💪 Empowering community stewards to cultivate prosocial norms
💪 Empowering community stewards to cultivate prosocial norms
Insights and design concepts from our R&D partnership with Hylo
In order to build new social media products and spaces for healthy connection and empathic communication, we need everyone to be on the same page about how to act and behave. There are many ways to do this, and often it involves punishing community members after they break the rules. But we’re excited by an under-examined piece of this: awareness and visibility of group norms.
Why is making norms visible important? The behavior of community stewards can be particularly influential for modeling norms. By taking steps to make norms clearer, platforms can encourage more positive, prosocial behaviors (like giving help) and reduce anti-social ones (like angry comments or promotional spam).
Let’s get up to speed on our Community Lab’s latest work. We’ve researched the literature on norms, and created some hypotheses. Now, we’re putting it all together and sharing what we’ve learned about supporting community stewards in establishing prosocial norms with our co-design partner, Hylo.
We investigated this important dynamic further as we worked with Hylo and interviewed stewards from different groups on the platform. Below, Mary Beth Hunzaker, a researcher, and Adit Dhanushkodi, a UX designer, walk us through our latest design insights about building tools to help stewards make norms visible.
Stewards can explore new concepts in proactive, positive vibe-creation for online groups, and Builders should take note of alternatives to punitive, retroactive responses to norm-breaking behavior.–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial
Co-designing tools to proactively cultivate prosocial norms with Hylo
During fall 2023, New_ Public’s Community Lab partnered with Hylo to more deeply explore tools that could help community stewards promote healthy, prosocial engagement norms in their communities. Hylo, a non-profit, open-source social platform for facilitating collective action, hosts groups focused on topics such as climate and social movements, educational programs, and regenerative agricultural practices. Like New_ Public, Hylo is deeply invested in building towards a vision of thriving digital public spaces that are shaped according to prosocial norms and values, and sees community stewardship as essential to that vision.
As Josh says in the intro, approaches that center visibility seem to be an underexplored area, ripe for exploration. This has the potential to be a scalable route to cultivating healthy online spaces proactively without a need for significant enforcement infrastructure.
In our initial round of design explorations with stewards, we set out to understand what sorts of features could be most promising to support new stewards in learning to model positive practices in their digital communities. To guide our work, we interviewed seven group stewards using Hylo to learn about their experiences and challenges with encouraging prosocial engagement in their communities, and to gain their initial feedback and reactions to two early-stage design concepts focused on supporting stewards by recommending tips for actions that model norms.
Insight: stewards are already spending a lot of time developing strategies to model norms
In our interviews it was immediately clear that the stewards we talked to were already thinking a lot about how to model positive norms in their communities. Many were spending substantial time creating their own guides and resources to help them steward their community, often relying on informal peer mentor support, tracking down examples from other successful communities, or learning by trial and error. These efforts, with each steward creating their own, individual version of a guide or how-to, are very difficult and inefficient, especially for new stewards. One Hylo steward said this about finding resources:
We looked up a bunch of the YouTube videos and some of the Hylo literature that was out there on the website and just started collecting all the pieces. So it would be nice to have a direct ‘here’s how to do that’ … or ‘here’s an example and here’s how to build it.’
The Hylo stewards we spoke with were excited about the possibility of tools that could make their efforts more efficient and provide easier access to best-practices, especially for stewards just getting started.
Idea: recommended actions and guides to support stewards with tips for norm modeling
During our interviews with stewards, we shared two early-stage design concepts based on our norm visibility hypotheses. These concepts sparked discussion around the value, challenges, and considerations of different approaches to helping stewards model norms.
One design concept we shared imagined stewards having access to in-context, recommended actions that stewards could take in their community to better showcase their community norms. In this concept, stewards could find suggestions of things they could do in the community — such as starting a brainstorming thread or reaching out to a new member — in a search box only visible to them. These recommendations would be tailored to the community’s values and would be responsive to whatever is happening in conversations throughout the community. By taking on some of these suggested tasks, stewards would be reinforcing the community norms.
The second concept imagined a more linear, step-by-step approach to norm modeling recommendations via stewardship guides. Stewards would be provided with a templated manual based on pertinent community characteristics like size, purpose and affiliation. This manual would provide stewards with sequential instructions to establish positive norms in a way that is most relevant to their group.
Insights: Considerations for designing a norms modeling recommendation system
The stewards of Hylo communities who we spoke with reflected on how these hypothetical concepts might work, including how they might or might not integrate them into their own practices and what challenges and risks they foresaw.
Stewards saw value in blending vetted best practices guidance with AI/smart reminders and tips for actions
First, it was important to stewards that recommended actions be based on expert knowledge and advice (e.g., advice from more tenured stewards, based on research studies, or supplied by Hylo). Currently, when stewards create their own strategies and guides, they often look to what has worked well for others — this was especially important for new stewards starting out. Stewards were excited about the guides and recommendations as a way to make this type of information more easily accessible (curated and brief, without time-intensive searching), and linked directly to where/how to take action on the platform (vs more general advice).
