The Ethnographer as Community Manager: Language Translation and User Negotiation

Abstract

This article investigates the ethnographic methodological question of how the researcher observes objectively while being part of the problem they are observing. It uses a case study of ABC Pool to argue a cooperative approach that combines the role of the ethnographer with that of a community manager who assists in constructing a true representation of the researched environment. By using reflexivity as a research tool, the ethnographer engages in a process to self-check their personal presumptions and prejudices, and to strengthen the constructed representation of the researched environment. This article also suggests combining management and expertise research from the social sciences with ethnography, to understand and engage with the research field participants more intimately which, ultimately, assists in gathering and analysing richer qualitative data.

Full text

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Media International Australia
Jonathon Hutchinson
Abstract
This article investigates the ethnographic methodological question of how the
researcher observes objectively while being part of the problem they are observing.
It uses a case study of ABC Pool to argue a cooperative approach that combines
the role of the ethnographer with that of a community manager who assists in
constructing a true representation of the researched environment. By using reexivity
as a research tool, the ethnographer engages in a process to self-check their personal
presumptions and prejudices, and to strengthen the constructed representation of
the researched environment. This article also suggests combining management and
expertise research from the social sciences with ethnography, to understand and
engage with the research eld participants more intimately – which, ultimately,
assists in gathering and analysing richer qualitative data.
This article investigates the tensions between my dual roles as a doctoral ethnographic
researcher and my employment as the community manager of ABC Pool (www.abc.net.au/
pool), and seeks to address the core tension of the ethnographic methodological question
of how I observe objectively (ethnographer) while being an active participant (community
manager) in the problem I am observing. This conceptual problem is applicable to all
researchers engaging in ethnographic research; however, in this article I will concentrate
on ethnographers embedded in institutions. The role of reexivity is crucial in these
arrangements in terms of understanding how to manage the delicate balance between
embodying the skills and roles of a researcher and participating in the research eld. I
argue that the role of the specic participant, the community manager, and that of the
ethnographer are mutually benecial while being exigent – that is, there are advantages to
be gained from engagement in both roles, requiring navigation through the challenges that
can also impede cooperation. The community manager position enables greater research
possibilities for my doctoral research while my ethnographic research provides a better
understanding and insight into the characteristics of the ABC Pool online community,
thus enriching and informing my job as manager. ABC Pool is the user-generated content
(UGC) site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which invites participants
of various levels of skill and expertise to contribute audio, video, text and photography
on a range of themes.
There are two areas of tension in the research presented in this article. The rst is the
rigidity of the internal operation of ABC Pool, as the stakeholders engage in collaborative
activity guided by the community manager. To explore this, I build on the work of Banks
(2009) and Bonniface et al. (2005), who highlight the explicit tensions of the community
manager decisions that affect online community stakeholders, namely the community
manager, the community and the host organisation. Understanding how the ABC Pool
THE ETHNOGRAPHER AS COMMUNITY
MANAGER: LANGUAGE TRANSLATION AND
USER NEGOTIATION

