Bruce Preville’s Doctrine
Improv Yes/And rules: the secret to building online communities.
Bruce Preville and Chris Page are inspiring a few of us at People Centered Internet to help NICs—Networked Improvement Communities—become the best exemplars for engaging their stakeholders with a suite of tools for seamless evolution of random ideas into well-organized, easily followed threads.
Catalytic Converter: Zooms to Rooms to Whom it may concern.
It’s now a universal challenge: An offhand observation in a Zoom meeting might be the spark for organizational change, but not if it’s buried in a Zoom recording that’s too difficult for most participants to access or build upon.
The solution seems to be an automated workflow to leverage Otter.AI to transcribe the conversation so a light human touch can form the transcript into the beginning of a fully humanized conversation and, hopefully, a community.
What’s a NIC?
Years ago, Douglas Englebart described Networked Improvement Communities:
“An improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability. Examples include a professional association, community of practice or consortium, a corporate initiative to innovate management practices, a local task force to improve our schools, or a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that puts special attention on how it can be dramatically more effective at solving important problems, boosting its collective IQ by employing better and better tools and practices in innovative ways, is a networked improvement community (NIC).”
Englebart called this vision “collective IT”.
Englebart’s vision presented colored arrows and a recursive loop representing Collaborative Activities. I remember 1992, and the thought of this collaboration possibility was enough to inspire us before we were flooded with collaboration activities. Now we’re sinking under the pull of so many collaborative possibilities.
My hunch is that we need to leverage the methods that have worked so well for Facebook, without the nasty bits: seductive reinforcement, compounded across time & space.
That’s where the Bruce Preville Doctrine comes in.
My proposed method specifies that every chunk of the Zoom transcript is published as an article from the person who contributed the thought. If it’s interesting enough, the rest of us will comment on it, and each of those comments is also formatted as a freestanding article, inviting more comments, and each of those comments/articles may be rated by anybody in the community, but only positively, using 1–5 Plus signs, to conform to Bruce’s Yes/And rule.
Many of those concepts are in “Brand New Ideas from 2004”:
Although I’ve been pushing some of these ideas for 17 years, I’d never realized that the core of community is Preville’s Doctrine: to leverage the well understood Yes-And rules of Improv to build community. Some of the details from an old NewGov Workflow doc may be helpful.
Smart = Busy = Distracted = Stupid
Why smart people won’t work to figure out what we don’t say well
The NewGov Ladder of Engagement
In 2005, Forrester Research developed a 6-rung “Ladder of Engagement” model to represent the journey of people who engage in social networks:
NewGov supports a user progression from an off-hand invitation to a fire-breathing activist. The NewGov engagement ladder comprises 7 rungs for a more nuanced, more easily engaged Ladder of Engagement:
NewGov: Aunt Maude’s Influence Engine
This is the story of how a non-technical voter in southeastern Iowa discovers a citizen-based government site and starts influencing politicians without really intending to. NewGov is a cloud government, open and transparent, encouraging any American to contribute ideas and gripes to thousands of online conversations organized by issues, locations and branches of government. And to present those views to their politicians.
Maude Gearson doesn’t know she’s getting involved in anything so powerful and sophisticated, and that’s a good thing, because that’s not what she wants. People just want to react to news as it suits their bias and participate with likeminded people, especially if they live in the same area.
One day, Aunt Maude receives an email from her favorite niece, Toni, suggesting that Maude might be interested in an article about groundwater pollution due to large-scale hog operations in southeastern Iowa. Maude and her husband Fred have been complaining about the smell of a nearby hog operation and know that many of their neighbors share their concern, but didn’t know how much, and really had no idea how to get politicians to do anything about it.
Hi Maude,
I came across an item you might be interested in:
Major Polluters Revealed!
“I lived in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa last summer and a lot of people were talking about factory- scale hog-raising operations and the stench they created. I asked the locals about Hog Farming Operations Inc. NOT ONE person supported them. The Hog Industry …”
I look forward to your comment on this important issue. Read the whole article here. Love, Toni
What happened: The email from Toni was generated automatically when she clicked “share this” at the quoted blog post. Her only typing was “Maude”, “Love, Toni” and Maude’s email address.
Didn’t happen: Toni didn’t have to open a new email message, copy and paste the item’s title, copy and paste the item’s 1st 3 lines, format the excerpt or insert the link.
Toni receives NewGov points.
Naturally, Maude would click any link sent by her favorite niece and sure enough, she finds a conversation that arouses her emotions. The 18 comments to the “article” (actually a blog post) are from energized local people who are offended by the hog farms’ stench, ground water contamination and the heavy-handed companies buying up family farms and building these hog- raising factories all over southeastern Iowa. They collectively see the operations as a threat to family farming as it has been practiced for generations, which had formed the values Iowa is so proud of.
