Participation Guidelines for your PeerConnect Community’s Interactive Forums
To ensure that your membership in a PeerConnect Community is a positive and beneficial experience, we have included some basic guidelines for effective participation in the SHARE and CONSULT interactive forums.
What To Expect
PeerConnect organizes voluntary social networks (SHARE) and email groups (CONSULT) for professionals within a professional domain (a “Community of Practice”) or with common interests (a “Community of Interest”). They are designed to enable Community members to share useful information and knowledge, and to learn from each other in a spirit of cooperation. As a member of a PeerConnect Community, you join your professional colleagues from government, civil society, foundations and donors, academia and the private sector who are interested in hearing from you and who know that you are interested in hearing from them. You are joining a group whose members value your contributions, whether you are an expert, a practitioner or someone impacted by the issues you are addressing.
Importantly, the CONSULT forum is dedicated to “knowledge-sharing” – what you know – and not “opinion-sharing” – what you believe. Most social networking sites focus on the latter; it is why CONSULT stands out as a go-to forum for learning from your peers. It is email-based to allow for “long format” messages, while the SHARE social network has a quick-response, “chat” format for exchanging news, views and information, in order to expand opportunities for members to interact informally and build familiarity and trust. (Opinions – “views” – are allowed in this space, but as well-argued, well-supported positions presented in blog post format.)
The Facilitation Team
When you join a Community you are welcomed by a Community Facilitator. PeerConnect Community Facilitators are specially trained and skilled to deal with every aspect of the PeerConnect experience – encouraging professionals to join, moderating messages, offering advice and suggestions on contributions, preparing CONSULT Consolidated Replies, and running e-discussions on priority issues. They are also specialists in the Community’s domain, and are familiar with the unique characteristics of the issues addressed. PeerConsult Facilitators apply “active moderation” in vetting and approving CONSULT messages for posting – they can work with you to edit your query to ensure it is clear and compelling, and – particularly for members for which English is not your native language – help you phrase your responses so that they convey what you want to say. You will find your Facilitation team to be knowledgeable, welcoming, and service-oriented, providing a personalized experience to make sure your participation exceeds your expectations.
Interacting With Your Colleagues
Here are some guidelines for ensuring a positive and beneficial experience:
Be collegial. It is said that the internet is a great leveler of hierarchy – everyone participates the same way. Participating in PeerConnect’s social network and email group builds familiarity and trust among its members, wherever they work or who they work for. Government Ministers interact directly with persons impacted by their policy decisions; professionals with expert knowledge – the “what” – hear from practitioners with the experiential knowledge – the “how”. Private sector participants find out from potential users where their products would have the greatest benefit. PeerConnect’s business model is comparable to a Professional Association – you may work in different, even competing organizations, but you come together in a collegial setting and interact as professionals to further your own effectiveness and become better known to your peers.
Be respectful. The Membership Agreement you signed on to states that your interaction with the group must be positive and constructive. Your knowledge is valued only if you are trusted, and so one of your goals in this forum is to gain the trust of your peers. Even when there are opposing sides to an issue, PeerConnect’s CONSULT forum can help members gain an appreciation of the core issues behind the divergent positions. PeerConnect Facilitators are skilled at helping you saying something negative in a positive manner, and at keeping the conversation engaging, insightful and moving forward.
Be concise. Your professional colleagues appreciate contributions that get directly to the point. Their queries usually call for specific items – experiences, reference material, contacts – and quick responses to take advantage of a window of opportunity. The CONSULT service is designed to present a fully informed response to a member’s query in as timely a manner as possible. It greatly helps this intention if contributors can be efficient in their writing
Be focused. PeerConnect CONSULT model emphasizes structure in member interaction – member queries have clear question statements that members provide responses to. Contributors who offer unrelated responses or introduce a different subject can dilute or completely lose the focus of the thread, leaving the query poser’s questions unanswered. When necessary, Facilitators can intervene to urge contributors to stay on track, but contributors should generally try to focus on answering the question, knowing that if they have another topic they can post it as a separate query.
And above all, be active. The more members interact on CONSULT, the more beneficial the service becomes – more members equals more knowledge. Usually the query poser is not the only person benefitting from responses; others in the group often have similar concerns and find comparable value in the responses received and resources recommended. The Consolidated Replies are filed and indexed in the CONNECT repository, so that the knowledge gained remains accessible to future users coming across a similar issue. And when you participate actively, you become more familiar to your fellow members, increasing your visibility and reputation among your professional colleagues.
Other Features
Anonymous postings. Occasionally a contributor responding to a potentially sensitive query may want to send their message anonymously. This is easily done with PeerConnect’s interactive forums - a contributor wishing to remain anonymous simply asks the Facilitator to send the message on their behalf, specifying that it comes from “an anonymous contributor.”
Cross-posting messages. Queries posed in your Community’s CONSULT forum may be equally relevant to other Communities. In these cases your facilitator can suggest “cross-posting” the query simultaneously in the other forums, enabling you to benefit from responses reflecting the viewpoints of Communities outside of your own domain. PeerConnect’s structure makes cross-posting simple and straightforward, simply combining the respective email groups into one larger group for addressing the specific query.
Languages. In the signup form you were asked to specify your preferred language. We intend to offer queries and Consolidated Replies in the languages which most members are conversant in. Additionally, we intend to design our interactive forums so that communication is seamless – your message goes in your language and a user reads it in their language. Ultimately we expect that our members will not be aware that they are in fact communicating in different languages