But first a bit of background to this ground breaking research.  The research using the back of a napkin and some great surveying by Blaise Grimes – Viort’s and his Zodiac Signs Survey conducted with 180 community managers and my Chinese New Year Zodiac Signs Survey with an impressive 27 responses.

Leads to the conclusion that if you where born between the 23^rd of August and October the 22^nd (Virgo or Libra)

And your year of birth was one of these 1926, 34, 38, 46, 50, 58, 62, 70, 74, 82, 86, 94, 98, or 06.

I can now say categorically that you will be a great online community facilitator.

So that’s me out then, back to the drawing board.

With it being Chinese New Year on the 23rd Jan and Community Manager Appreciation Day I was wondering if the year of your birth would have any effect in you becoming an online facilitator.

It would be interesting to see if it does.

And if you are interested I’m a Snake, read into that as you will.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Manager_Appreciation_Day

What to do? It’s so easy: Thank your Community Manager in blog posts, tweets, hugs, or gift them tea, cakes and biscuits

Or use a combination, everyone knows that Community Facilitators / Managers love biscuits.

And two things came up regularly, while doing this.

People had put lots of effort into completing the application form (Description, Welcome text, Tags, Facilitation plan etc.

But, this was the bit that I found strange.

1. On quiet a few occasions no content was ever added to the community.

2. And on others there was only one posting.  “What should this community cover?”

Maybe it was a bit of a failure on my side of not helping them out enough, but with 2500 communities to cover that’s always going to be difficult.

Or was it something else?  Did they think that having an online space would automatically create the conversation?  I’m guessing that’s true, and I have spoken to people in the past who thought that was the case.

So just a quick note before you start an online community.

Have a chat with your potential members; find out if there is a need and what they need help with.  And create a purpose that as many people can be part of.

But I wonder what happens when you do?

Below is Nick’s take on us Brits.  Do you think he is right when it comes to Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Management?

The United Kingdom

Northern Europeans are very open to knowledge management, and the UK is no exception. The British are very willing to learn from experience, but somehow more willing to analyse failures than successes. There is a British unwillingness to “show off”, and a national tendency to explore things that have gone wrong.

Knowledge Management and learning from experience will, if you are not careful, tend to focus on problems and challenges, and the knowledge manager will need to work quite hard at times to get people to recognise success, and learn from it.

However the northern European fondness for process is a good supporter of the Lessons Learned process, and other project-based KM activities. Communities of practice work well in the British culture as a mechanism for problem-solving, as people are very open to asking other for help, and open to sharing their problems and challenges. The “not invented here” syndrome can be strong, and the knowledge manager needs to be very aware of this, and how it may be addressed.
Read more: Knoco stories: KM and national culture 1 – UK and Thailand/Malaysia http://www.nickmilton.com/2011/03/km-and-national-culture-1-uk-and.html#ixzz1JP4rRZGZ

Tiffany talks about how people are using online communities to galvanise like-minded participants into action and what we can learn from grass-roots community collaboration to support our own endeavours.

But check out about 4 minutes in to the video as there is a great screen shot from last years Local by Social Online Conference. Which was a great success and all thanks to the hard work of Ingrid Koehler @ingridk and Charlotte Hayes @charliegirlhay

http://videos.liftconference.com/v.ihtml?token=13c0057ab69552e4c9bd146f71d0235c&photo%5fid=1179720