This is a great discussion. My view is that participation on the web is always a matter of a very small % of people doing pretty much all the interaction – 1% or less. It has always neen that way as far back as the early 90s. We hope to improve the numbers but it will still only ever be a couple of % of total users. I’m not sure we can radically change that.
There are a number of reasons why I stil think of the CPod community as much greater than the people who post. First, we simply have contact with a far greater number of people than post on the site. Day after day we see hundreds of people sign up. We see the info they provide their reasons for study, why they join, and the general patterns. I get emails and messages all the time from learners who do not post on the site – including teachers of Mandarin, for example, who use CPod with hundreds of students. People regularly walk into the ‘factory’ who seem to know everything about us, about the community, etc, but who had never once posted there. (I’ve even met people who travelled from the States just to meet us, even though we didn’t know they existed.) It’s also clear that our approach to learning Mandarin has been adopted by lots of people – teachers, and individuals (not to mention, imitators). Hundreds of thousadns of people listen every week.
So Michael’s point is valid: How do we delineate the community? My thinking has been that ‘community’ is indeed a vague term and that people who visit and learn from the discussions are part of the community whether or not they post. The learning practices and interactions that they observe, function as a CoP and they can benefit from those things. I’ve never taken the time to try to figure out exactly at what point someone offically enters the community.
All of this is tremendously thought provoking. Please keep your ideas coming. Fred Learner’s observations have turned out to be very fruitful! I thank him for that.
Ken