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community manager operates highlights the connection of that role to the ethnographer,
and thus highlights the second ethnographic methodological problem within this article:
how does the researcher address reexivity while participating in the research eld? ‘There
is no way in which we can escape the social world in order to study it; nor, fortunately,
is that necessary.’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 15) Observing the research eld is
difcult when the ethnographer is also analysing his or her own actions as community
manager in an online environment.
In what follows, I will describe the ABC Pool environment as both an online space of
users and a project that operates out of the ABC ofces in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.
I utilise explicit examples from my eld research to highlight the interplay between the
ethnographer and community manager roles. This research also maps the ethnographic
methods outlined in this article against the role of the ABC Pool community manager.
The ABC Pool examples demonstrate how the ethnographer should engage deeply with
the research eld and its participants to achieve a more informed understanding of the
environment. Finally, this article borrows expertise and management research from the
social sciences in order to outline how ethnography might address the problems created
by the researcher’s own involvement in the research eld. The signicance of reexivity
in the type of research project highlighted in this article is paramount when coupled with
the ever-increasing demand for online community research from multiple disciplines.
That is not to say that all community managers require ethnographic research skills,
but understanding the ontology of the online space is advantageous for ethnographers
embedded in an organisational setting.
ABC Pool
As an ethnographer, I am physically positioned at the ABC’s head ofce in Sydney,
Australia. My ofce location offers the unique advantage of simultaneously observing two
sets of stakeholders operating in the same project. First, I observe the other two ABC
staff members directly working at ABC Pool to understand how they manage the site,
interact with the community members and navigate the ABC more broadly. ABC Pool is
physically located between the Radio National and Classic FM departments, providing
the opportunity to observe and understand the culture of the ABC through interacting
with approximately 40 additional ABC staff members indirectly involved with the ABC
Pool project. Second, I observe and interact with the community members of ABC Pool
in the online environment as the community manager. There are approximately 7000
registered members on the site and I have regular interactions with about one-third of
those members. The relationship between the ABC Pool members and me is on a user
name basis – that is, I know them by their online identities and they know me as the
community manager who is also undertaking his PhD. The types of interaction are usually
supportive and encouraging conversations to increase the engagement levels of the users
in the online environment. The following section outlines the ABC Pool project, the
embodied practices of the ABC Pool members and some examples of activities that have
occurred to demonstrate the problem of the researcher’s own presence in the research eld.
The operation of ABC Pool is indicative of the trends of participatory cultural
activities occurring more broadly in online spaces, enabled through computer-mediated
information communication technologies. Participatory activities, including cultural
production (Jenkins, 2006; Lessig, 2004), journalism (Bruns, 2008; Wilson et al., 2008) and
political engagement (Castells, 2007; Jenkins, 2006), are referred to as ‘peer production’
(Benkler, 2006). As peer production activities become more popular, the need to research
and understand these online environments becomes increasingly important. ABC Pool is
an opportunity to incorporate peer production through UGC and its associated activities

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into the creative practices and cultural production of the ABC. The ABC has developed,
and entirely resources, the space to provide a secure online platform, access to media
and cultural expertise, and the opportunity to use ABC archival material under Creative
Commons licensing.
Individuals join the ABC Pool site and establish their online persona through an
avatar representation of themselves – often a prole image – and a brief biography
describing their creative interests. There is no subscription fee to join, and membership
is open to anybody; however, members are subject to the guidelines of the ABC Pool
site. Once registered, community members are able to upload contributions to the site as
audio, video, photographs and text. Members are encouraged to ‘join in the conversation’
with other community members by commenting on their work, sharing technical and
production knowledge, and generally encouraging and engaging other members through
online conversation. Users can upload contributions as stand-alone pieces of media; or,
occasionally, they contribute them to projects that address specic ABC and user-dened
themes. The contributions promote collaborative practices through the reuse or remix of
the creative texts, and are sometimes produced into broadcast outcomes for ABC programs.
The remix or broadcast outcomes see the participants engage in what Lave and Wenger
(1991) describe as a ‘community of practice’, whereby ‘groups of people who share a
concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge
and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991:
16). A community of practice describes how the ABC Pool community operates through
the passionate user-base of individuals who collectively contribute peripheral skills to
collectively engage in the production of cultural artefacts.
New Beginnings (http://pool.abc.net.au/projects/new-beginnings) is a 53-minute radio
feature that aired on Radio National’s 360documentaries during 2012, and is a useful
example to demonstrate ABC Pool as an online community of practice. The New Beginnings
project is a collaborative creative production between Mike Williams, an ABC Radio
National producer, and multiple community members of ABC Pool. Williams designed a
call to action that simply asked the Radio National audience and the ABC Pool community
to contribute their stories of new beginnings. The project Williams designed calls for
contributions of creative works:
ABC Pool wants to hear your New Beginnings story!
Starting something new can be exciting, refreshing and stimulating but also very
daunting and scary. Whether it’s a new job, new family member, new home, or
maybe even a new love interest, we’re often faced with the challenge of having
to start afresh in a new situation.
This project is about expressing your stories, your experiences and your emotions
when you’ve gone through a new beginning. (Williams, 2011)
The New Beginnings project received 86 contributions from 44 members, with text
and audio recordings as the preferred mediums for contributions. Williams selected the
most editorially appropriate contributions – that is, the contributions that he noted were
original, creative and interesting, and would have appeal to a broader ABC audience. He
then invited the creators of those works to the ABC studios around the country to record
their stories in a professional environment with professional ABC staff. The process
involved both Williams and the ABC sound engineer working on each contribution, and
coaching the contributors in how to read a script and perform for a radio program, how to
technically achieve a standard suitable for the ABC, and generally sharing their knowledge
of radio production. Thus both the producer and the contributor combine their specic
expertise in this situation: the producer has the knowledge of radio production to the

