Online Community Thought Leader and academic Venessa Paech presents risks and opportunities around automation and artificial intelligence in online community management practice. Originally presented at the RMIT Symposium on Digital Data and Automation in Everyday Life, Nov 29, 2017

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Online community management
- automative risks & opportunities
RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday life
RMIT University, Melbourne
November 29, 2017
Venessa Paech
@venessapaech

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
• 10+ years building & managing online communities for business, NFP &
more
• SWARM – Australian Conference for Online Community Managers
(2011-)
• Australian Community Manager Code of Ethics (2015)

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Situating community managers + automation
• 3800+ self-identified in Australia, many more globally
• Builds sticky engagement – relevance not reach; conversation + relationships
not following + shares
• Time has changed 2 key elements: professionalisation + platform
fragmentation
• Automation is used across online communities for administrative community
tasks
• As it becomes more embodied, community management practices are
implicated

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Online community managers have witnessed a progression of programmatic
mechanisms to augment their daily work as cultural mediators –
they possess a high level of algorithmic awareness

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
‘Secret sauces’ + scale
• Community managers look to automation to save time + refocus on higher
social value
• However – administrative busywork leavened by machines is being replaced
by routine ‘algorithm chasing’
• Encoded community management can produce social systems errors at
scale
• Self-defined communities are subject to code pushes that implicate identity,
governance + culture

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
reddit’s bot subreddit:
“Hey, I developed a bot (using PRAW) which takes a single subreddit and
outputs a CSV with redditors who posted or commented great content on it
(long and highly voted content).”
“You're going to just end up with a list of reposters and karma whores. Can you
work in originality into the algorithm?”
Disambiguating messy sociabilities

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Trust efficiencies
• Increasing social + commercial expression of distributed trust between
unknown participants
• Online communities modelled on distributed trust between ‘strangers’ vs.
social networks of known degrees
• Community managers engineer conditions for pervasive trust as an
efficiency toward member and communal aims
• How can automation enhance - or erode – trust + its intimacies?

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
”The number-one resource I use for real-life problem solving is my online community.
When I have a problem, I talk it over with them. I get real support in return, as well as
practical advice.” ~ Anna. The Woman’s Guide To Online Services, 1995, Judith A.
Broadhurst
Tensions of personalisation
“In my first year of being in Australia, I remember ringing my mum, standing in the
middle of Coles supermarket, crying because I couldn't find the cumin. I don't feel so
alone any more. When I was making all those things to eat postnatally, I got this list
from my mum and my aunt, and half of these things I don't know what they were, to
know what they were called in English, and I didn't know where to find them. Whereas
now, I'll know in like 10 minutes, not even. That's amazing.” ~ Kavita, 36, British Indian
migrant mother, 2016
“Throughout my high school years I suffered from what I now know was depression and
at times I seriously considered taking my life…I turned to the Internet for help hoping
that I could find some information to tell me what I should do. Soon I came across the
Reach Out web site and I could not believe what I found.” ~ Reach Out forum member,
2009

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Small data + foraging
• Online communities are “lively and leaky”, characterised by mundane data
compounding to produce cultural norms, social narratives + locative
sensibility
• More tethered, less ambient
• Constituted through social sense-making + foraging
• New members forage to fulfill informational needs, forging new social ties
• Automation can close the gap between seeker + information – what is the
impact on social trajectories + improvisatory interactions that produce
mundane data

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
“What happens to a lot of online communities when they can get legal advice,
emotional support, technical advice and feedback from a machine? Seconds
after they post it? What happens to our communities when bots come and
blend in? Propaganda and machine learning bots pushing their agenda?” ~
Australian Community Managers Group, 2017
Small data + foraging

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Equities of access
• Online community sites are constructed on proprietary technology
architectures
• Access to algorithmic authors + their wares is patrolled economically
• Major platform access requires investment
• Agency of community owners + operators is implicated by capital -
commerciality is mobility

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
Community manager = machine coach
• xxx
“I built my own ranking index for users. Contributions, page views, time on site,
logins, likes given, likes received. Monthly, drop a massive user report into a
spreadsheet, run pivot tables and get out lists of users in 3 or 4 categories.
Apply a hidden rank to each group and use smarts in page components to show
or hide things and messages for them. Rinse and repeat.”
~ Australian Community Managers Group, 2017

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RMIT Symposium: Digital data and automation in everyday
• Automating intelligences seem poised to take on larger, more varied roles in online
communities
• Contesting normative social, cultural processes of communities + their governance
• Power asymmetries + intentional friction between algorithmic authors + community
managers pose challenges
• Interoperability between human + machine systems; consciously adaptive
automation affording the reflexivity + improvised interactions foundational to online
community
Encoded community management = augmentation of embodied community
management
An interoperable future