My friend Sacha is putting together a SXSW panel - Living in the Matrix: Communicating past Agent ‘Smith’ based on a geek conversation we have on community moderation.  I’m sharing the ideas below and if you like it, or want to hear more about it, please vote for the panel so that I might go troll SXSW :)  Thanks!

So…

The legendary Linus’ Law states that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.  It states that with enough community scrutiny, bad content/contribution will be noticed and taken down.  From my work on the sociology of Wikipedia and experience in Yahoo!, I would add that there are three key elements to having a successful community (which a lot of designers/start-ups seem to be conveniently unaware of).

They are

(1) the Composition of your community

(2) the Tools to empower them (i.e. the system of moderation)

(3) the Timing between noticing and taking down bad content

Let me elaborate.

(1) Composition of your community

For Linux and Wikipedia, the communities are composed of many extremely smart, technical, virtually connected geeks that are experts in online communications and are very comfortable with setting up policies and norms for their communities to follow.  They are also good at developing hands on tools to execute the policies.

For example, Wikipedia community established the three core norms: Neutral Point of View (NPOV), Be Bold, and Assume Good faith.  Its developer communities built a special app, VandalFighter, to help editors monitor realtime edits among the many other useful tools,

Vandal Fighter is software that watches Wikipedia edits in real-time and has many built-in filters (multiple regular expressions can also be used) to allow users to specify exactly what types of information they would like to see. Examples: watching custom article watchlists, watching edits by non logged in (IP) editors, ignoring edits by people marked as “ok” (or, the reverse as well), and watching comments with the word “revert” in them are just a few of the almost limitless ways in which Vandal Fighter can be configured to produce custom output.

VandalFighter screenshot (source)

Basically when you have a bunch of really smart people using your community product, the plus side is they are also the key people that will help you develop and refine community policies, and even help you develop tools for moderation.  The downside is the challenge for the product people to remain open and transparent, and be liberal enough to accommodate opinions and suggestions.  In that regard, Flickr’s done a pretty good job in encouraging communities to tell them what they want and actually responding to those needs by both (1) talking to the users; and (2) implementing new features or explain why not if it’s not possible.

The problem I see is that people assume that their community will also function like the highly technical, systemic crowds above, which mostly is NOT true.  If you have a fashion community website, people may flag a button to state if they like or hate the content, but don’t expect them to fill in a form to explain why – people are usually pretty reluctant to work so hard when they are just browsing a site.  If they keep on seeing bad content, they will leave and will not try to fix it for you.  Think about the design – how can you gather data about the quality of the content without needing your users to do a lot work?

(2) The moderation system

The key to a robust moderation system is that – you can’t rely on old school customer care services alone if you know that your community is going to grow in scale.  Traditional customer care is expensive, inconsistent, and slow in turn around.  What it means is that your community is soon going to know they know better than the people sitting behind the hot desk, on both how the product works and how to game the product.  You will need to work out a moderation system that incorporates community realtime feedback, such as the Slashdot meta moderation system, where trusted users will be empowered with more karma points to help promote or suppress content.  I encourage you to read through the documentation as I know most world’s robust systems share similar principles as the Slashdot mechamism, and here’s my favourite bits,

Who

It’s probably the most difficult part of the process: Who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say “Everyone”, but I’ve chosen to avoid that path because the potential for abuse is so great. Instead, I’ve set up a few simple rules for determining who is eligible to moderate.

1. Logged In User If the system can’t keep track, it won’t work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you’re paranoid, but this system demands a certain level of accountability.
2. Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses from each logged in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average number of times. The homepage doesn’t count either. It then picks users from the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just happened to read an article this week.
3. Long Time Readers The system throws out the newest few thousand accounts. This prevents people from creating new accounts to simply get moderator access, but more importantly, means that newbies will have to be part of the community for a few weeks before they gain access to the controls to a system they don’t understand.
4. Willing to Serve If you don’t want to moderate, just visit your user preferences, and set yourself as ‘Unwilling’
5. Positive Contributors Slashdot tracks your “Karma” (see the FAQ). If you have non negative Karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts.

So the end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average, positive slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually) the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a proportionate amount of eligible users “Tokens”. When any user acquires a certain number of tokens, they become a moderator. This means that you’ll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody can abuse the system, and that only “regular” readers become moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;)

Basically when you start to develop a new system with communities of users, remember to add the above top five variables trackable into your backhand – even though you may have only a handful of kitties using your site, if in the fortunate even of your community taking off, these data WILL come in handy.

(3) Notice and taking down time

Cannot emphasise this enough – remember when you were a kid at school, there were teachers that pupils respected as opposed to those who were bullied by kids or just completely be ignored?  What made the difference?

