Mayan pyramids and layers of participation

The main pyramid at Chichen Itza, Mexico (photo by me)

Back in 2006 Bradley Horowitz, of Yahoo! at the time, suggested that social software communities on the internet have a pyramid-like model of how people participate. Briefly - 1% of a group might create something - start a messageboard thread or upload a song, 10% of a group might actively participate - contribute to the thread or comment on the music, but 100% of that community benefit from all the activity above - they all read it, listen to it, watch the video and so on.



Last Summer we used this as while working on one of my BBC Radio Labs R&D projects that was investigating online participation around radio - something that eventually became Radio Pop (coming soon...). In Bradley's post he says, when talking about online music radio, "The act of consumption was itself an act of creation, no additional effort expended". Which is exactly what we've done with Radio Pop (and indeed Olinda)- just the act of listening to the radio is enough to create something - a record of your listening - that can then be used later on; referenced, shared, aggregated, recommended...

During the communication of this project I used this pyramid of community metaphor but have also developed a second pyramid to represent a hierarchy of community activity.



The Mayan Five Stepped Pyramid of Participation

Starting at the bottom we have attention - just listening to the radio is participating in the broadest sense and is contributing something to the communal experience of the radio show. And certainly if we track that attention data for your radio listening it could be valuable for you, the community and the broadcaster - showing your identity, sharing with your friends or building community recommendations on top of the data. Last.fm already do this for personal music listening. Dopplr do it for travel. Upcoming do it for events. Amazon do it for products.

Up from that we have "rate"; This can be done explicitly by giving something a rating - like a 5-star rating of a film. Or, implicitly, by showing an interest in something, maybe by bookmarking a page in your browser or recommending a TV show to a friend. Note: In my original hierarchy I had both "like" (thumbs up, bookmark) and "rate" (star rating) but I collapsed them both into "rate" here.

Then "tag" - users tagging an item with some metadata. When you do this you're helping create a user-generated taxonomy.

Then "annotate" - maybe it's a review of a book on Amazon or a description of a gig you attended, a comment on a blog post or a call to a phone-in radio programme.

Finally "create" - members of the community creating original, or maybe adapted, content. Sending in photos, posting on messageboards or remixing songs.

Each layer generally supports the ones above it, and is often implicit in the creation of the ones above it. Any social media product will usually support some combination of these layers. Things at the top of the pyramid need a fair amount of effort and motivation from the user and this corresponds to the smaller percentage of people that do this. But most people (the 100% consumers of Bradley's pyramid) will do the things at the bottom of the pyramid when they visit that site.

Finally, how do some community sites would fit into this model:

last.fm:
5. create Contributing your own band's music
4. annotate Contributing to artist or event pages
3. tag Tagging
2. rate Love/Ban
1. attention Scrobbling or listening to music

Flickr:
5. create Uploading photos
4. annotate Comments on photos
3. tag Tagging and geo-tagging
2. rate Favourites
1. attention Viewing photos

Maybe a restaurant review site could have:
4. annotate Write a review, post some pictures
3. tag Tag with type of cuisine, atmosphere or location.
2. rate Recommend to a friend or explicitly rate it
1. attention I ate there

For Radio Pop we we have deliberately used only the bottom two layers. This is because it's intended to be a very light, easy-to-use addition to radio listening with a low barrier to entry. The system tracks and stores your radio listening  - which requires no more participation than just listening to your radio - and you can express an interest in, or bookmark, something on the radio, what we have called a "Pop". So that would be:

2. rate Popping a moment in time
1. attention Listening to the radio

Twitter is basically just annotations of your life. Annotatable Audio was annotations for radio programmes. PhrazIt, featured on TechCrunch the other day, is something that pretty much uses just tags.

I came back to these layers of participation recently for another project and decided, as I've now used the model twice, that maybe it was worth writing about. I have found it a useful metaphor for thinking about, and communicating, social software.