Hi Sylvie,
You asked us "What are some ways to facilitate multimembership in communities? How much of a role should a community coordinator take in managing multimembership?"
Great questions.
For me, I think recognizing that there are new comers and there are older members and that has advantages. One can get fresh ideas -- that may have been said, but it is good to have them said again -- especially for new comers. From everyone, one can receive offerings about what memberships work -- links, interest tags, etc. just by asking, being interested, and having some mini-conferences discussing these items.
I think that the community coordinator can lead in a style that works for each coordinator, be authentic, share, organize new questions if there are lull, show refection about and/or enthusiasm for what is happening, but mainly initial the first e-mai through Scope in a timely, introductory fashion at the beginning of the e-conference, announcing the topic and range of questions (which can be expanded). The coordinator could acknowledge e-mails from participants and as you stated make sure the wiki is saved in a way that won't be "deleted" as you mentioned could happen, and probably just engage with others. There are likely important tasks that I have missed as I have never done this task.
Jo Ann
Ah yes, a good reminder from Jo Ann that repeating information for the sake of the newcomers to a community is so important -- and that revisiting and refining these practices as a group is essential.
I just checked out my email copy of The Daily, which is generated daily as part of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. This is a nice example of managing multimembership for groups. There is a 2 step process for course participants.
Similarly with the Facilitating Online Communities course Joao Alves created a Nebvibes page for the course, so we can see all blog posts at a glance. This was not an easy thing to organize with the ever changing course roster, plus some feeds are from blogs that were created specifically for the FOC08 courses and others are from blogs that include posts on a number of different topics.
I just checked out my email copy of The Daily, which is generated daily as part of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. This is a nice example of managing multimembership for groups. There is a 2 step process for course participants.
- Course members login and submit their feeds from their blogs
- They add CCK08 in the subject heading of posts they want included in The Daily.
Similarly with the Facilitating Online Communities course Joao Alves created a Nebvibes page for the course, so we can see all blog posts at a glance. This was not an easy thing to organize with the ever changing course roster, plus some feeds are from blogs that were created specifically for the FOC08 courses and others are from blogs that include posts on a number of different topics.