The answer is the consistency of treatment and the responsiveness in delivering rewards and punishment.  Forgive my Pavlovian tone here, but online communities rely even stronger on fairness, consistent treatment, and timely response since people cannot see one another in person.  Lots of emotional information is missed out, hence collective community behaviors are shaped by the system, not just by the people.  If you let a few trolls take over your sites, your community suffer.  In the normal life cycle of events, communities will moan and seek help, and if nothing happens, they may stay and tolerate the bad content, which would leave a sour taste and encourage people to act in a uncivilized manner – trolling the trolls.  Other light-minded members will leave because it’s not fun anymore.  So – when you design your community – make sure you have factor in the notice and take-down time by incorporating first two points by defining the nature of your community and tools for empowerment first.  These are not nice-to-have – these are necessarily conditions for any online communities to succeed.

Okay I’ll be a bit hardsell here and repeat myself – If you’d like to hear more on community management, please vote for my friend’s Sacha SXSW panel

Living in the Matrix: Communicating past Agent ‘Smith’
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4414

I am probably missing a lot of the core details as well, will be filling this in from your comments and links and hopefully this will build into some sort of useful documentation.  ;)

Have been researching more on the business side of social media due to a recent project and it seems really challenging to wrap the space so I am keen to share with you the thought process.

1. Social media, like all media, is a medium for people to connect
2. Social media is defined as digital medium that allows people to distribute information to one another or to many in a low-cost, parallel distributed way (i.e. once a message is sent, it can easily be cascaded and spread out)
3. Human beings intrinsically connect to satisfy their emotional and social needs, and seek empathy when something elicit their emotional response (e.g. fall in/out of love, winning a competition, had a bad day at work, best friends getting married, stress of moving homes etc)
4. Just like it is comfortable to watch episodes of Friends where it feels like people you knew all along are there with you, Facebook/Twitter or even your old school emails provide you with a digital venue to meet and greet and connect with people that you like (hence interested in what they are up to)
5. Social media, hence, is an extension or convenience for us to connect, just like a community cafe in the town where you read newspaper and get greeted by familiar faces on Sunday mornings
6. Social media also provides ample information for people to compete and distribute their achievements (linkedin profiles) for social capital gain (oh I know this person who can help our company does that), but at the same time can back fire as a medium on ego-stroking oneself (e.g. facebook updates on how someone bought another race car with photos etc..)

Now the business side is what boggles me.

1. Marketing sees that when there’s something that everybody looks at and ‘ENGAGEs’ with, it is a channel (the ‘billboards’ where they can make a lot of money in getting people to notice and buy a product)
2. Marketing sees that ’social media’ is one of these venues
3. Now how does marketing ‘capitalises’ and ‘leverages’ social capital?

Here I hope we can take a step back and look at the human side of social media.  If your product helps me connect and share my feelings/thinking (e.g. Wordpress), I would genuinely really like you and I would spread the word for you when someone asks me what blogging platform I recommend.  Or if my good friend develops an iPhone app that rocks, I would gladly review the app and put some good words (genuine, of course) in the app store, not because I am doing that for you per se, but if I find something useful, I would want to share and help other people find the same thing too.  But if the app sucks, I would help my friend to improve by giving him offline recommendations because I know online reputation counts.

Now what I am not sure is if a big brand comes along and ask me to re-skin my blog to promote their brand so that my visitors would constitute their ‘page impressions’.  This is where traditionally marketing having a hard time to understand.  Social media is NOT a traditional billboard.  It is an intimate part of my daily life.  Imagine if you are a new father/mother, you won’t ‘brand’ your kid with Pampers outfit to promote the brand, but if Pampers works really well for your child’s skin, you would naturally recommend it to other parents (whether via social media or just a simple chat over coffee).

In a nutshell, social media allows users to get their words out fast and more exponentially, but ultimately your product needs to deliver.  Get the product right, then people would do the talking for you.  Social media helps getting the words out faster, but that’s both for good and for the worst.

I pledged to dedicate a blog post on today, the Ada Lovelace Day, and my tribute goes to Dr. Cheng Ha-Yan, Kate, who volunteered to help saved patients inflicted with SARS in Hong Kong and unfortunately contacted the disease and passed away at the age of 30.

Also I’d like to highlight the strength and leadership of Dr. Margaret Ng, another Hong Kong Chinese who led Hong Kong through a really weird period of SARS and continue to keep the world vigilant against aviation flu as the Director-General of the World Health Organisation.

Now to put this achievement in context, we are talking about fight this,

In a city like this,

Source from the legendary Michael Wolf’s protrait of Hong Kong’s density


Where everyone was patrified and did not know exactly what to do (and not to do),

SARS was a bossy, horrible epidemic – 296 people died of the disease and 1,755 became ill [BBC].