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ABC’s standards, and the contributors provide the insight into local Australian stories with
fresh and at times innovative ideas. The result produced a new cultural artefact facilitated
by a professional producer from the ABC institution in conjunction with contributors to
the ABC Pool community. The New Beginnings process also indicated the need for an
intermediary when online communities engage in cultural production with an institution.
There are three principal stakeholders engaged in ABC Pool: the community itself, which
is made up of university students, media professionals, retirees, artists and users aspiring
to become ABC employees; the Pool Team, consisting of producers, community managers,
researchers, the editor/manager and interns; and other ABC staff not directly involved in
the Pool project who are television and radio producers, managers, administration staff,
archivists, researchers, legal professionals, senior executives and executive producers.
A core activity has been identied where these stakeholders intersect (see Figure 1).
Community engagement is dened as the ABC and the Pool community interacting through
activities such as users uploading UGC to the ABC Pool site, or ABC staff offering advice
on user content. Interaction within the ABC is an activity undertaken between the Pool
Team and the broader ABC staff, which may include aligning the Pool project with the
broader goals of the ABC or clarifying editorial concerns with legal and editorial staff.
Community administration refers to the day-to-day tasks of maintaining the site, including
moderating content, responding to user emails and identifying development work to action
with the technology support team.
Figure 1: The stakeholders and activities of ABC Pool
The community manager has the intermediary role that understands the stakeholders’
interests and can communicate and negotiate between them. It is a complex yet pivotal
role, and the community manager has been described as someone who encourages, fosters
and enables collaborative practices between online community members for an increased
user experience (Bacon, 2009; Bonniface et al., 2005). Banks (2002) also describes the

