The White House is claiming success in using its LinkedIn social media group as a forum for a public policy discussion on reforming the financial services industry.

The Wall Street conversation has generated 296 comments from members of the White House's LinkedIn group in 12 days. The discussion is being led by Jen Psaki, deputy communications director at the White House and one of the group's three leaders.

This example is from the government sector, but across the board - commercial and non-commercial - I think there is good reason to consider LinkedIn as a place to host a discussion with stakeholders or customers.

The main benefit of using LinkedIn over either hosting your own discussion or using the 'default' strategies of Facebook or Twitter is that you have a ready made community of mainly professional users that you can engage with - if done right - through a platform they already have some level of familiarity with.

It does help that LinkedIn finally rolled out some improvements to how groups work a few months ago. To be honest, I had almost given up participating in any LinkedIn groups because the user experience was so bad. That now looks like it is improving, which is why I think LinkedIn is now worth a second look.

Of course, all the functionality in the world doesn't make up for poor community management, which in most cases is the root cause of a bad LinkedIn group. The signs of poor community management are often quite obvious - too much spam, a hands off moderation style, no content curation, lack of community focus and endless questions from people to lazy to research an issue for themselves. There is nothing new here, but as with many community orientated Web 2.0 technologies I find that access to collaboration tools doesn't immediately equate to quality of collaboration.

Learn more about group functionality, in LinkedIn's online help. There is also a case study on how uses Phillips' marketing use their Innovations in Health group.

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Interesting discussion about identity versus reliable identity:

Charles Arthur talks to the man who put the "e" into e-democracy – Steven Clift – about whether we should be forced to use our real names online. Plus Meg Pickard talks about anonymity and web publishing – is it a good thing?

You need to listen from about the half-way mark.

BTW I was actually having a look around to see if there was any further discussion of this concept of reliable identity, and came across these 2004 and 2006 class notes on Techno-Identity from MIT's Sociable Media Group.

This part on individual identity is very relevant, so I've quoted it in full:

Without identity, there can be no reputation. In order for the history of one's actions and of others' assessments of those actions to become "reputation", a few things are necessary. We must be able to identify the person, we must be able to communicate, and we must have some form of memory.

In the online world, identity, communication and memory cannot be taken for granted. Whether you can know who are the others in a space, whether you can communicate with them, whether the history orf their actions or of other's reactions to them persists and is accessible - in a mediated envionment these are all matters of design. The creators of the environment can choose to incorporate them into the interface, to allow (or require) users to provide such information. Many do not. There are numerous forums in which anonymous contributors write; there a places where communication among participants is difficult or discouraged. In such circumstances, reputation cannot be a socially motivating force.

In the online world identity, the ability to connect an action to a particular person or a sequence of actions to the same being, is especially problematic. The crux of individual identity is the body, which is absent online. One way of establishing identity in the mediated world is to connect the online persona to a physical being. Sometimes this is straightforward: if I sign my writings with my real name, my email address and work place, I've provided clear ties to my physical world self, connecting the online persona to the real wold self.Yet sometimes it is less straightforward: what if 10 people are colectively creating a single virtual persona? Another way is to use history and reputation to establish an online pseudonymous identity sufficiently robust and valuable to have at least some of function of an embodied identity, in that harm to the pseudonymous persona is significantly costly. If I spend a lot of time and effort establishing an online persona, that persona can have a functioning reputation; however, its value is still much lower than that of the embodied self: I am likely to be much more willing to discard even a long running persona than I am to risk bodily imprisonment or harm.

Anonymity, pseudonymity and known identity exist on a continuum of verifiable connection to a single physical self. Anonymity means that there is no connection to a physical self and little persistence in time. Pseudonymity means that there is no connection to a physical self but there is persistence in time. A pseudonym can have a reputation.

I had the honour of presenting this Vital Issues Seminar today for the Parliamentary Library, at Australia's Parliament House. In between interruptions by the bells, Sen. Kate Lundy chaired the meeting and even managed to throw me some curly questions to deal with.

Also demonstrating that the Parliamentary Library is walking the Gov 2.0 talk, you will find a copy of my slides and also a sound recording* of my presentation on the Parliament's Website. This I should add is not only a great resource for people working in parliament, but also those that wouldn't necessarily normally have access to these sessions either.

*BTW that noise at the beginning is the bells ringing through the PA system.

The Engadget site is taking a break from comments for a while, which appears to have renewed the debate about the relationship between comments and blogs elsewhere - like on Mashable and WebWorkerDaily. It is of course somewhat ironic that this has stimulated so much discussion, in comments.

This is a contrast to other people in my personal blogosphere like Luis Suarez and Andrew McAfee who have both recently promised to renew their efforts to engage with the people that comment on their sites.

Now, this isn't a new debate for me and I remain firmly committed to comments here on the Chieftech blog, even if I am a little tardy in replying sometimes.

But I think it is worth revisiting this issue in this case, in respect to the problem of comments on high volume sites. The basic argument appears to be that if you are really popular, then switching off comments is ok because it is too impractical to manage. I have some sympathy with this, however, I think this is really a symptom of a different problem:

• Have you ever actually sat down and thought about what you want to achieve with allowing people to comment on your site and how you will engage with a community of that scale?
• If you are suffering from trolling or too much bad behaviour, then perhaps its the community (or lack of) around you blog that's the issue?
• If you are literally overwhelmed by comments or spam comments, do you have the right comment management tools in place or alternative method for people to contribute without commenting?

I've said before that there are no rules for using social media. There is nothing wrong with using social technologies for publishing (rather than conversations). But a blog that doesn't support conversation is just a Website, even if its written frequently and in a conversational style. I don't have a problem with that.

Perhaps what is more important, if you are running a site for profit or some other outcome other than personal learning, does turning on or off comments support that goal?

Hat tip to Luis for starting the debate again for me... :-)

I’m finding that some Communities of Practice (CoPs) at work are lacking leadership even though they have a community leader.

This is a broad statement, and there can be many reasons for this, but in this post I want to focus on one particular reason.

This has happened on several CoPs where the team leader has appointed their personal assistant or a nominated team member to set up a CoP…or the team leader has borrowed a person from another team leader as they like how they designed their CoP.
NOTE: Personally I would be inspired by CoPs with active and frequent conversation, over a well designed website.

The reason for their approach is that the community leader is technically proficient at designing and using the CoPs. The problem is that this person is not a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and does not have the interest, passion or time to facilitate the community in a non-technical way.

Facilitation is not just technical design/support, part of it is monitoring how people use

John's observations at work also reflect my experiences. Getting the balance right between CoP leadership and technical facilitation skills can be difficult to get right in one person. Unfortunately, in some online communities or communities that involve some element of online or computer mediated communication it can be difficult to separate out the technical facilitation entirely.

In a past role, to help deal with this issue I came up with a model that divided the world into CoP leadership behaviours (and skills) that were non-negotiable and other activities that could be delegated. This was designed to make it clear to CoP leaders what exactly was expected of them by us and also their community. It also allowed me to design appropriate systems, policies and training to support them.

However, I'm not going to give you a dot point list - these leadership behaviours and delegated activities were designed specifically for that situation, based on feedback, surveys and other analysis of the CoPs in that organisation. In another organisation, these leadership behaviours and delegated activities would be different.

Incidentally, John's point that he "would be inspired by CoPs with active and frequent conversation, over a well designed website." was an issue that came up during our investigation. It was critical that we could tell that story based on feedback from community members as part of the process of refocusing CoP activities where they actually counted, rather than simply our (educated) opinion.