Many of the 18 comments from local Iowans had been rated by other locals, and Maude really identified with a comment that had earned an average rating of 94% by 107 readers. Underneath that comment, Maude sees a comment link and clicks on it. The page opens up a space offering a text entry area directly beneath the interesting comment, asking her to add her thoughts.
What happened: Maude entered her comment without confusion or excess process, right where it was logical to enter it. It felt as natural as speaking at a town meeting, but without the nervousness or time constraints.
Didn’t happen: Maude was spared the confusion of being sent to the bottom of the page or to another page to enter her comment where she couldn’t read the piece that inspired her to participate. Nor did she know she’d been spared a tiresome series of steps to pre-register with the site before being permitted to enter her thoughts.
Niece Toni receives more points.
Maude types her reaction while able to review the content that inspired her reaction. She’d not meant to get so engaged but her pent-up resentment prevailed and she even realized she could link to an article she’d read in the local paper. When she clicks “Publish”, she’s advised that her comment will be visible to her on her own computer, and that she can share it with others by providing a non-specific user name (pseudonym) and her email address, which she does.
What happened: Maude became a NewGov member without feeling like she’s “registering as a member”, which can sound like a big deal to a non-technical person.
Didn’t happen: Maude became a NewGov member without feeling like she’s “registering as a member”, which can sound like a big deal to a non-technical person.
NewGov.US has no interest in “capturing”, “monetizing” or advertising to Aunt Maude.
The Value of Author Attention Bobg, the author of the post that Maude was moved to comment on, receives an email from NewGov.US advising him of Maude’s comment, hoping that he might support it enough to give it a positive rating (the system has no negative ratings, just 5 plus signs). If Bobg rates Maude’s comment as better than average, it matters because the occasional user of social media sees a “published” blogger with some of the credibility of any published author. So it can matter to Maude that she gets a personal message from Bobg:
Hi Maudeb,
Thank you for commenting on my post, Major Polluters Revealed!. I liked your comment so I rated it 4 Plus signs, which means it will be displayed next to other high-quality comments immediately below my blog post.
Also, I see you’re new to NewGov. Please let me know if I can help you feel welcome here. As a new member, you may not know that you now have your own blog, at http://newgov.us/users/Maudeb. Your comment on my post has become the first post on your blog. Maybe you’ll want to start writing yourself! If you do, I’ll be notified and I’ll try to promote your contributions so others see them.
Again, welcome to NewGov.US/IA–You’re off to a great start and I hope to hear more from you.
Sincerely, Bobg
Bobg receives NewGov points.
Non-modal, uniform participation experience Maude learns that she contributes her thoughts to the community the same way whether she’s commenting or creating a new post. She can even create events and polls from within a blog post or comment entry area, because often she doesn’t start out with the intention to create a poll or meeting until she starts typing.
Personalized engagement The site keeps track of Maude’s actions at NewGov.us/IA and invites her to further actions by system messages and emails. As she does a few things, she may be invited to rate how important a major issue is. After individually rating the major issues, she is invited to rank the relative importance of those issues. Rather than the system nagging her that her profile is “only” xx% complete, Maude is invited to take the next easy step, “while-you’re- at-it”, to enhance her profile, without interrupting what she’s doing.
Automatically generated messages from fellow members can also be used to engage her.
Rich discussion experience The key to engaging, and continuously re-engaging, a new member is to make the system approachable and neighborly. NewGov sites are displayed as blogs and comments so Aunt Maude is not put off by social networking jargon. When she finds conversations worth following, she learns:
- She can comment on any article, post or another comment.
- She enters comments directly below the text she’s commenting on.
- Each of her comments appears as a primary post on her personal blog.
- She can recommend (rate) any post or comment with a simple gesture, 1–5 Plus signs.
- Each of her ratings appear as a primary posts on her personal blog.
- All comments that are rated by the author appear beneath the item commented upon.
- Comments not recommended (rated) by the author require a second click to view, with the notation that strongly held views by commenters may be worded rudely.
- On her own blog, if Aunt Maude doesn’t want another member’s comment to appear in the rated (valued) comments, she simply doesn’t rate it.
- Interests, Issues, Polls and Location As Maude interacts with posts, comments, groups and events, the issues she cares about become clear. The site can alert her to groups and events in her area or draft invitations to her from groups and event organizers.
- Groups Maude can join a group or form one herself. If she becomes interested in her town’s public library support group, she can form a related group to organize a bookmobile for senior centers. Each group inherits all the power of the NewGov.US site, equipped to scale into a major movement. If Maude wants to build a nationwide federation of bookmobiles, she can.
- Calendars & Event Management Members and groups get their own calendars. Event invitations use NewGov’s built-in Invitation Manager, allowing Maude to click-select members with whom she’s associated in groups or members whose posts she has commented on, or vice versa. Maude can select one of her favorite places as the event’s location or create a new one. Events can also be created from within any blog post or comment creation window.