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community manager as a representative of the members of the online community to the
organisation that is resourcing the space. The community manager is responsible not only
for identifying who the stakeholders are in the online community, but also understanding
their interests and how best to negotiate those interests within the expectations of the
organisation itself. This activity often manifests in the core activity of project design,
where the community manager directs the collaborative activity of the members towards
the core goals of the ABC. The rigidity surrounding the community manager decisions
becomes explicit when the role is mapped on to the stakeholders as nexus, and when
the community manager engages in conict resolution between the stakeholders. I would
argue that the role of the community manager not only supports the community inside
the institution, but also assists in the negotiation process to cross ‘knowledge boundaries’.
This section has outlined the ABC Pool environment, how the project is positioned
within the ABC, and the requirement of an intermediary to facilitate online community
members engaging in cultural production with the institution. The intermediary role outlined
is that of the community manager, demonstrating that this role is the nexus between the
three stakeholders of ABC Pool. The article now describes the interplay between the
community manager and the ethnographer through specic eld examples and the existing
literature. The interplay of the two roles highlights how each position benets from the
strengths of the other, while making explicit the tensions of the ethnographer researching
the eld in which he participates.
The complementary ethnographer and community manager roles
The following example from ABC Pool demonstrates the intermediary role of the community
manager while mediating a conict between a Pool member and the management of the
ABC. It connects the existing ethnographic literature to a specic eld research example in
that it highlights the role of the community manager, which is informed by the research of
the ethnographer. Simultaneously, as an ethnographer employed as the community manager,
I observed behaviour I could not otherwise have seen. This example also demonstrates
how researchers participating in the eld can collect and critically analyse data to better
understand the environment in which they are researching. Furthermore, it is exemplary of
how the online community manager uses ethnographic research and employs ‘interactional
expertise’ to ‘cross knowledge boundaries’ – concepts borrowed from social science and
dened in greater detail in this section.
The ABC Pool team published a blog post on 3 November 2010 titled ‘What’s the
difference? Pool and ABC Open’ (ABC Pool, 2010). The blog post was to explain to the
ABC Pool community how the two projects, ABC Open and ABC Pool, are different while
existing in the same creative, collaborative production environment. ABC Open was allocated
$15.3 million of federal funding to develop digital literacy of regional Australians over
the National Broadband Network (NBN) (Rennie et al., 2010: 12). The project employs
approximately 45 ABC Open producers nationally to ‘skill up’ citizens, and encourages
audience members to work with producers (Dwyer, 2011). ABC Pool had been operating
for two years prior to ABC Open commencing, and the Pool community erupted with
outrage, demanding an explanation as to why ‘their’ website had been marginalised, while
the infant ABC Open received a ‘signicant’ amount of ABC resources. The following
email to an ABC Open producer summarises the frustrations of one ABC Pool user:
My name is [withheld] and I am very interested in ABC projects and how public
money is being spent on sites like the one you have been selected to produce.
Lots of claims have been made about how the public, who funds these projects,
will be able to participate and provide user-generated content but we haven’t seen
much of it up to this date. If ABC OPEN policies are to remain true to the very

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nature of the ABC, producing content with a wide and varied nature, then Sites
like yours will be full of contributors posting Photo’s, Video’s, Links, Comedy,
News & views and be a real asset to the community. If it remains a closed society
of Uni graduates, tech students and paid ABC staffers peddling non-controversial,
politically correct, balls of uff then its failures, to be honest, will only be sustained
at best. (Anonymous Pool User, 2010)
In approaching this example, it is useful to dene the methodology implemented for
this research project. The research of ABC Pool utilises ethnographic action research
(Tacchi et al., 2003), using participant observation as the principal research method. The
participant observation method extracts its denition of ethnography from anthropology
(Goodenough, 1964), with the aim of ‘engaging with people in as many different
situations as possible’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 65). Hammersley and Atkinson
(1995) dene ethnography as a methodology that ‘involves the ethnographer participating,
overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what
happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data
are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research’ (1995: 11).
Ethnography provides a way to gather rich qualitative data through social research by
observing, understanding and participating within the research site. The heated public
debate that ensued online from ABC Pool posting an informational blog is a rich example
of my community manager role enabling my ethnographic action research, as I gained an
intimate understanding of the users, their interests and their sensitivities surrounding the
ABC Pool/Open issue – knowledge gained ethnographically. It also highlights the core
ethnographic problem of researching objectively while actively participating within the
research eld, and is compounded by ethnographic action research methods.
Ethnographic action research includes the methods of ethnography and combines them
with action research methods, integrating the research into the development of the project
itself (Tacchi et al., 2003: 12). Action research prompts the researcher to ask, ‘What am I
doing? What do I need to improve? How do I improve it?’ (McNiff and Whitehead, 2006:
1). The action researcher also endeavours to ‘improve their own learning, and inuence
the learning of others’ (McNiff and Whitehead, 2006: 1). As the community manager
of ABC Pool, I incorporate my ethnographic research observations into the project to
develop the experience for the users, and the management techniques of the Pool team.
The ability to utilise my research to contribute vital information for future developments,
along with mediating the differences between the disparate stakeholder interests, suggests
that the ethnographer and the community manager are complementary roles.
Multiple ABC stakeholders were on high alert after the backlash from the Pool users,
both in terms of how to react and with regard to how to moderate the debate. The Pool team
agreed that the debate should continue in a public environment while seeking instruction
from the senior management levels of Radio Multiplatform and Content Development,
where Pool is managed. The senior management were very concerned with the community’s
attitude towards the institution that was resourcing their online community and were
planning a formal response to be published on the ABC Pool website.
Demonstrating the complementary benets of the roles of ethnographer and community
manager, I was able to draw on both my knowledge from my ethnographic work and my
skill as a community manager to mediate a difcult situation. The traditional ethnographer,
while constructing and describing a reality to their readers, ‘represents another culture,
develops a particular line of analysis, or constructs a persuasive argument or engaging tale
in the published account’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 213). For that reason, the ethnographer’s
embedded position and participatory activities are necessary in the research eld to detail
how the environment operates. The researcher’s perspective is introduced as they ‘work
with what knowledge they have’ to construct a sense of the researched environment

