For several years, there has been a rule-of-thumb, called “90-9-1″, that 90% of online participation in groups/community consists of “lurkers” or more politely, “passive participants”, and only 1% are active creators. Jacob Nielsen’s 2006 post on Participation Inequality provides a good overview of this phenomenon.

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity.

A recent BBC survey of 7,500 people shows significantly different results.

Here we see that passive lurkers make up only 23% of participants; active (intense) participants have increased to 17%; and there is now an “Easy” group in the middle who, “ … respond largely to the activity of others. This includes replying, ‘liking’ and rating, all activities where there’s little effort, exposure ...

Jane Hart asked readers “how regularly are you “learning” in the workplace?” Here are the top five ways that people learn, with my comments below on how this can be facilitated in the organization, either by management or the learning support group. Notice that these are all informal. The more formal methods, like courses, ranked much lower on the survey results.

Email (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Since email is the number one method of keeping up to date, find ways to make it easier or replace it with a world without email.  Using internal blogs for any multi-recipient email is a start. That way it’s visible, in one permanent place, with all the comments attached.

In-person conversations (keeping up to date inside the organization)

Create space for people to talk. Regular company coffee breaks can be supplemented with white boards or flip charts to encourage knowledge sharing. Take pictures of what’s going on and post them. Photos can encourage conversation. Small nooks with comfortable seating invite conversations. Changing office layout can change behaviours and even encourage inter-departmental conversations.

At ...

One of my earlier blog posts is still online, which I stumbled upon this week, much to my surprise. Note: Nine years ago I was warning how production jobs were leaving Canada and getting outsourced. Deep conversations about R&D in … Continue reading →

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week. @birgittaj – “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. ~ Benito Mussolini” HCI : “more than 50% of … Continue reading →

So you think the Web won’t change the business you’re in? Do you believe that education, training, and instructional design organizations will carry on with business-as-usual, as people keep paying for traditional courses? Look at how these business models, which … Continue reading →