Join the dots

Just recently I’ve been asked to put together a couple of Community Hubs using Moodle, and its made me think about what works (and what doesn’t) in setting up such an environment.

Firstly, what do we mean when we talk about a Community Hub? To be honest I’m not sure if anyone has used that term much before, so if it turns out that it becomes a common term then remember – you heard it here somewhere early on in the piece.

A Community Hub in the virtual sense is an online environment where individuals with a common interest can meet, communicate, share, and create knowledge. It may be open to the world or restricted to a specific group, it may act as an aggregator for information, a collaborative space, or an information channel – or all three (and no doubt more). In terms of the work I’ve been doing recently, the Community Hubs have been semi-closed environments created to support formal groups – in one case conference delegates, and in two others, professional associations in the Higher Education space. Some have been complete ‘walled gardens’, while some have had combinations of shared and controlled content.

So what makes a good Community Hub? Like any product, a Community Hub must provide a value proposition that makes participants want to use it, which can include such elements as:

1. access to information (or individuals) that cannot be accessed anywhere else;
2. access to aggregated information from elsewhere, presented in an easy to digest manner;
3. the ability to contribute to the community in some way and see your own contributions reflected.

To use the Educause Community Hub as an example, the above elements were provided through:

1. providing forums that allowed delegates to contact each other, and conference presenters;
2. providing (albeit belated) information on conference changes;
3. using the ‘interests’ function in Moodle to allow delegates to find like-minded individuals;
4. providing access to tools (in this case the Wimba Pronto instant messenger) that connected delegates via live chat;
5. displaying images from Flickr and updated from Twitter that were tagged with the conference tag (published on the website) that allowed participants to see their own contributions reflected on the website;

At least in theory.

In practice, the uptake of the Community Hub was varied. Most delegates were sent a login to the site, around 60% logged in at least once, but the uptake of different aspects of the site were variable.

Successes

The biggest success of the Community Hub was primarily the fact that people accessed it. The aggregation of content from Twitter and Flickr was (anecdotally) received as excellent by those who were new to Web2.0 technologies, but somewhat ‘passe’ by those who were used to living their lives via Twitter feeds. The capacity for the community hub to be quickly updated to reflect changes in the conference program was another strength of the Hub, but one that was not utilised to greatest effect due to reasons discussed later.

In a broader sense, the use of Twitter at the conference was a true reflection of the power of microblogging, with many ‘discussions’ held during presentations (at times giving brutal critiques of the speaker, leading to interesting ethical discussions about whether we should indeed tweet in-session) and ultimately leading to the #EdAust09 tag listing at number three in the worldwide trending stats, competing with such themes as Wolverine and Swine Flu.

Shortfalls

One of the biggest shortfalls of the Hub was that it did not offer a great deal that could not be accessed elsewhere. Granted, there was the Pronto instant messaging tool, which was used by a relatively small number of users, but that was often met with a ‘what, I have to download and install yet another IM client?’. The aggregated Twitter and Flickr feeds were also something that could be accessed through other means, and the lack of significant dynamic or high-interest content (case in point being the conference papers and videos) meant that the use of the Hub was not as high as it could have been. Much of this was due to time, with the Hub being put together after the main conference website had been created, and hence missing out on things like advertising session information.

Another interesting fact was the impact of a lack of technical knowledge by the conference organisers. Although by conventional measures the conference ran smoothly, there was an expectation (not unreasonable) by some delegates that they would have access to information in almost real-time via the Hub on such things as schedule changes. Unfortunately, the Hub administrator (me) only found out about changes after either popping in to the organiser’s desk, or hearing about it via pointed Twitter posts questining why specific information was not on the Hub. If nothing else, this conference showed the change in expectations of the Web2.0 community in terms of information distribution.

A disposable community?

Since the conclusion of the conference, the traffic on the website has dropped to virtually nothing, so does this mean that the Hub has been a failure? I don’t think so. The Hub did its job, but as the Educause delegate community aren’t an ongoing group then it is unlikely that they will require a central Hub in the longer term.

Usage Stats from the Educause09 Community Hub

In conclusion

For the Educause Community Hub, the party is over, but this does not mean that the experience will not help improve future projects. The subsequent Hub I have been working on (which is still in draft so I won’t name names just yet) has a combination of open and secure areas, will support a longer-term community, and will hopefully provide far more in the way of value to participants that the Educause Hub did, even if it was considered a success given the short timeframes in which it was created (which was about a week). In my next post I’ll share some of the tools in Moodle that can be used to create a Community Hub, as well as external Web2.0 tools that can be used in conjunction to add some spice to a vanilla Moodle.