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(Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 15). If the researcher attempts to be invisible, they risk
constructing theoretical presumptions of the research while ignoring a developed sense of
the research problem. The reexivity of the researcher is crucial in conveying a detailed
description of the environment they are studying.
I responded to the Pool user’s email with this publicly visible comment in a Pool
forum where the same user was coordinating a discussion:
I think the key issue that everyone is working on here is facilitation. By involving
and including people with all types of skills into the process, we are starting to
learn ‘how’ to do things collectively. The ABC is starting to listen and incorporate
everyone’s voice in this process – which is highly commendable I think. And, in
that regard, Pool has a lot to offer Open as they start down this process.
No, Open doesn’t allow you to contribute freely just yet but, if you recall, Pool
had its issues in the past as it has matured to the current format of reactive
moderation. And contributors such as yourself have had massive input achieving
this. (Jonathon Hutchinson, 2010)
To which the user responded:
Thanks, Jonathon, for your considered reply to my harsh criticism.
If I come across as a bit heavy handed it’s because I see the importance of the work
we are involved in and only want the best for all. (Anonymous Pool User, 2010)
Collapsing the knowledge collected from ethnography by suggesting the only advantage
was the community manager performing a better job is a little simplistic. Participating in
the online debate revealed detailed knowledge of two signicant areas. First, I understand
the users of ABC Pool in a way that conict would only reveal – that is, their ultimate
concerns for the site are how they will operate to achieve their desired outcomes. Second,
I observed how the ABC operates internally at a time of conict. It revealed multiple ABC
departments working simultaneously to nd a solution, while exposing who is involved
and what their role is within the conict. I argue that this information would otherwise
have been overlooked without the effective use of ethnography.
This eld example of mediation interwoven with ethnographic literature has outlined
traditional ethnography, while suggesting that contemporary ethnography concerned with
online communities requires a mix of online/ofine methods. Netnography, described
by Bowler (2010) as a variation of traditional ethnography that adapts the study of
ofine communities to understand the cultural characteristics and social interactions of
individuals in an online environment, is also useful to employ when researching online
communities. However, none of these scholars addresses the methodological conict of
interest an employed ethnographer in the institution they are researching may encounter.
Further, there is no discussion on tools and processes that can be implemented to assist
the ethnographer in transforming these tensions into complementary assets that develop
the research project – or, as Stark (2011) denes it, conicting tensions as production
friction. In what follows, I outline a mixed approach combining multiple methods useful
for addressing the ethnographic reexivity problem and with suggestions for how an
ethnographer can apply these techniques to their research.
Ethnography in action
Before arguing for additional techniques that will assist the ethnographic researcher address
the core problem of how to both observe objectively and be an active part of the problem
being observed, it is useful to explore the concept of reexivity. Scholars have explored
this problem, and many agree that objectivity is impossible in the ethnographic encounter,

