The Rules Of Engagement
I was doing a bit of thinking today about engagement in online communities. Obviously “engagement” is an overweighted word and there’s plenty of debate around what it even is. So for my purposes I’m going to say “community engagement” means “being interested enough in a community to contribute to it”.
This is rightly seen as an important goal in market research. If you’re recruiting 1000 people to take part in a community and only 100 actually do, something seriously inefficient is going on. If you can get that proportion up to, say, half, things seem a lot more respectable.
So engagement in this sense matters. But the next question is: what are people engaging with?
The reason I started thinking about this is that I was wondering what a particular metric might tell someone about a community’s health. The metric in question is the percentage of conversation in a community that’s meta-conversation - i.e. people in a community talking about that community.
Meta-conversation can take many forms: the annoying habit people have in some places of going “FIRST!” at the start of a thread counts. So do any discussions about moderation policies, or any games the community members create about themselves (“Post in the style of another poster”, to name one particularly incendiary example I’ve known.). What it has in common is that it’s content which makes no sense outside the community - it needs the community in order to exist.
This, I reckon, is a difference between meta-conversation and the wider area of social, off-topic interaction within a community. The social/personal/”I ate a yoghurt today” type of talk is based in an offline context (and can tap offline connections and shared offline context) (“shared offline context” might be better known to you as “the real world”). Meta-conversation feeds more purely off the community itself.
What does that actually mean, though? Let’s come back to that definition of engagement - being interested enough that you contribute. We can now outline at least three types of engagement that might be happening in a community:
- Engagement with the topic: Contributions which happen because the topic is interesting.
- Engagement with the people: Contributions which happen because the people discussing the topic are interesting.
- Engagement with engagement: Meta-contributions which happen because the community itself (and its mechanics) is interesting
All three are (I would argue) both necessary and inevitable in any community. I’ve seen a bunch of talk about the idea of phatic speech online - speech which is purely social rather than information-bearing. I’m not a linguist, so I don’t want to use the word glibly, but I do agree with the essential idea behind talk of phatic activity in communities. Which is that social activity in a community is where a lot of the real action - forming relationships, networks, and hierarchies - happens that makes a community sustainable.
But! If you’re running a research community your particular concern will be the first type - on-topic engagement. You’re essentially not really interested in the second type of engagement - you’re not in the business of getting people to form relationships. And this leaves the third type of engagement - meta-engagement, engagement driven solely by other people’s engagement.
In most online communities, meta-engagement arises naturally from the other kinds: it’s a way for people to express the value the community has for them, which also helps codify and reinforce that value. In research communities, though, that value tends to be imposed from above, in the form of incentive systems - rewards, points, and badges for contributing.
So, yes, we’re back at “gamification” again. The point of gamification in research communities is to increase engagement by creating a “game layer” on top of the ordinary activity of communities. But a game layer is almost by definition a meta-layer, and so you have to ask: is the extra engagement it’s creating engagement with the topic, or engagement with engagement itself? If there’s an increase in activity in gamified communities, is that reflected in an increase in valuable, on-topic activity?
I wouldn’t want to prejudge the answers here. And meta-content is, as I’ve said, vital to any community. You can look at my three forms of engagement and simplify them to discussion, socialising and play - all are essential. It might well be, though, that gamifying research communities has a positive impact mostly because it artificially stimulates meta-engagement, rather than directly affects engagement with the topic itself.
