This was a pretty freeform discussion of topics around communities with some kind of database relationship.

Participants

Participants fell into three broad categories:

1. Some people had communities they were looking to in order to build knowledgebases
2. Others were looking for ideas about how to engage communities with existing databases
3. Still others were looking for answers about what to do with the information produced by the communities

Topics

Trust, KBs, and Community

Concern of community about the trustworthiness of the content. Finding the balance between UGC and either UCG high-cred users of some kind of authority produced content.

One solution: Wikis do integration of authority and larger community

Flexibility: Possible to lock down credible/complete content and still add color and movement around the content (in the news, what’s new, comments, discussion, etc.)

Real world examples:
1. Encyclopedia Brittanica just announced going to a wiki-ish format
2. Article about backlash of community knowledge- finding integration of authority and community

Integrating KBs into community

Google user-support content search results model:

As a better way to link UCG with help center- searches yield integrated results- but are marked as help center or UGC

How to determine how to get people to the content- search? Browsing? Tags?

Though people think they want to browse, actually more successful in finding the information when they search. Consider forcing people to search. Then it becomes an issue of displaying search results in the most navigable, useful way. Bringing the tendency to browse into the search results. Better match for KBs anyway?

Where do you keep your knowledgebase? Community platform and knowledgebase platform- if separate, how do you integrate them?

Globalization- UGC not standard across languages (though help desk content, etc. is)

Managing the process

Question of how much to moderate. How much involvement does it take to get KB online but not meddle too much?

To what degree to we feel responsible for the accuracy of content?

Opinions:

• don’t baby it too much or it won’t become self-dependent. Coming there to talk to the company and not the community.

• whether credible or not will reflect on your company

• Decide how dangerous the misinformation is in the big picture

Finding KB contributors

How to identify and motivate users to become super-users:

• The people who are active already- people reporting abuse, giving feedback.
• give them additional access.

Making KB the point around which communities grow-
Professional communities- resources library popular- people can (but don’t as much as preferred) comment or upload their own resources.

Initially thought people would be motivated to post work by getting credit, but anonymity sometimes more appealing because it’s less intimidating

Community vendors need to make it easier to post- user specific- are people posting mostly from phones or blackberries- how to make it easier

How do we motivate community to create relevant content?

• How much participation can you expect from your community. If one percent is the very active group, support them in different ways than you support the rest of the community. Reward systems, etc.
• Different types of people- some people answer questions, but don’t start it on their own. To motivate those people, create a list of articles you’d like, put it out there.
• People who are there to participate in ways like tagging, rating. Make sure to cater to all groups.

Navigating corporate tendencies towards secrecy

Sharing knowledge with customers- corporate culture of secrecy- how to do the paradigm shift towards openness for growth?

• Culture change, why give up IP? Need champions to push it.
• Is it more important to gain customer loyalty and satisfaction or maintain secrecy?
• Paul Krugman column- the Grateful Dead had it right to allow bootleggers, sharing knowledge, know that money will be made other ways.
• Get people comfortable- offering it only to people who are interested- not flashing it on the homepage.