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and in fact should not be seen as the ‘marginalia of ethnography’ (Madden, 2010: 23).
Watson (1987) argues that ‘reexivity is a pervasive ineluctable feature of all accounts;
it is not something to be remedied; it is not a special problem of anthropology at home’
(Watson, 1987: 30). By aligning with the four forms of reexivity established by Marcus
(1998) – the basic form, sociological reexivity, anthropological reexivity and feminist
reexivity – Madden distills reexivity into essentially different positionalities. That is,
the truth is partial and not absolute, and it is dependent upon the researcher dispensing
‘nostalgic ideas of discovery’ for ‘partial truths that help to more faithfully represent the
real world’ (Madden, 2010: 22). The researcher is the principal tool in ethnography, and
by utilising reexivity as a means to check against personal ‘presumption and prejudice’,
it is quite simply a way of ‘managing the inuence of “me” on the research and the
representation of “them”’ (Madden, 2010: 23). An effective way to utilise reexivity as a
research tool is to participate in disciplinary activities and power relationships that occur
within institutional settings.
Neff et al.’s (2010) recent ethnographic research into the construction industry highlights
how merely providing technological tools fails to cross ingrained disciplinary activities
of practitioners in collaborative practices, particularly within organisations. Neff et al.
dene engrained disciplinary activities and practices as knowledge boundaries, and suggest
that ‘power relationships, cultural differences, and organisational distinctions often get
reasserted at the moments of technical and social change’ (2010: 557). In other words,
ofine power relationships and cultural differences are mapped on to online collaborative
cultural activities, impeding earlier visions of democratised peer production. The ABC
Pool project encourages collaboration; it also inhibits it by seeking to bind it in existing
disciplinary activities, knowledge boundaries and institutional frameworks. For example,
ABC Pool community members contribute ideas to the Pool Team on how ‘their’ space
might be improved. Quite often, these ideas are never realised because of the political
limitations of a small experimental project in a large bureaucratic institution.
An example of user input limited by the bureaucratic processes of the ABC institution
was present during the early conception of the Community Editor project. The Community
Editors are the lead users of the Pool community, who have fortnightly phone conferences
to exchange ideas and to transfer information from the community to the Pool Team, and
vice versa. During one of the early meetings, the Community Editors were discussing
printing coffee table books from the images contributed to ABC Pool. As one Community
Editor suggested:
It’d be great if we could put all the cool images in Pool into one book that we
could then sell to the public, or in the ABC Shops! Then the money that we make
from them could go back into Pool. (16 August 2010, Community Editors’ Meeting)
In performing my duties as the community manager, I was to champion this idea to the
management team of ABC Pool as a useful and viable idea that had emerged from the
community. I was informed that there was no budget to produce the book, and that it
would be too difcult to separate the income from the book’s sales in the ABC Shop to
bring a revenue stream back into the ABC Pool project. The project stopped at the rst
hurdle, before contemplating the additional levels which would include ‘buy-in’ from
senior-level management and approval from ABC Commercial. I then returned to the
Community Editors, informing them that their idea was not viable. This was a valuable
experience of the resistance to change in the processes by which cultural production
occurs in the ABC.
The ABC Pool project also inhibits collaboration by challenging existing institutional
production models, described by Neff et al. (2010) as attempting to cross knowledge
boundaries. Cultural differences and organisational distinctions are most obvious during

