It’s been a year and a half since we started and our LIONs’ Newsgroup on Yahoo has certainly helped continue to create new super-connectors, continue to grow the connections of LinkedIn Members who have “exceeded” the arbitrary “LinkedIn Invite Limit”, as well as “fast track” LinkedIn Newbies.

However, our potential as THE LIONS is not best served by YahooGroups ALONE.  Hence, THE LIONS’ LAIR has been formed to COMPLEMENT — NOT REPLACE — Our YahooGroup. 

My thinking on this is simple —

Since the LinkedIn LION Community contains most, if not all, of the top online networkers in the world, doesn’t it make sense for us to find someway to tap into, and build upon, the collective wisdom of such a towering crowd of online networking masters? 

This is the humble mission of The LIONS’ LAIR — to tap into and share the collective mind of the best online networkers in the world.

NewsGroups vs Online Forums

While a newsgroup format is a very powerful tool to push “the latest news to all members,” it is not well suited to “aggregating community knowledge” overtime.  You see this in all of the otherwise very good YahooGroups which have formed around various LinkedIn Groups of special interest.  While these NewsGroups are very active and valuable, they tend to go through “amnestic cycles” of “repeat discussions” and “repeat responses” — WITHOUT EVER MOVING FORWARD or raising the discussions to a new level.  They become repeative and boring when it comes to these recurring topics.  Just look at how, every few months, the “Quality v Quantity” Pseudo Debate re-emerges as if for the first time — completely oblivious to all prior debate. 

Most of us “old-timers” won’t even dignify such “repeat discussions” with our participation — their repeative nature makes them boring.  This is sad, especially since these topics have been well-covered in the past and those with the most insight no longer contribute to these topics. 

No one should be faulted for this.  It’s purely a product of relying solely on the “NewsGroup Format”. 

NewsGroups are excellent at broadcasting “for the moment” issues — BUT — they have NO LONG TERM MEMORY.  NewGroups are inherently amnestic.  Their strength is in casting a wide and immediate net for aggregating community feedback on time-sensitive issues — NOT collecting and organizing aggregated discussions into useful knowledge overtime THAT CAN BE BUILT UPON rather than CONSTANTLY REINVENTED. 

Online Forums, on the other hand, are great at aggregating community knowledge. We see this all the time in software support forums.  When you run into problems you check online forums first to see if this is a new problem and, if not, what solutions have others found for this problem in the past.  If it is new and you discover a solution, you post it so others in the future will not have to repeat what you went through to solve the same problem (The “Pay It Forward” Principle).

So, while NewGroups are a fantastic “near-synchronous communications tool”, community knowledge building is an inherently assynchronous community-based activity better suited to Online Forums.  Forums tend to become more valuable overtime, as each contribution becomes a brick upon which future contributions can be built.  Peoples insights are collected, organized, and shared overtime.  This benefits both the oldtimers and the newbies by allowing discussions to break new ground without too many repeats, while simultaneously allowing those new to these discussions to quickly catch up, without forcing these topical discussions to constantly “reinvent the beginning”.

Ideally, an Online Community benefits from BOTH —

• the “immediate notification-and-response” function of NewsGroups and
• the “community knowledge aggregating” function of Forums

Therefore, The Lions Community now has the best of both worlds — THE LIONS YAHOOGROUP and THE LIONS’ LAIR.

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Fabulous!
written by Madeleine Laird, June 14, 2007

Thank you so much to those of you who have spent your time and efforts to create this wonderful forum. As someone who has created other Yahoo/ LinkedIn groups (Medical Device Networkers Group)I know how much time and effort goes into these things. Yet somehow, we are left feeling that it could be so much more if only there were a better format.
Thank you for wanting it to be more and for taking the steps to take it there.

Best regards,
Madeleine Laird

...
written by Grayson Walker, October 11, 2007

I think the Yahoogroup is keeping this site's fora from being active, and I encourage Christian to delete the Yahoogroup, in favor of the Lair.

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