Overview: Online Community Management

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…

House Democrats ... environmental justice bill, a novel collaborative effort between lawmakers and local groups ... used ... PopVox to allow disparate environmental justice groups around the country to comment on the legislation... also met with hundreds of groups and hosted a daylong environmental justice summit on Capitol Hill...environmental ju…

a social dynamic in which it becomes more beneficial to hold those views than not. It’s the feedback mechanism by which people are punished for expressing any kind of nuance, doubt or divergence... moral outbidding, unchecked, that corrodes a group from within...the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transg…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

A “Behind the Story” explanation box attached to a news story ... most people skip right over it...it didn’t impact their trust ... Banner blindness isn’t just for ads... can be confused with advertising... whether people saw a BtS card or not didn’t significantly change their ratings.

The union faces a double crisis of legitimacy... it is hard to sustain the fiction that ordinary citizens have a meaningful say over what happens in Brussels... If many voters don’t believe that they have much sway over what happens in their national capitals, the feeling of impotence is even more profound when it comes to Brussels.... the EU ... …

Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on... WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny ... that’s the bullshit economy... fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers ... to siphon cash through Facebook and Google’s ... counterfeit goods pass through Amazon... a financial crisis based on bu…

we’re headed for a miserable 24 months of purple prose, tediously long sermons and unneeded – and unheeded – speeches and moralising... a ‘Big European Moan’... Let’s capitalise on this rather jolly mood... minimising the institutional hijack and confusion ...European Parliament... traditional organisational blueprint ... plenaries, steering commi…

‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ will open this spring... will not be enough... also... a real democratic debate on the final text, so that it can be followed up... if there is to be a reform of the Treaties... to be ratified in all Member States...Referenda are ... not suitable for the ratification of a new treaty... not allow a debate on its…

to make participatory democracy a reality, it is essential to avoid only paying lip-service to the idea of participation — and give citizens a real say...European federalists are hoping to gain momentum for treaty change. Many member states are afraid of that very outcome...Citizens’ participation is being tested out far more commonly across Europ…

Europe needs a new mechanism for involving citizens, not another talking shop chaired by the Guy Verhofstadt... By raising expectations it can’t easily deliver on, it risks eroding citizens’ trust...won’t directly prepare treaty change... a preparatory process ... could lead the European council ... to initiate them... this time the conference is …

How the Conference on the future of Europe will look like? ... it's the European Parliament ... to offer 1st blueprint... in essence a Constitutional Convention model PLUS... 'plus' is so tiny that fails to capture ... vivacity of EU civil society ...prepare a set of “concrete recommendations” that may be turned into legislative and…

despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures—government, business, NGOs and media—is trusted...Since Edelman began measuring trust 20 years ago, it has been spurred by economic growth. ..[no longer] in developed markets, where income inequality is now the more important fa…

“Conference on the Future of Europe,”... if the commission and national governments get their way, it may be a useless exercise... the European Parliament... would create ... citizens’ assemblies ... of up to 300 people each... give citizens specific questions to wrestle with... should result in major changes in how the EU works... resembles the …

Better Reykjavic platform ... encourage thoughtful debate for government improvement among citizens while avoiding vitriolic arguments...a new debate system with simple tweaks: Citizens must list arguments for and against ideas, and instead of replying to each other directly, they can only down-vote things ... forces users to create standalone poi…

The most successful audience team members have a complete understanding of how the organization works... interpret a treasure trove of data and analytics about what people are searching for, what stories they like, and what stories are missing that special something ...audience development was everyone’s job and no one’s job at the same time... Th…

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos... people develop severe anxiety in training... struggle with trauma long after they leave... conspiracy videos ... gradually lead them to embrace fringe views... By the end of 2018... more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content modera…

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

I started the ‘coffee club’ as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members, who pay $10 per month... private discussion forum ... live web video chats monthly... recorded and available for 30 days... a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services.... main focu…

Informing Knowledge4Policy with an Understanding of our Political Nature - exploring on Medium what “Understanding our Political Nature”, a recent EU study into knowledge, reason and policymaking, has to say about how the Knowledge4Policy platform could (should?) evolve.

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

Europeans feel disenfranchised ... alternative forms of active citizen engagement in democracy must be experimented with... Our approach combines ... random sample voting (RSV) with secure digital identities... if anyone in Europe, from the European parliament to a local government or NGO, wants to find out how people in a certain region feel abou…

POLITICO asked eight of the European Parliament's youngest members... how do you make the EU more relevant to young people?... " letting them into the decision-making process and giving them a better sense of what it is they do"... "The EU is designed to be impervious to citizens’ influence... led by an unelected Commission and its Parliament has …

news industry trade associations are corruptly cashing in their political capital ... their members are newspapers, and politicians are scared of them — in desperate acts of protectionism to attack platform companies. The result is a raft of legislation that will damage the internet and in the end hurt everyone, including journalists and especiall…

a system that could bring some structure to the legislative advocacy ecosystem — listing all bills online; organizations and constituents would create accounts and post input in a structured, transparent way with outward anonymity but real names and addresses sent with messages to lawmakers in a way that could be easily processed by offices... th…

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…