Katie passed this link to me about participation inequality by Jacob Neilson. It makes very interesting reading for anyone planning on running elgg within their institutions - particularly in terms of what to expect when it comes to user participation. To some extent it's quite grim reading but perhaps less so when considered in the context of academic use of social networks where participation may actually be from several perspectives. In our implementation, we have deliberately delivered Elgg both as a social tool for the student community , an academic tool for shared learning AND a personal tool for PDP, eportfolio activities and embryonic PLE. In this respect, the academic/shared learning aspects will most likely (at the start at least) include some degree of required participation and lurkers may not be allowed or may face lower marks in assessments. From the PLE/ePortfolios point of view, personal tutors may well encourage participation as a means of collecting evidence, reflections etc. It will therefore be very interesting to see the extent to which these "forced" approaches may influence user participation in the more social aspects of our Elgg instance.

Incidentally, we've already hit 0.2 of active users before our first two weeks are over and that's before any of the academic activity has really started so we're already passed the most pesimistic statistic Neilson quotes. 

Well much of the same really in terms of usage. We're getting a steady stream of new bloggers and repeat bloggers and that side of things is going really well. What we still don't have are any student-created communities coming to the fore.

Now, this isn't that students aren't creating communities - there have been several created. It's the fact that no-one else is contributing to them.

I think there are a number of things going on here:

1. Students who create communities don't know how to advertise them or get them started. To address this I'm going to put out some more detailed instructions on how to create communities that include tips about kick-starting them such as making sure they've got at least one posting etc
2. I think we ought to offer an advertising service for new communities and put them on the home page for short periods of time
3. One of our customisations was to ensure that the default access level for a post within a community was "members only". I now think this has back-fired to some extent. Firstly, this means that even if a new community owner posts to their community, unless they explicitly specify a different access level, their post won't be visible to non-members. Secondly, the same defaults also apply to profle data which means most new communities are appearing with blank profiles and blank blogs even if there's data in them. I suspect we may moveto change this customisation to allow a new community owner to specify what they want the defaults to be.
4. Finally, I think we're waiting for just a few to get going for everyone to catch on what the possibilities are - we'll wait and see!

All good fun so far, albeit hard work but just seeing the blogs taking off is worth all the work.

Anyone interested in what other people are doing with Elgg really ought to try to make one of the user group meetings - the one in Oxford this week was a hoot!