Crowd Storm

We may be moving to a world of networks well led versus organizations well managed.

The city of Boston fixes about 19,000 potholes a year. Part of the cost involved in doing so is not just repairing the potholes, but figuring out where they are. When the city first began addressing the challenge, they thought they had a good idea for how to deal with the problem efficiently. Their solution was to ask the good citizens of Boston to help them. So, like other cities, they built a website and mobile application to allow people to report pothole locations.

But getting people to report potholes was still pretty tedious and, as we have seen, the harder it is to participate, the lower participation rates will be. So, under the umbrella of their “New Urban Mechanics” initiative,1 the city created a smartphone application that allowed citizens to help the city create work orders for problems without requiring a phone call or an email to city engineers—what they called volunteering without the sweat equity. The app used a driver’s phone’s accelerometer—a motion detector—to sense when their car hit a bump, based on the car’s acceleration. The phone’s GPS sensor could then be used to accurately note the location and transmit the data to the city.

The city of Boston worked with outside partners to help develop the application—a traditional contract relationship with experts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Santa Fe Complex, a technology think tank in New Mexico. But, like others who tried to make this kind of road-surface-sensing application (Microsoft and MIT, for example, are two entities that had spent time on it), the results were only marginally successful.

The problem was simply that users couldn’t rely on this approach: After all, how could the app tell the difference between a missing manhole cover and a pothole, or just temporary construction? At this point, the city explored the possibility of reaching out to a community of external talent for help with solving the problem. The Street Bump team turned to InnoCentive to run and manage the challenge.

Participants were asked to submit a detailed description of their ideas for how to solve the problem of differentiating bumps in the road so that they could definitively categorize some as potholes, along with the software source code that would become part of the downloadable phone application. InnoCentive shared the brief with their problem solver community, as well as other coalition partners, including media partners—like magazines The Economist and Popular Science—to reach out to new participants.2

Participants agreed to submit ideas and give up the associated rights as a condition of submission. The city then reviewed and tested the solutions with their experts and selected the best performing solution as the winner. InnoCentive’s role in managing the challenge was minimal: they merely had to answer any questions about the brief or the challenge’s terms and make sure that participants adhered to contest rules.

The result: the city uncovered a series of algorithms to filter out things like manhole covers and speed bumps. So if at least three people hit a bump in the same spot, the system recognized it as a pothole. Problem solved.

Crowdstorming Community Patterns

Figure 7.1 represents this pattern by depicting the specific interactions between the participants from outside the organization with representatives inside the organization.

The search pattern focuses on recruiting to find the right participants. Once they are uncovered—and opt to join in—the interactions are relatively simple: outside participants submit ideas to representatives inside the organization (or coalition).

Collaboration Patterns

We also see a familiar pattern of opportunities to participate, often referred to as the 1–9–90 rule.3 This rule describes types of contributions—big versus smaller—in online systems. We think of big in terms of the resulting value—that is, a single big submission of an idea to solve the problem. Many smaller submissions—such as votes and comments taken together—will help to improve on the idea or identify its potential. One percent of participants are making big contributions (in our case submitting ideas, plans, or proposals) and 9 percent are making smaller contributions (commenting, voting, or sharing these submissions). We then expect 90 percent of the people who interact within an open system to “lurk,” that is, they will not participate directly beyond observing participants’ results.

This rule has important implications for managing the collaboration pattern. Let’s assume that 100 participants submit ideas to our hypothetical challenge. The 1–9–90 rule suggests that we should then expect 900 people to participate in the voting and commenting processes. So, in effect we have moved from interacting with 100 people to interacting with 1,000 people—an order of magnitude change. And with this change some new management demands emerge.

These interactions can get more complex in another important way: they take place across organizational boundaries. For example, when the city of Boston received an idea via InnoCentive, there was no need for them to offer feedback or encouragement. But take a look at American Idol, LEGO, GE, Threadless, or Starbucks Betacup and you will see representatives from these organizations interacting with participants in much more significant ways—they need to observe and react to not just ideas but their feedback too.

Integration Patterns

From Crowds to Community

The Role of the Community Manager

Another way to understand the role is in terms of its monitoring function—to understand not just needs, but also behavior and contributions. Community managers know what drives the community—what tasks, incentives, and interactions make it work. They also have the strong communication skills required to represent the community to the internal organization. Just as important, they are responsible for selling the organization’s priorities to the community. By continuously striving to represent and reconcile stakeholders’ needs, the community manager can help his or her community move forward.

