Participation in voluntary electronic challenges is very different from participation in formally assigned business teams. Some people enter ideas, some comment, a few do both. Entries may represent a fair cross-section of the audience or may be driven by a small minority. Seeing these patterns helps a sponsor interpret the content. For end users, seeing where they fit in and what others are doing tends to drive interest and participation.
In many cases the graphics in Analytics are most easily understood when comparing one challenge to another. Below left is a Venn diagram showing that in this challenge, most people entered ideas, a few entered comments, and a very few did both. In a different event (at the right), these behaviors are more balanced.
Which is appropriate depends on the context. For a quick polling challenge, commenting may not matter much, so the Venn at the left would raise no concerns. But in most cases, we’ve found that ideas and comments should be about equal in number: too few comments and ideas remain unconsidered and aren’t built out enough, while too many comments may indicate a vague problem statement (leading to multiple inconsistent interpretations of ideas) or show that it’s time to pull the plug and move to idea evaluation and decisions.
It is very important for the business leader to understand that participation in voluntary electronic forums is always long-tail: that is, a few people will contribute a lot and most people will contribute a little. This is very different from traditional business teams where people are assigned to a task, resulting in about equal participation from the team members. Measuring Participation has two graphs that show the extent of the long-tail phenomenon:
The pie charts show a slice of the data at 80% of ideas and comments while the line chart shows the whole curve. If there were no long tail — if people participated equally — then 80% of ideas would come from 80% of the contributors (analogous to one person, one vote), so the business leader would know that the content represented the opinions of the majority. The smaller the slice of the pies, the more skewed the long tail. Twitter is a notorious extreme where the vast majority are lurkers and only a handful of people account for most tweets. In business challenges, a sponsor should be concerned if 30% or fewer of people enter 80% of content, because the loud voices are drowning out the less active majority.
Measuring Participation can also show anyone’s connection network, based on coauthorship and commenting. The example above shows Christy Keller’s network and highlights the people connecting her with Wallace Bailey. These diagrams also show that some people are key connectors, and in their absence large sections of the network would be severed and drift apart. Understanding Communities shows these people in more detail.