Traits of a community Manager


I came across this article on Mashable a few weeks ago about the traits of a good community manager. Granted this article is concerned more with commerce rather than academia, however I do think that the traits do translate one-to-one in academia.

I encourage people to go to mashable and read the article. Here are a few of my thoughts on it.

1. Love your job

Well this is a d'uh for almost any job (otherwise you will be a miserable sob hehehe). I found the comment that a community manager should be very approachable quite pertinent. Community managers are the community's front face, the maitre D' in a sense and if you don't like the snooty Maitre D' in this restaurant you will probably go somewhere else.


2. Empower the community and promote others (as well as self).

This quite important in a community of practice. People are veritable fountains of knowledge, they just don't know it. Encouraging people to participate unlocks that knowledge for the benefit of the community. What I know, you might not - thus if I share you gain (and as some of my professors have said: if you have a question, chances are that someone else does too!)


3. Extensive knowledge about the company

This is really important. In academia it's also really important to be very familiar with school procedures and be a subject matter expert as well in order to run a community of practice. Just being the IT guy helping people log in isn't going to cut it. The subject matter expert will help people navigate the campus bureaucracy, give them accurate information, and know enough about the subject matter to find resources for the community, participate in the community and spark conversation and debate.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more