already involved in external communities which probably provide better emotional payoffs than their job. Find out what they get from these communities to provide lessons on introducing fun flows into the organisation's primary business practices.

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I think the reason this paper struck such a chord with me is that "engagement engineering" is something I've been drawn towards for a while but hadn't had the theory or vocabulary to talk about. Although not always applicable to more mundane projects I think it provides an alternate perspective to consider when planning internal services, which can only be for the better.

"Social Networks Were Created by Geeks to Attract Girls"

My favourite topic at the moment is how the nature of communication is changing, particularly with regard to social networks. And despite not wanting to make this all about gender, the studies I see seem to continually emphasise the differences in male and female behaviour.

For the record, I completely disagree with the title of this post - but I love the quote. It's taken from the comments of a 2008 study finding that Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks. The article looks at the major social networks and confirms that women outnumber men in all age categories on all of the networks - except Linkedin.

I don't have the answers as to why this is (women's desire to share/communicate/socialise?) but surely something is changing in society if increasingly communications are happening via social networks, and it's the women that are dominating this area.

Another social media survey, from website's magazine called "Let's Hear it for the Ladies" found that increasingly 'online women' refer to blogs and message boards when making purchasing decisions. Women like the peer-to-peer reviews, and the notion of trust seems key to me. It doesn't state how men make their purchasing decisions. Personally, I'm quite happy to trust the reviews of strangers on amazon for my new toaster - but if a friend on facebook told me not to buy it, then that probably would change my mind. That's assuming of course I'd already shared the fact I was thinking of buying a toaster in order for them to respond...

Actually, I do need a new toaster, any recommendations?

My Vicarious Life

Last Sunday was the first Brighton marathon, and I enjoyed every 26 and a bit miles of it. Well vicariously I did...! I didn't run it, but Brighton is full of twitterers, the hashtag #brightonmarathon was in use well in advance, so when the day dawned the stream was already very active, full of well wishers, nervous runners and toilet queue updates.

The local paper also did a live stream pulling tweets along with posted messages from readers and their journalists - here's one from later in the day where my stormtrooper photo was retweeted by the official twitter account (little did I know that EVERYONE had posted photos of the stormtrooper).
So despite having personally witnessed only a tiny piece of the event, I really felt quite involved with it.

I've also been following various conferences recently via twitter - there was a Games Based Learning conference in London a few weeks ago I would have loved to have attended, but luckily several people I follow were there and posted all the best bits including video links.

This got me thinking about the power of vicariously living through events as a learning tool. We already know about the power of twitter to connect people and to harness the knowledge of the network, but this is about sharing the experiences of the network.

At the extreme end of this, imagine an operation (please go with me on this) - and consider the twitter stream from the patient, the surgeon, the family members and the observing student as the operation happens. I suggest that following everybodies perspective - live - is even better than actually being there from a learning point of view.

(I think this could also make a great teaching exercise with students taking the roles and posting their own messages into a stream for the other students to discuss)

I am starting to consider if a recording/archive of tweets of an event has the same value as watching them come in live. My instinct is that it doesn't. I'm sure if I was trying to fake a tweet stream experience I would end up over-editing the displayed posts and no doubt lose some of the richness. The fact that it's really happening, now, is the key.

And finally, thank you to all the tweeters out there who let me follow their marathon runs, their conference sessions and moments of their lives so that this is possible. Somebody actually has to have the experiences after all!

Managing your IT services the ITIL way (my Cheat's guide to ITIL)

ITIL is big news at work lately, but nobody seems to be able to give me a decent summary of what it is, how it works and what new buzzwords I need to drop into committee meetings. So I've decided to write my own. I've never read the books either, but I've assimilated a whole lot of other people's work into this summary post.

ITIL - Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Ok, it's all about managing IT services, and the library is a set of books full of checklists, best practices and processes to help you do this effectively. Like a "how-to" guide for your IT infrastructure.

By using these best practice processes you can plan, deliver and support your IT services without fumbling your way through it or reinventing the wheel each time, and with resulting improved quality and speed.

