• Beginning in January 2009, I’ll be serving on the advisory board for the Pittsboro St. branch of the North Carolina State Employees Credit Union.  I love the NC SECU!  If you’re a member– at any branch!– of SECU, feel free to tell me how it’s going.  Advisory board members love to hear what’s going well and what you’d like to see from the SECU.  Ideas for services you’d like to see are particularly welcome!  (No, “free money” or “money for hugs” are not suggestions I will take to the branch manager.) 
• I have finished the first seven days of a 30-in-30 grind.  30 poems in thirty days.  After seven days, I have five sonnets.  I did not set out to write sonnets, people, it’s just happening.  But I am finding them tremendously liberating.
• This is my first post since election day, and I suppose that just about everything that could possibly be said about this election has been said.  I have nothing new to offer.  I feel a great sense of hope about the direction that this country could take under Barack Obama.  I really believe he’s going to be an incredible President, because more than any politician I can remember in quite some time, I believe he’s an incredible human being.  (And I am delighted with the direction of the Democratic Party under another guy I think is pretty great, Howard Dean.)

  But for all the hope I feel, as proud as I am of the American electorate, I am just disgusted with referenda passed in states like Florida and California that deny human beings basic rights, that relegates some people to second-class citizenship.

  Gay rights are civil rights.  

  According to tax laws, if a tax-exempt group — religious or secular — promotes ideas which contradict important public policies (like desegregation), then the group’s tax-exempt status may not be granted or extended. Tax exemptions are provided in exchange for groups’ providing services to the community; when the groups undermine important goals of the community, then the tax exemptions are no longer justified. 

  I have heard some calls for petitions to strip the Mormon Church of its tax-exempt status for its role in the passage of California’s Proposition 8.  I support this action, and I support the removal of tax-exempt status for any non-profit institution which engages in partisan political activity.  I hope you will too. 

I’m on a listserv that isn’t very useful.  We all have a common professional interest, but we have all joined at different times, and the list has devolved into a more social hodgepodge than a true professional community.  I’ve been thinking about online communities at work, so I used my broken list as an opportunity to think about what true professional community entails.  I just wrote to a friend about this.  Here’s what I had to say (information that would identify the list has been edited or removed):

I think our listserv is broken.  I think it is is irreparably damaged.

Well, obviously not, right?  It’s very active, and participants from a variety of backgrounds send messages regularly.

However, the list is dominated by just a few individuals who have been active participants for quite some time.  Very few posts come from participants who have joined in the last two and half years.

A healthy list would have more broad participation from a wider variety of voices.  But most of my peers, the people who joined recently (I have quietly surveyed, but obviously there’s small sample size, unrepresentative sample, and confirmation bias, all at work here) have expressed that the reasons they don’t use the listserv are:

• The volume of messages unrelated to our professional topic is too high.
• They end up deleting most everything because they don’t want to sift through the unrelated stuff.
• Not very many discussions are directly related to the professional topic; those related to it are often tangential and focused on employment or “meta-”topics.
• The listserv seems to be dominated by a few “power users.”
• There’s the perception that there’s a lot of in-joke-iness that isn’t welcoming to new participants.
• There’s no sense of shared vision on how the listserv is used.
• There is no mechanism for knowing who the posters are.  (Other than their e-mail signatures.)

Part of my job recently has been looking at virtual communities, including professional learning communities.  At heart, I believe that’s what the listserv was designed to be.  But the barriers to entry keep it from realizing its full potential.

So, my early brainstorming around the issue has led me to a series of steps.  Keep in mind that this is all still a braindump.

Fixing the listserv requires a dedicated group of users to:

1. Identify the power users.
2. Convince power users that there is an issue and building consensus that it can be fixed.
3. Find out what power users want from the list.  Figure out how that is different from what new users want.
4. Devise and offer an alternative venue for power users.
5. Make sure that the alternative is somehow more appealing than the listserv.
   • The alternative must have clearly stated, shared values and principals which anyone can access at any time.  (community norming… those norms must remain negotiable)
   • The alternative must have some directory function so that people can find out more about who they are talking to.  (encourages new users)
   • The alternative must fulfill the social needs of the power users which are currently prevalent on the listserv.
   • The alternative must separate purely social discussion from discussion of our professional topic in meaningful ways.
   • The alternative must support and encourage shared and reflective practice of our learning goals– our true, core professional topic.
   • The alternative cannot be more demanding technologically than e-mail.
6. Engage the power users in making (and promoting) a shift to the alternative.
7. Recruit more casual users to the alternative, which should reinforce its value to power users.
8. Repurpose the listserv so that it serves a more discrete purpose.
9. Enjoy the benefits of increased  engagement and a more robust community of practitioners, as well as an inbox that isn’t so crazy.

What do you think, dear reader?