This is not going to be news for those of you who work in the IT field, because you’re likely to have already heard about this sort of thing, but I was having a discussion the other day about the general public’s apathy as regards politics, and how people are content to live in their little cotton-wool ball lives without ever trying to set out to change the world.

The conversation drifted to whether we needed a new radicalisation where I argued that perhaps we do have a new radicalisation already — people don’t get so uptight about party politics any more because they are seen as two sides of the same coin, but they do get uptight and campaign for specific single issues – the war in Iraq, animal rights, father’s rights and so on.

And then we talked about how to get to understand what people as a whole felt, and that was more difficult. You can make it easier for people to communicate: They Work For You makes it very easy to find your MP, for example; you can provide online consultation areas, but in online consultations, you find participation inequality.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

Alertbox: Participation Inequality

I am a moderator at Accessify Forum, which basically means I’m a regular, who takes on additional responsibility for stuff like deleting spam. I have been a member for almost 3 years now (the site has been going just over 5).

The stats from AccessifyForum back up this participation inequality idea. Last time I was on the forum, there were 31 people visiting it, only two of which were registered users. That’s fairly standard.

So we’ve got massive participation inequality between lurkers and members. Only 6.5% of site visitors are members.

Of the total number of site members, 4437 have never posted. In many cases this may be because they joined up to the site with an invalid email address, or they thought joining up would give them a link to their site to improve their SEO (they were wrong).

Of the remaining 2328 members, 1918 have posted between one and ten times. Yet the site has managed to rack up some 60,507 posts. How exactly has this happened?

Well, we’ve had around 4000 spam posts, which have been created by users, identified as spam, the posts dumped in the spam bin and the users deleted. But that still means we have around 56,000 genuine posts.

79 users have clocked up 100 or more posts. These 79 people have contributed around 76% of all of the genuine posts to the site. Let’s not forget, only around 6.5% of site users are registered, so on that basis around (79/ 6765) * 6.5% = 0.08% of the sites users have contributed 76% of the posts. The remaining 99.92% of visitors have contributes only 24% of the site’s posts.

And the participation inequality becomes even more extreme when you look at the “top” posters – those with 1000 or more posts. There are 10 members who have posted more than 1000 times, contributing a total of 19696 posts, or some 35% of the total.

10 members. That’s less than 0.01% of site visitors, contributing 35% of the posts. The remaining 65% of the posts have been produced by the other 99.99% of site visitors.

It’s fair to say that those ten people (and yes, I am one) are contributing more than others. Now the fact that some people post more than others isn’t in itself a bad thing: they want to help people who have problems or want advice, they want to support the community that they are part of. That is fine, and it tends to be the people who are more knowledgable, more experienced or more interested in web accessibility who post repeatedly. There is, however, that us ‘super-posters’ can allow our opinions to dominate a thread or a discussion if we aren’t careful — we need to be sure that we are encouraging, rather than stifling, debate…

But it does highlight clearly the participation inequality and why you should never assume that those participating in a discussion online are a representative sample. They won’t be. They will be that 0.01% (or at best the 0.08%) who care strongly about the matter in hand. And if they are the only voice to which you listen, you risk disenfranchising at least 99.9% of the people you might want to reach.

Online participation is great: but just remember those actively participating are a vanishingly small number compared to those just looking. Don’t draw too many conclusions from your biased sample. Online consultation should not stand on its own (unless you specifically only want to know the views of ‘active participants’).

Think about it this way – there is a 76% chance that a randomly selected post will come from a sample of only 0.08% of Accessify Forum users. Selecting 100 posts would not therefore give you a ‘random sample’; it would give you 76 posts from a group of 79 members, and a further 24 posts from a group of 6686 members. That’s clearly not representative. And that is where you need to be careful…