The role is also not static; its emphasis shifts as we make our way from search to integration patterns. Let’s take a look at how one successful organization has evolved their community management approach to respond to more complex crowdstorm patterns.

Local Motors: From Collaboration to Integration

Local Motors invites people—“from everyday car enthusiasts to experienced engineers”—to participate in all aspects of the process. Rogers explains that his company gives “people tools, education, a network, inspiration, fame, money, and they give you ideas, enthusiasm, feedback, criticism. We call it ‘cocreation.’”6 Local Motors’ goal in 2008 was to crowdsource the design and production of the first car, something they managed to do with the Rally Fighter (the culmination of 35,000 designs by 2,900 community members from over 100 countries). This off-road vehicle was completed from design to production in 18 months—a fraction of the five years it normally takes to bring a new vehicle to market.

The Rally Fighter was an impressive debut for a crowdsourced car. Unfortunately, so much of what makes the Rally Fighter innovative is invisible. It is not just that this is the first car designed by a large group of people using crowdstorming processes; it is also the result of fantastic community management.

Local Motors began with a collaboration pattern. For the Rally Fighter challenge, participants not only submited ideas; they also made comments, voted, and interacted with the full-time Local Motors team. Local Motors had to figure out how to encourage, and then work with, all of this feedback. There was no question that for John Rogers the community was always going to be at the core of Local Motors. What was interesting to see was how this played out during the first design—how the respective roles of the community and the full-time organization evolved during the process.

Alex Fiechter is Local Motors’ community manager. He explained that the Local Motors team knew that while the Rally Fighter was successful along nearly all metrics, it would be hard to keep the community excited through the 18-month cycles needed to develop future cars—the process does not allow everyone to participate through all phases of development. This realization came in part because of great community management—the Local Motors team talked constantly with community members to understand their needs. While Local Motors was in the business of creating cars, they recognized that their business model depends on motivated participants—so they needed to shift their model in order to encourage participation.

This led Local Motors to establish contracts with other organizations that wanted to work with their community to build cars. In 2011, Local Motors contracted with DARPA to design and build an experimental combat support vehicle in four months. President Obama proclaimed the project’s success during a speech at Carnegie Mellon on June 24, 2011, during which he announced a major manufacturing initiative.7

Community management helped Local Motors evolve their model to rebalance the value exchanged with their community. The focus in the beginning was on Local Motors’ needs and on getting ideas; it evolved to leveraging feedback between members on the designs. This feedback then became a driver for the integration pattern. The DARPA challenge was greatly concerned with increasing opportunities and incentives for the outside participants and changed Local Motors’ business.

However, this was just the first big step in the shifting structure between the full-time Local Motors team and their increasingly active community. Their next challenge was to figure out how to balance the range of participant skills. A quick visit to the Local Motors “Forge” (their online collaboration environment) reveals a massive number of beautifully rendered automotive designs. The design talent is easy to spot. But what about the less visible—but no less important—engineering work? Local Motors realized that the motivations that attracted a large design community were not as successful at drawing in engineers.

While both target a finished product, a designer’s end-state is the completed work, which can become part of his or her portfolio, whereas engineers must point to something they have built. In other words, designers “win” even if their idea is not selected; they can show their work and be recognized for it. But in crowdstorm projects, engineers need to be part of projects that get produced in order to “win”—working artifacts are the best show of engineering skill. Local Motors understood that they needed to become “deep enablers” for participants.

So they began to focus on key pain points that prevented engineering community members from participating in ways that would lead to product realization. For example, they provided software tools that helped engineers perform complex mechanical modeling during the development stage; and they identified key areas of expertise that community members needed—such as carbon fiber fabrication—and provided access to the key resources to support these areas.

Local Motors is playing a more supportive role in another important way, to ensure that more ideas are realized.

Community members constantly share ideas and projects in the Local Motors forums. When one of these projects began to gather support in 2011, Local Motors made the decision to take on a new role. They would help to organize the development of a new idea for a tandem car design 8 that one of their community members had proposed. Unlike previous Local Motors projects, this was not something that Local Motors had initiated either directly or with a partner. Further, they would not produce the design under the Local Motors brand name, nor would they own the IP. In taking this step, Local Motors was clearly committing to support their community in pursuing their own initiatives—and, in so doing, they were strengthening their relationship with the community.