I also dedicate this post to everyone who has been through the tough time time – imagine everything holds still in a city and no one knows for certain whether you or your love one still be around the next day…  It is these women and men in the health care industry who work very hard to keep things in check.  People are now comparing the economic downturn with the impact of SARS, but hey, at least people don’t get killed (directly) by the recession… but that’s irrelevant.

What is important is this – Hats off to everyone.  Thank you so very much.

Blogs are great for asynchronous communications and documenting your streams of thoughts.  But when everything is within a few clicks from search, your blogs are who you are to many.  Recently I have been struggling to assess what I want to do with this blog.  So i’ve done some research – what blogs are for to you guys?

1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation

Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge.  By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.

To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you.  You are a representative of you.’  Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self.  Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.

2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in

Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network’s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground). :)  Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops.  Did I just create a new word?

3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push

Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)?  Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do.  And better yet – it only takes them 2’secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway.  Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone.  (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!).  However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.

4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume

Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post.  Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch.  Wikipedia is a good example.  Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished.  Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work.  Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.

5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet

Are you ready for this?  I’m getting contentious, as usual.  Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa.  A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan’s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through.  Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.

Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog.  For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections.  But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.

You might ask, what’s stopping me?  Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers.  Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her.  Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats.  Why?  In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’.  It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers.  But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated.  The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.

All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now.  And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do.  Or perhap there is?  Don’t have the answers here.  Thanks for bearing with this long post.  Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.

A bunch of Hong Kong Lego fanatics have created miniature Olympics village with Lego,

As the world watches the Beijing Games, enthusiasts from Hong Kong have unveiled their own Olympics — built entirely from Lego.

More than 300,000 Lego bricks and 4,500 Lego people were used to create the display, by the Hong Kong Lego User Group.

The stadium

Even the rickshaw was re-created with Lego – how cute!

Photo courtesy: Flickr images by Dunechaser

For more photos, check out Flickr.  I particular admire this quote from the Lego folks, ‘We believe that creations are not limited by resources, but by ideas.’  I wish more people share that enthusiasm at well not just with lego, but at times with work as well… :)

Go on, Hong Kong Lego Users Group!

I did a lengthy post for YDN links here.

For those who’re interested in the presentation on Wikipedia’s Community deep dive, check out the deck here:

| View | Upload your own

It’s been almost 4 years since I started observing and learning from the growth of the Wikipedia community… so the deck is actually pretty dense, and I’ve been too swarmed to do any fancy ppt magic – forgive me!  Any comments/questions, just give me a shout!

Oh and Rain requested me to post a photo of me playing with Diablo under Ian’s patient instruction,

Incidentally the one and only one computer game I was addicted was Diablo I – I killed Diablo when I was 14! Probably more than just once as well.. Thanks Ian for bringing back my Über geek memories…

[Hong Kong only]

We lost our cute puppy, Coco – please help us find him:

Small White Male Dog with White Curly Fur 白色捲軟毛男小狗

Also Black Collar Little Bell

Last Seen on Friday May 16TH AT 9AM
ON DES VOEUX ROAD WEST, SAI YING PUN
星期五(16/05)最後到見在德輔道西. 西營盤

[Update: We found Coco!!] Yaya!!!!

You might have noticed that earthquake has shaken SiChuan, China, and thanks for those who raised their concerns. I have no families and friends who are affected as someone from Hong Kong, but looking at the devastating state of situation, I want to show you why we’re working in an industry that is bigger than just figures, but also meaning and promises to peoples’ life.

To date [BBC News],

About 10 million people in Sichuan province have been directly affected by the 7.9 quake that flattened entire villages, state media said.
Nearly 15,000 people are known to have been killed, and another 26,000 are still trapped in the rubble.

Figures are figures, you might want to see the videos (notes: unpleasant images) of the rescue effort.

On the blogasphere, at least two prominent figures on China, Elliot Ng and Rebecca Mckinnon, founder of Global Voices immediately started mobilising other bloggers and connected individuals through their blogs, twitter, and facebook.

A great example of how technologies break down bystander apathy (i.e. it’s your problem) is Pledgebank, where Rebecca promises that she will donate $500 more to Chinese earthquake aid when 500 more people donate at least $20.

What can we do?

Do it and share it @Pledgebank.

Web 2.0 minus the hype also means that aggregated effort matters – do put the link on your IM status (Y!IM, GTalk, Skype, Adium…etc), your twitter, forward the link, or to put that on your blog or simply track back to this post or pledgebank.

I have also cross-posted this blog post as email to people I work with.

