A provocative conversation this weekend on LinkedInBloggers focused on the value of ‘lurkers’ in an online community. Des Walsh discussed it here.

Des cites research by usability guru Jakob Nielsen about a phenomenon he dubbed “participation inequality“.

Essentially it comes down to this

• 90% of users are lurkers
• 9% of users contribute from time to time
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

I believe this rule translates closely in the real world.

Teams in the workplace, volunteer organizations, classrooms, politics, even families demonstrate similar participation rates.

The question for you as a manager is whether this natural breakdown is detrimental to the creativity and productivity of your group and, if so, what can you do about it.

I hope you’ll leave your thoughts on this and I’ll share mine on Thursday.

Image credit: flickr

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under Business info, Culture, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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