I push my clients hard on the issue of active engagement and moderation as a way of setting tone – and elevating quality – in communities.

A great article today in Slate talks about what that looks like when it works:

Why is the Internet the place where civil discussion goes to die? It must be something in the tubes. Before there even was a mainstream Internet, in 1990, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Mike Godwin coined Godwin’s Law: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” If you put a group of slightly asocial, opinionated people behind usernames, the conversation descends into flame wars and miscellaneous insanity.

And everyone who had led communities knows what that’s like…but with a lot of effort,

Because real community ROI can be hard to measure (so we use proxies for it like cost-per-impression comparisons with advertising, or offsets for physical event costs), we often tend to measure the ‘health’ of our communities by the level of activity.

New members, posts-per-member, churn (new members – members who are inactive or quit) are fairly typical metrics that I’ve used in looking at communities.

But for myself, I’ve also been obsessed with ‘quality’ as a community metric; both in terms of how ‘upward-norming’ the community is, and how well the community fulfills the intent of the community sponsor. I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I think we all know it when we see it.

‘Upward-norming’ is simple; it’s the willingness of community members themselves to intervene and react to typical online bad behavior;

One issue that I’ve been paying close attention to is the rise of the ‘portable social graph‘, which I’ll define as the ability to extract metadata about who you connect with online – both listing your ‘friends’ and contacts, and potentially doing a traffic analysis on the communication within this network.

Combined with a ‘portable attention graph‘ which begins to map what you look at online and gather similar metadata about your individual behaviors, new technologies offer unparalleled opportunities to do useful (and highly valuable – very highly valuable) behavioral mapping and targeting.

Now these emerging tools have value to me as a web user, to be sure. They allow strong recommendation engines, targeted content (including advertising), and allow me to function better in an economy where attention is a scarce commodity.

I’m on Jason Calcanis’ mailing list (you should be as well – you can sign up here), and today got a long missive from him that I think is quite important and goes to the heart of what I want to fight by moving our interactions back to conversation. Here’s the nut graf:

Josh’s experiments in 2000, during which he and his cohorts became obsessed with their view counts, parallels today’s blogging, social media and YouTube “arms race.” In his experiment, the technology robbed the subjects–and their audience–of every last ounce of empathy.
Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis.

When I talk to clients about social media, I try and lay out a basic path through the process for them. Over time, it’s developed into what I’m calling “The Five Decisions.”

1. Decide that you want to do this.

2. Decide what you’re really capable of.

3. Decide what you’ll have to change to make it work.

4. Decide on the tools and processes to do it.

5. Decide how you’ll know whether it’s working.

Here’s how it works.

I’m traveling (in DC for the last few days, and headed to Boston tomorrow then home) and will be back on a regular schedule next week.

Today, though, I ran across this blog post and wanted to share it here:

A Janitor’s 10 Lessons in Leadership

By Col. James Moschgat, 12th Operations Group Commander, graduate USAFA class of 1977

It’s a moving story (and we’re all suckers for those) but it contains some basic points that deserve the attention of people who are using social media.

And there’s a larger point we ought to take away.

In the story there was originally a divide between “those that mattered” – the students at the Air Force Academy – and “those who didn’t” –