Interesting session on Having Fun and Sharing Gratitude in Distributed Online Communities. Here are some notes.
Facilitators
- J.Nathan Matias (MIT Media Lab / Awesome Knowledge Foundation) @natematias – research on gratitude
- Vanessa Gennarelli (P2PU) – build communities online
Fewer options to celebrate things together in distributed communities.
Examples:
- Yammer Praise
- KudoNow (performance review)
- Wikipedia Thanks (for every single edit)
Awesome Knowledge – fun awesome projects that spread knowledge, part of Awesome Foundation; celebrate in weird and crazy ways
Other Tools/Examples
- chat circles
- spreadsheet fun
- surprise Google Hangout
- Twitch Plays Pokemon (Pokemon game attached to chat room)
- Scavenger Hunt – hacked it by OCR, crowdsourcing answers, google maps to tell where the physical group has to go
- Online dance parties e.g. plug.dj
- Meatspaces (video based, animation gif chat platform)
P2PU Example
- lovebombs – what can do and accomplish?
- model the behaviour we want to see
- inspire others to take it in another direction
- cohere as a group
- ritual can recognize the person, and sets the tone
- Scratch – features
- feature stellar feedback to model and inspire others
- showing success through the interconnected but also to connect to those who are outliers
Challenges
- first have to decide what you’re going to celebrate
- want to celebrate the right things
- how to? need to? separate coming together to work on something vs. celebrating
- inclusion – what about people who feel left out?
- does it become a race at some point?
- encouraging sharing
Things we could do
- send thank you cards
- storytelling – put into newsletters
- personalization and showing personality
- sharing, even failure in a fun and reflective way. Saying that we’re sharing ownership. showing appreciation
- badges, can help make visible what was invisible before, models what is valued, can be used for feedback
- throw someone a “life line”
- take a piece of data about them and visualize it
- showcase to highlight what people have built themselves (vs. for example, outsourced)
- “PowerPoint kareoke” – 5 mins to use whatever slides are there; could do it with other people’s projects
- highlight strong skills (profile) and get others to connect with them
- introduce someone by mapping their location and getting others to find and share a fun fact about the city
- Friday Disco Backup – sharing what you’re listening to on Friday
- CC-BY + (heart)
- better messaging, that is giving events names that recognize people’s roles (for example, Hey Expert)
- digital party in a box
- party popper that everyone would have to have to work together to get it open
- group photo software in real-time
- duo (disco) – shared, curator list