Second, many of the stewards expected that the recommended actions would be suggested by an AI that is actively monitoring all the engagement in the group, helping them keep up with all the activity. Ideally, these suggestions would support their group at the right moment and automated reminders would help them stay accountable by engaging regularly. Stewards felt having this sort of automated and analytics-based assistance could help them understand how to best apply expert advice that fits their situation. When it came to AI support, some stewards also saw a risk that over-relying on templates and AI could change the vibe of the community, making it feel less authentic and personal. Here’s one steward we talked to on how they’d feel about having access to in-context stewardship recommendations:
The recommendations [are] great … I mean, anything to take that guesswork out and to compel people forward. ‘Cause this is really creating habits as a group. It’s very much prosocial. How can those healthy, regenerative habits be created at a group level? So I think that's fantastic … Yeah this is great. It immediately feels kind of like a relief wave over me … This is the thing that you want to be able to build and do, but it's just so challenging to create anew again and again. I just think it’s just a huge support to groups.
Guides could help make stewardship accessible by breaking daunting tasks into manageable parts
Community setup and maintenance tasks like creating community agreements can feel big and intimidating, especially for newer stewards. Stewards said they saw the step-by-step guides as a good way to give a supportive boost to new stewards, both to assist them in getting started if they felt overwhelmed or unsure, and in providing smaller milestone steps that show gradual progress along the way. These steps could potentially be sharable and celebrated with the community as well.
However, we also heard that the completion-oriented nature of the guide felt out of line with how stewards thought about these tasks. Since many community needs are cyclical (e.g., you might want to revisit your community agreement over time) and don’t have a defined end point where you succeed, designing features to mark tasks “complete” or have “success criteria” feels out of tune with their community’s needs. Some suggested making guides iterative or allowing stewards to have more flexibility in customizing the guides. One steward said:
What I like about this is it addresses some of the [stewardship] capacity building and learning …. It says, ‘hey, it’s a good practice to have a community agreement, and so here is how you do it tactically.’ And then here are best practices, of which I know that the Hylo team has many, right? And so by doing that, it’s baking in some of that education [into the platform], even if it’s linking off to FAQ guides or if there’s another question mark [icon] that I can hover over, those little interactions would be really helpful for those who aren’t thinking about these steps or are not used to these steps being considered in the set up of the digital space.
Opportunity: bringing members into a path to stewardship
Despite the stewards’ enthusiasm for tools that could help them by recommending ways to model norms, we also learned that focusing on tools for stewards alone may not be enough.
Some stewards felt like they were the primary person putting in effort to cultivate prosocial engagement, resulting in a top-down broadcast culture. However, their ideal vision was to create a more bottoms-up culture where members play a more active role in initiating engagement via collaborative resource-sharing and working on projects. As one steward vividly described:
[Right now] it’s kind of like people are at a big park with a lake in the middle, where someone kind of shouts across the way, like: ‘Hey did you hear about this thing,’ and it's kind of like waiting for feedback to get back to them. But I'd love for it to be a huge intergenerational dinner party, just like everybody kicking back and getting excited about things.
A number of the stewards immediately saw an opportunity to extend the guides and recommendation concepts we discussed as a way to help members step up into stewardship and play a more active role in the health and success of their community. This led us to consider whether providing stewardship recommendations to group members could be one fruitful way to help stewards scale their efforts and promote more prosocial engagement norms.
The idea of creating tools that contribute to fostering a culture of stewardship on a platform, by bringing members onto a “pathway to stewardship,” was a very compelling idea to both our team at New_ Public and Hylo. While most platforms today think of stewardship in binaries (you are a moderator/leader, or you’re a regular member), a core part of Hylo’s philosophy is that stewardship is a shared responsibility, and that everyone in a community has a part to play in caring for it. If we envision stewardship as a path that every member is on, some may have just begun their journey, and others may be farther along, but everyone is headed in the same direction and is contributing to the success of the community. This may be an unusual way to think about participating in an online group, but we found it to be exciting.
In Josh’s recent interview with Lola Omolola, who stewards FIN, a Facebook group of two million women, we learned that all of FIN’s stewards have come from within the community. It’s a common story: many of the best, most effective stewards begin as active, interested community members. Even though Lola started the group, she says this was true for her as well: “I didn't start off being amazing at bringing people together and knowing how to set guidelines and knowing how to hold people accountable. No, I actually got better over time.”
As we began to consider that concept, we wondered how interested regular community members would be in taking on various stewardship responsibilities and acting on behalf of the group. Stewards were clearly interested in expanding stewardship to members, but what would members think? What are the motivations of community members? What are their mental models for participation in a community? And what unique needs and considerations might members have for feeling supported in stepping up to stewardship tasks?
These questions led us into our second round of design explorations. In a future newsletter, we’ll share what we learned about how stewards and members think about the path to stewardship and our design insights on how we might best support members on that path.
– Mary Beth Hunzaker and Adit Dhanushkodi, New_ Public
Looking forward to my bulbs coming up soon,
–Josh
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