The Local Motors example shows community management in action across the continuum of interactive models. Table 7.1 highlights the different roles that community management plays across the search, collaboration, and integration patterns as Local Motors evolved its approach.

It is worth noting that community management starts from the top at Local Motors. Local Motors founder and CEO John Rogers tirelessly communicates the company’s values and vision to all stakeholders. But Local Motors success also depends on the creation of new support structures—or institutions to enable the community, such as ensuring that there is space to learn or make decisions about what is best for the community. These institutions help communities to help themselves. Let’s look at these structural components in greater detail.

Eight Pillars of Crowdstorming Community Management

We can flesh out the roles of the community manager as mayor by looking at the work of 2009 Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, who has shown how simple institutions can enable groups to manage shared resources. Ostrom spent her career working across multiple disciplines to understand very efficient approaches to managing shared resources from forests to fish. As such, her findings demonstrate the characteristics required for forming effective communities and community management—they apply to the city as well as to crowdstorm projects.

Ostrom discusses eight institutions that help in the management of shared resources.9 These institutions apply directly to managing complex online work communities:

1. Monitor: A key function for effective management in Ostrom’s model is having monitors who are accountable to the sponsoring organization—something that is central to all community management.

There will always be questions or clarifications about the terms of participation in search patterns. After all, if nobody is monitoring communication channels, then they are likely to miss these questions and opportunities for clarification.

But in more complex patterns like collaboration and integration, monitoring is the core function that enables community managers to be aware of what the community is doing. Where are they succeeding, and failing? What are they concerned about? Is anyone abusing the voting system? Are you getting useful feedback?

Monitoring is absolutely crucial to effectively managing shared resources—community managers cannot be effective without it. And in order to do so, managers need quantitative and qualitative measures. Monitoring enables the other institutions below. (We will look at the metrics required for effective monitoring in the next chapter).

2. Support (Conflict Resolution): In the InnoCentive example, support was primarily focused on answering questions from the community to help ensure that they understood the brief and the terms of the challenge. The potential for conflict increases in the Local Motors example—more feedback and voting increases the opportunities for disagreements and misunderstandings. Again, monitoring is critical to determining when and where conflict might be occurring. Once you identify it, we see some recurring themes in approaches to conflict management and resolution:

Communicating Rules and Policies: Community management is responsible for ensuring that the group running the challenge is able to convey good behavior guidelines. Often this might include some of the issues that lead to establishing new rules—as well as some of the thinking behind them.
Style: Community management needs to determine a balance between firmness with regard to the rules and policies for engagement, and flexibility and nuance with regard to resolving conflict and encouraging the right behavior. Style must be believable and serve as a beacon for the community; however, it must also be decisive and make it clear when action should be taken.
Copycatting and Bashing Management: Conflicts in crowdstorm environments generally fall into “copycatting”—where one participant copies another participant’s ideas—and “bashing”—where participants make negative, unconstructive comments about other participants’ ideas, feedback, or votes. Best practices for resolving these conflicts are based on slowly escalating both direct and back-channel responses. In general, most conflicts sort themselves out quickly once the parties become aware that they have crossed a boundary, and when it is clear that two ideas are very similar or that a comment’s tone has crossed the line of appropriateness. Healthy, mature communities will police themselves; peers will influence peers when they see something out of line. For situations that escalate, the next step is to take direct communication offline and refer to stated guidelines.
Tactics: Community management is responsible for setting up support centers whose job is to help communities on an ongoing basis. Key components for managers in this area include:
- establishing the appropriate reporting and response approach–queue management including categorization (for example technical, business, contest, or other categories).
- updating and managing frequently asked questions (FAQs).
- publicizing important questions with the user community.

3. Advocacy: It is one thing to understand the community’s needs; it is something else entirely to work on their behalf to get them what they need. Like those who represent the “voice of the customer” in many organizations, the advocacy role ensures that the organization is addressing the community’s needs—that “outsiders” in the collaboration and integration patterns are well represented in decisions that will impact them. For example, Alex at Local Motors approached the organization on the community’s behalf to ask for everything from educational tools to support for one of their own projects. The tangible results that were conveyed to the community assured them that they could trust and rely on Alex to represent their interests, which further enabled him to have frank discussions about what was and what was not working in the community.

