Last night at the Online Community Roundtable, hosted by Webex in Santa Clara, a fascinating discussion emerged: “What does it take to activate participants in an online community?”.

It was agreed that community managers need to tune in to the most important motivators of their individual members/participants/prospectives. To paraphrase the consensus “Every community participant asks themselves 'What's in it for me?' before they contribute to content or help to solve a problem”. Various sorts of psychic rewards systems using ratings, reviews, privileges, prizes, recognition, and other kinds of incentives were reviewed in-brief.

On Tuesday, May 30th at 4pm PDT Micki Krimmel, the Director of Internet Outreach for Participant Productions, will be speaking about, "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and More Tales from Participate.net" as part of NetSquared's remote conference.

Even though I'll be working at the face to face Net2 Conference, I'm going to try to sneak off to the Net2 Remote Conference Chat Room to participate in this chat.

Participant Productions is the company behind socially conscious films like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, Fast Food Nation, Murderball and North Country. Not only do they produce movies with meaning, they also host a complementary web site, Participate.net that give users tons of ways to get involved and create positive change around the issues they care about.  You can learn more about Participate.net and see an interview with Micki Krimmel on the Net2 vlog