I’m thinking about “core” vs. “fringe” in a community and at this moment it’s more about a “fringe”… As far as I know there is not enough attention paid to legitimate peripheral participation in communities, to the “learning” and “belonging” effects of lurking (I may be missing something here, any pointers are welcome).
As I wrote before, there is a great value of an on-line community as a content provider: it could be a small group generating most of the discussions, but many people can benefit from finding and learning from them. I wonder what lurkers do in a community, how their activities (“passive” reading is an activity as well :) and effects of those activities can be accounted for and what role lurkers play in a community dynamics. I believe there are some hidden treasures there :)
And as usual, my questions have to do something not only with communities, but with blogging as well: regular reading of a weblog is a sort of “lurking” that creates similar effects of awareness of what’s going on and “silent” learning.
Tags: communities, lurkingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/05.html#a890; comments are here.
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