4. Value Exchange: For Ostrom, value exchange entails the rules to leverage the use of common resources—in crowdstorming, “resources” mean ideas, time, and knowledge. Though we have already discussed incentives at length, it is worth noting how exchanges shift as we move from a crowd to a community. While InnoCentive is providing incentives to participate in challenges (exchanging compensation for ideas, time, and knowledge), Local Motors is going further. A decision to support community-initiated projects and to provide educational resources has Local Motors putting more into the pool of common resources in terms of time, ideas, and knowledge.

5. Sanctions: Implementing the policies and guidelines for community membership provides the basis for monitoring and managing participant behavior. Community managers must provide the governance for graduated sanctions when a violation of community rules occurs. They also must manage policy compliance according to expressly stated legal terms differently than they do for guideline compliance for processes and values that are part of the community’s way of doing business and its ethos. For issues involving IP or confidentiality violations, community managers need to be comfortable with an organization’s terms for a given challenge. (Chapter 1 provides an overview of the approaches to legal issues that organizations can take.) They must vigilantly review ideas for violations as they are submitted, and initiate direct communication with—and deliver a warning to—the participant when a violation is determined. Community managers must take failure to comply seriously and—with their legal group’s involvement—take the next step of disqualifying any violator from the challenge, in addition to banning them from subsequent challenges. For guideline violations involving bashing, hateful speech, undermining the voting process by trying to “game” the system, or any other violation, the procedures defined in the support guidelines above are best practices. You can introduce sanctions gradually—but they need to be direct and severe when violators do not comply.

6. Collective Choice: Participating in the decision-making process is an additional principle that Ostrom believes leads to effective communities. The role of voting in crowdstorming environments is the primary way that participants feel as though they have a stake in the process—and the outcome. (We look at the pros and cons of peer-to-peer rating and filtering in order to select ideas in Chapter 9.) With regard to managing communities to deliver results, the more participants feel they are involved in the process—from idea submission through to rating—the more engaged and active their participation will be.

Organizations that manage online work environments must also establish communication channels for the community to easily review and share their opinions on issues that impact individual challenges as well as the community in general. Discussion threads, online forums, and blogs are all effective ways to do this. Community managers must facilitate this process.

Finally, participants who consider themselves community members need to feel they have a stake in modifying and improving the community’s guidelines. In Chapter 11, we discuss the ways that organizations can build review-and-improve steps into their crowdstorming processes, including the role that community members play. Community management has a critical role in this, because they provide the front line of communication with participants who want to shape the next iteration of the challenge process.

7. Membership: Clearly defining boundaries for being a community member (as well as defining what effectively excludes the unentitled) provides the basis for the support and monitoring functions—particularly with regard to managing good behavior and values. It is important to communicate the community’s shared values and interests clearly, as well as the more formal terms of membership. And it should be clear that by joining a community, participants are agreeing to these values and terms—as well as agreeing to be monitored for compliance. By becoming a “member,” participants commit not only to the challenge’s outcome, but also to the process to achieve that outcome. (We discuss how organizations track and monitor participation and commitment in the next chapter.)

8. Nesting: Finally, there is an important question of how to scale. While community managers can use technology to monitor and support participants, management is still built on relationships. It is a challenge to manage relationships beyond a certain scale in large online work environments. As the number of community participants grows, so do the interactions. As this happens, monitoring becomes more complex and time consuming, and the list of conflicts to be resolved increases. Across all patterns, there is a limit to what a team of community managers can do. Nesting is a way to find logical points to decompose the community management role.

For example, Local Motors can “nest” their community and management support of the community based on segregating Local Motors’ work from its partners’ challenges and also from community initiated projects. The project structure is one simple way to enable nesting and divide up some community management responsibilities. So, while we have talked about a single Local Motors community, it is more useful to think about members of the community being active around specific challenges—and managers focused on specific community activities.

Community Management and Crowdstorm Patterns

Table 7.2 provides an overview of the community management roles across the search, collaboration, and integration patterns that you need to consider for your projects. It highlights the differences between the types of institutions that enable each pattern.

Table 7.2 Key Attributions of Different Crowdstorm Community Management Patterns

The following final example in the chapter will show how an organization has used community management to drive results using the integration pattern.

Chapter 7

Manage Communities to Facilitate Great Outcomes