This is the time where I’ll think of Marshall McLuhan,

“We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 24

“As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of “do it yourself”.” 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone “Essential McLuhan” Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 283.

And finally,

“Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.” 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone “Essential McLuhan” Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272.

This cracks me up – ironically I found this out on my ‘funwall’:

Even more ironically I’m feeling very very dreadful whenever I see all these pending ‘requests’ from my facebook. Weekdays we troll through thousands of work emails, and when we get home during weekends there’s another hundreds of stupid facebook apps out there – apps are probably just a phase, ultimately from a user’s point of view, I only care about how facebook helps us connect with one another:

Talking about application development, I was at the Over the Air hackday today and am really intrigued by how mobile can take on to become the next springboard of technologies connecting people together in an asynchronous manner (i.e. people are connected not in real time, instead our phones become an aggregating tool where users can choose when and who to respond to, just like our email, which is what the net is for). People often make parallel between facebook applications and mobile widgets, as in if there are many people using facebook applications, there can be a room of widgets for mobile.

One the contrary, partly stemming from my cynicism towards the facebook apps development trend, I see that a more timely and relevant comparison should be on how users discarding desktop computers and shifted towards a laptop paradigm for three reasons: the evolution between generations of technologies has much more to do with (1) hardware improvement, (2) providers’ cost reduction and (3) how users perceive new technologies. With the continuous price drop + expanding storage of mobile phones and flat rate for mobile internet service, next for the whole mobile/internet industry is why users should be using the internet on their mobile.

The key problem, as I learn from today’s keynote and our mobile engineer’s, Ricardo’s presentation*, is definitely compounded further by the challenge of interoperability – how can you create a functional tool that is workable on any mobile device? If I were to submit a hack tonight, it will probably be a knowledge-sharing platform that speeds up the mobile development process, probably a portal aggregating all resources as a directory in one place where developers share insights in the most efficient way they can, so that we can progress to a standardised, incremental approach more quickly than we are today. But how can we add value to the developers and what kind of functionalities this portal should possess, so that developers will look more than just their interested areas?

I quite like Yahoo! Go 3.0 bundle concept in this regard because once you created a widget and ensure it is supported by Yahoo! Go 3.0, we have a team of 200+ engineers making sure that your widget works with as many phones in the market as possible. When Ricardo was presenting this to the hackers they look pretty intrigued – hopefully by tomorrow there will be some interesting hacks coming out! :)

Updated: Ricardo’s presentation slides are available on his blog here

Jake McKee’s presentation made my day, thanks to Jeremy for flagging it up. Jake is a ‘revolutionist’ that led the Lego Mindstorm Programme involving 20 core fans, and literally drove a cultural reform in Lego. From some random marketing handouts I found that mindstorm outsold its predecessors by more than 2 fold and generated significant word-of-mouth (correct me if I am wrong). I have been running around in our company pointing out how ‘cool’ the Lego programme was, but of course, there are usually an avalanches of ‘ROIs’ questions where I’m still trying to deal with.

Flickr image by jurvetson

His personal trajectory gave a hearty account on how he dealt with Lego’s corporate membrane. For those who are working at the forefront on community management in the corp world while still believe in what they are doing (with ’symptoms’ such as strong squeamish reaction towards the word ‘customers’ – well we know that it’s key to view users as as clever, if not more intelligent than the corporate dudes, right?). I filtered the 45 mins presentation and put together my favourite three key points:

1. Org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical

If you have the critical understanding of the market and know what it takes to move your company’s needle, don’t shy from it and make it happen. If you do add value to the business, the chances that key stake-holders will endorse you are really high – but bear in mind that medium-level marketers are the hardest to sell – they have the numbers to sale, which makes them the hardest parties to convince – and the only way you can convince them is to first convince the senior management like VPs and CEOs so that they can do the corporate-membrane breakthrough for you.

Good news for shit-stirrers!

2. There is no secret

‘Tell me why we can’t release it?’ Jake explained how he pushed his colleagues to explain why things are kept secret, while fans are creating the most amazing derivatives from their products and needed their support. The chances is that most people who claim they things should be kept secret can’t articulate why! So – challenge them *grin* (that actually reminded me of my primary-secondary school years asking all the ‘why’ questions, can totally imagine that both Jake and I would be the classic nightmare for oldschool teachers!)

3. Don’t force-build a new community, support and nurture the current ones

This is particularly insightful a lot of business leaders, who randomly decided that communities are the new key and have their company ‘building’ their own. If you are a long-standing company, what is the odd that fans around the world are already involved and engaged in their own means?

The key is to work with what you have, and respect who they are (and are not).

Exciting, now I just need to think of how to break the ice with the figure-driven people…