Process is the key idea. Think about services in terms of the overall goal for the organisation - like a quality eLearning platform - and the processes needed to achieve that. But don't think about your IT sections doing their own thing, the network guys do this, the training guys do that. The individual teams need to really trust the process so they can achieve their bit of it - this can be a hard change of mindset for some (implementing ITIL is a culture change as well as a process change).

An example of ITIL recommendations for a service desk would be to have a single point of contact for users and a systematic way of managing their request:
Log -> Classify -> Investigate -> Diagnose -> Resolution

Change management is another biggy - making sure you assess the impact of any change and that all changes are authorised, tracked and communicated.

The ITIL wikipedia page has a list of the 5 volumes that make up ITIL v3 (the latest version). The books and courses to become ITIL accredited are expensive. Luckily, JISC Infonet has provided a set of infokits on process review and other aspects to provide best practice advice to UK educational institutions like universities. These resources are freely available.

Sound like you know what you're talking about:
"the complete service management life cycle."
"align IT throughout the entire business enterprise"
"Automating the Service Life Cycle"
"promoting Continual Service Improvement"
"capacity planning"
"impact analysis"

Want more?

This Beginner's Guide to ITIL (powerpoint presentation) from Dennis Adams has some great diagrams and more examples than I've included here. Worth a look.

There is also an interesting set of 13 case studies of Universities that are implementing ITIL - interesting to see how far they are and how they are handling different aspects.

Why Outlook will not rule my life.

There has been some discussion recently about a communication strategy for the university, which has got me thinking about how I would write a future communication strategy for a large institution. And surprise, surprise, my strategy involves a LOT less email in my life!

A couple of posts have shaped my current thinking on this topic, Ben Werdmuller's post on How Social Networks can Replace Email, and a post I picked up on twitter by @grahamperrin called Microblogging inside the Firewall.

Now before I start on what I want, I thought I would give a passing consideration to what other people might like, so I tweeted: What are my ideal communication channels? If you could choose, would you have less via email and more via discussion boards/RSS feeds etc?

And here are the replies:

• In theory yes but email is just too convenient - the inbox is always in my face but RSS feeds are more in the background
• depends on what I'm communicating, and the expected & needed speed & detail of response
• I suspect RSS is still relatively niche as compared to email
• I'd like it better if outlook messages were threaded
• Outlook message are threaded in the latest version, but would still prefer an email alternative.
• anything with a bayesian filter that lets me prioritise messages based on content.
• A decent search capability.
• Direct person-to-person messaging shouldn't be for automatic updates: those via RSS. But then, I'm not a typical use case.

I've talked to colleagues about this too, and as much as people seem to want to have twitter-style and feed-style news, they then want email alerts about all of it. And they all want to resort back to email as soon as something is considered "important". I'm all in favour of choice, so if people want to receive email alerts of all the systems we implement then that's fine by me, as long as I can choose not to.

Speaking of email, as Ben points out, the analysis firm Gartner released their predictions for social software, and the first is this:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

Just 20%? Please don't let it be so - or let me be in the 20%. In my vision, I do not spend my life glued to my inbox. So, in no particular order, and subject to change, here is how I think (in an ideal world) a large institution should handle it's internal communications:

1. Everyone will use their calendar. Properly. Never again will someone email me a load of dates and ask me about my availability.

2. Any message to a formal grouping (such as a dept or campus etc) will be posted on the central communication site (e.g. Sharepoint, even though we don't have this yet) and will not be emailed to everyone in the group. And yes, they can subscribe to groups and get email notifications if they want. A well designed portal homepage will be key to everyones daily activity to see these messages. The only things sent direct to my email are messages targeted directly at me.

2a. I'll say that again to reinforce it, I'm going to be viewing my inbox differently. Only messages targeted directly at me are in there.

3. And because of this, email attachments only exist for messages sent between individuals, externally or to small informal groupings. All those minutes etc will be properly stored in appropriate team areas.

4. Serendipitous communication, and the ability for every individual to have an easy way to send a message viewable by every other individual is encouraged. I would like to see an internal twitter style solution for this - which is not for really important stuff that shouldn't be missed, but is also not viewed as "fun" and sharing your status, what you're working on etc is encouraged and not frowned upon.

This is a work in progress, and I should restate it is just what I want. But if you work with me, I may well try and talk you round...