Using community equity to attract and develop talent

June 1st, 2009 Lisa Dyer Posted in User Assistance | 4 Comments »

This past year, the Information Development team at Lombardi has been thinking a lot about community equity, and the powerful role it can play in attracting and developing talent. I think this is especially topical with our recent launch of Lombardi University.

Active community participation is clearly a good goal, but it’s been difficult to measure. To quote OnDemand Beat: “There are a number of arbitrary measurements that Enterprise 2.0 solutions providers and end users have cobbled together but up until recently there has not been a tried and proven method to calculate community participation.”

Here’s a quick look at an emerging community equity specification, and why I think it’s a very important tool for attracting and developing talent, in addition to growing a body of expert knowledge. People need effective ways to find the right information and mentors so that they can succeed with their BPM projects. And people need tools to develop their careers, especially in industries where new career paths are evolving.

Is “600 karma points” better than “linebacker”?

A definition of community equity is a set of measurements that indicate how valuable a member is to his or her community. Measurements such as number and frequency of contributions, the quality of contributions (e.g. how well they help others learn and accomplish goals), and what his or her skill set is sum up to some form of currency. Examples of currencies, ubiqutuously found on forums, are titles such as “linebacker” or “novice” and symbolic points, which members can trade for something else, for example, gadgets or T-shirts.

But the meaning of these currencies isn’t easy to translate into business value. They don’t mean the same thing to everyone. Hiring managers or clients looking for experts might not consider “600 community karma points” on a resume to carry much weight – even though it might be an important performance indicator. T-shirts, on the other hand, go only so far as incentives for community participation.

A formula to help us talk about the same thing, with the same meaning

Some months ago, I caught a presentation by Peter Reiser of Sun Microsystems, hosted on Atlassian TV. Peter was demonstrating SunSpaces, Sun’s mission-critical employee knowledge portal, which is built on Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki and customized with a mix of plugins. (A close match to our Lombardi Wikis system, interestingly.)

An integral part of the system is an internally-developed algorithm for calculating community equity, as defined by Peter Reiser and his team. The following diagram illustrates the idea at a high level:

Each equity component generates a number. From these numbers, two equities can be derived: Personal Equity and Information Equity.  Sun recently filed a patent on their Community Equity Specification and you can learn more about the equity model on Peter Reiser’s blog. Also some analysis here:  http://www.ondemandbeat.com/2008/03/03/sun-completes-community-equity-specification/).

My community equity, visualized

Here’s what your community equity might look like on the Lombardi Community site (all screen shots are from Peter Reiser’s blog):

And you can easily find the top experts and their contributions:

Why is a community equity specification important?

A common language for describing the value of community activities can help you achieve the following results, specifically in the context of talent management:

• Set and track unambigious and measurable performance goals
• Confidently identify the right people and resources for your project
• Provide a career tool for industry professionals (community equity is portable)
• Grow a body of expert knowledge that attracts industry professionals and drives industry direction

Interesting or not? Let us know. We’ll blog on this subject later with a development update.

Thanks to Peter and his team for sharing their expertise and driving the specification effort!