Two per cent solution

My colleague, Gareth Wall, over at the Centre for Public Scrutiny has just sent me an interesting article on online communities. The article seems to say that when building an online community - lots of people will view what's being built, but only 1 in 10 will "interact" with it and only one in 100 will actually "build content". The "one per-centers".

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that much the same applies at Yahoo:
in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, "1% of the user population might start a
group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually
author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress;
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups,"
he noted on his blog in February.

The article's author takes this as discouraging, but I don't. (And I bet Gareth doesn't find it discouraging either.) When we've run online conferences in the past, we' have higher than 10% interaction rates - much closer to 20%. And as a result we got three excellent online conference reports that have informed the work of the PMMI project and helped us build improvement tools - particularly around culture and councillor involvement in PM. Because we translated that learning into a variety of media - we were able to share it with more than just 100% of originally "user population" - but a population that was far wider and more diverse.Plus rather than "building content" per se, we want you to largely share what you've already got.


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