Tomorrow night (Thursday 10 May), I’m participating in a panel (and audience!) discussion entitled Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online? The focus of the event will be to consider some of the challenges and (sometimes missed) opportunities for mainstream media in making (or letting?) online debate and Weblog-based commentary happen around politics and current affairs.

This is another in the series of Innovation Forum discussions initiated by Nico Macdonald, aimed at bringing together people from different disciplines to share knowledge, and I’m chuffed to be appearing alongside such an interesting bunch of people, including Lee Bryant from Headshift, Andrew Calcutt from the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies (University of East London), Daniel Mermelstein from BBC News and Olivier Creiche from Six Apart.

As many of you will know, I recently joined Guardian Unlimited as Head of Communities and User Experience, and it’s been fascinating to start understanding the many issues and opportunities that community presents to a major media organisation, as well as beginning to help others understand and make change. But it’s been equally exciting to explore how a successful online media organisation can learn from its user community.

My interest in online social interaction extends well beyond my current GU role, though. Since writing my Social Anthropology Masters thesis in back in the distant mists of time (AKA 1998) on the need to redefine the concept of community and culture to envelop then-burgeoning use of the web, social activity online has exploded. No longer seen as the exclusive preserve of freaks and geeks, internet users from all sorts of backgrounds are increasingly engaging with the social aspects of the web, both directly (through forums, blogs like this one, shared assets and commenting) and indirectly (through expressing preferences, voting with their feet - or their eyes - as well as classifying and publishing assets which can be blended together with those of others to be discovered or remixed).

Moreover, people are using the internet not only to commune with each other about cats, sandwich fillings, race relations and environmental policy, but coming together (and sometimes coming to blows) with and via media organisations in discussion of topics which they care about. These kind of discussions were previously much more segregated, with talking heads noodling in late-night TV studios and bylined in comment sidebars in print, while passionate people – citizens – talked about the same topics (and the coverage of it) in their own communities at work, on blogs, at the pub.

I like the fact that politics and current affairs topics generate frequent, lively discussions online, where they are being covered and debated on both small and large platforms. But I think new forums for public discourse and interaction in combination with the media evolves such discussions, and that media organisations can and should both support and learn from such social environments.

In fact, (mainstream) media organisations are undergoing a cultural shift, which necessitates a move from purely objective reporting and comment to incorporating different kinds of journalism which can be open to or encourage reader response and reaction. I think that it’s good that there’s more conversation, and that media organisations are increasingly open to being part of that conversation, as well as helping others to become part of it, too. And dealing with that conversation is a big job, and one which goes beyond mere moderation.

One of my interests is in exploring how big media organisations can enable healthy communities – ones with a lively, committed userbase engaged in discussion which is both relevant and appropriate. But how do organisations lay the foundations for such communities? And how can they nurture – and learn from – them, especially as they grow?

I’m interested in both technical solutions to good community management (such as user identity, peer-recommendation and platforms which facilitate moderation) but think there are also huge benefits to thinking about more editorial and anthropologically-inspired initiatives; things like rewarding good behaviour, encouraging a sense of responsibility and ownership for the group and working to ensure that the proposition is robust.

So, as I see it, established media organisations have three big challenges in the community space (as well as lots of little ones):

• Figuring out how to educate and encourage users to new levels of interaction – both existing and new users, each of whom has their own needs.
• Understanding how community and user interaction overlap – and the differences between them.
• Learning how to belong to their communities as well as host them.

And all this at the same time as trying to be authentic, informative and relevant to users plus raising the level of online debate? Tall order!

I’ll be touching on some of these points in the discussion tomorrow night, but I’m really looking forward to hearing what other people think about ways that users and the media can work together to develop and facilitate relevant, engaging public debate around current affairs, politics, environmental issues, celebrity gossip, the arts or anything else that people are passionate about.