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times of technological development, where often the language between different stakeholders
displays varying authority. An example of organisational difference is the negotiation process
between developers and community managers: while the community manager highlights the
needs of the community, the requirements are at times blocked by technological restrictions
outlined by the developers. For example, embedding media within the ABC Pool site and
publishing ABC Pool’s media into other external sites is editorially contentious, resulting
in the inability to mobilise this proposal from the community manager. That is to say,
once ABC branded media is embedded in third-party platforms, the ABC loses editorial
control over the content. This failure to collaborate fully across knowledge boundaries is
not only present in the technical conversations about the website itself, but also in the
day-to-day communicative and collaborative activities.
Effective collaboration and transfer of knowledge in an online community of practice
require some form of coordination and mediation between the individuals who make
up the community (Bonniface et al., 2005; Wilson et al., 2008). As outlined above,
coordination is the community manager’s role; however, there are some barriers to
effective communication and collaboration, such as adhering to one’s own specialist eld
(discipline) and not entering into interdisciplinary projects that are central to contemporary
creative industry production. Such individually engrained disciplinary thinking may restrict
the collaborative process, which is not necessarily a ‘given’ simply due to the digital
affordances of an online community alone. It is the coordinated effort of human and
non-human actors across a range of interdisciplinary experience that enables effective
collaboration. Neff et al. (2010) suggest that ‘embedded disciplinary thinking is not easily
overcome by digital representations of knowledge’, and that collaboration may also be
hindered ‘through the exposure of previously implicit distinctions among the team members’
skills and organizational status’ (2010: 556). As such, it is neither technological artefacts
nor individuals’ implicit knowledge alone that can hinder knowledge transfer, but also
their rank and position in the institution. Disciplinary – as opposed to interdisciplinary –
thinking, together with hierarchical power relationships and thought patterns, is restrictive
to effective collaboration in online communities of creative practice.
It is useful to incorporate the work from the social sciences into the ethnographer’s
role to navigate the ethnographer’s position in the research eld. The ABC community
manager process is reective of what scholars in the social sciences refer to as interactional,
contributory and referred expertise (Collins, 2004; Collins et al., 2007; Collins and Sander,
2007; Ribeiro, 2007). Collins et al. (2007) introduce the concept of ‘interactional expertise’
to describe the negotiation process across the different forms of expertise involved in
collaborative, heterogeneous arrangements. Drawing from Collins et al., Banks (2009)
suggests that: ‘Interactional expertise is a translation role that facilitates and supports
communication, dialogue and exchange across expertise domains.’ (Banks, 2009: 85)
The interactional expertise model can be applied to the community manager’s role when
operating in an online community by using language to negotiate between human actors
engaging in collaborative practices. The community manager translates each stakeholder’s
knowledge to the other stakeholders involved in the online community, in an attempt to
foster increased collaborative experiences. ‘Contributory expertise’ is dened as expertise
in ‘tacit knowledge, practical or craft skill’ that enables the participant to be recognised
as a member of the community (Evans, 2008). ‘Referred expertise’ is when ‘skills that
have been learned in one scientic area are directly applied to another’ (Collins and
Sanders, 2007: 622).
Reecting on the case of the ABC Open and ABC Pool public debate, as the community
manager, I was employing all three expertise models to inform decision-making that
enabled consensus to cross knowledge boundaries: contributory expertise to understand
the interests of the Pool community members, ABC Open project members and the ABC

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more broadly; interactional expertise to engage in negotiation between those stakeholders;
and referred expertise as the specic model used by a community manager engaging in
ethnographic research of an online community. By aligning with Madden’s argument of
ethnographic reexivity being a matter of positionality, the expertise models outlined
above are extremely useful for rethinking ethnography. The multiple forms of expertise
determine the ethnographer’s position within the research eld, thereby inuencing their
observation of the truth. The expertise models also dispense the ‘nostalgic ideas of
discovery’ by locating the researcher in the most appropriate position for discovering the
truth of the examined research eld.
Conclusion
This article has outlined the interplay between the specic participant, the community
manager, and the ethnographer within the research of ABC Pool. The community manager
who engages multiple expertise models understands the relationship between human and
non-human actors, enabling them to implement decisions that assist in gaining consensus
through the negotiation process. Furthermore, the community manager gains access to
situations that reveal deep, rich data on the studied environment, reected in this case
through conict resolution. The role of the ethnographer and reexivity are signicant
in the ABC Pool examples, as they position the researcher from a specic perspective to
interpret the environment and the people in that environment. However, this is indicative
of ethnography more broadly when reexivity is used as a tool to check the researcher’s
perspective against their resumptions and prejudices. Reexivity does not weaken
ethnography, but in fact strengthens the discovery of truth, as demonstrated through the
examples of ABC Pool. Moreover, the dual roles of community manager and ethnographer
clearly demonstrate how ethnographic action research can be applied effectively as a
research methodology in the online creative industries.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Axel Bruns, John Banks, Oksana Zelenko, Jenny Burton, C.K. Wilson, Sherre DeLys,
David Hua and Cath Dwyer.
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