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Laura,
First and foremost, I too greatly appreciate your and other staffs' efforts to both moderate the posts and promote engagement. I have recently seen more proactive engagement and have reported a couple posts myself, like one asking how to commit cybercrimes.
As for proactively providing posts to encourage contributions from others, I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. All forums where I participate introduce topics of current relevance to spark conversations and often bring in experts to contribute in the forums.
I would caution against "shilling" however. Transparency is key to maintaining trust. If a PMI employee/volunteer discloses their relationship to the organization, all is good. Asking members to start a specific topic and even drafting the post for them *without* disclosing that relationship starts to cross ethical boundaries.
The practice of promoting interest without disclosing that it is on behalf of another party who has something to gain from it is a common technique in many shady businesses, including some criminal. Best case, it is like hiring people in an audience to cheer or laugh, or a speaker who has a plant to ask what sound like tough questions to set up a prepared answer. Worst case, it resembles the behavior of a team con-job and people used to spotting scams can be immediately turned off, regardless of how innocent the intent. People don't like being conned, and they typically don't like being a party to them even more.
As an alternative, why not post something like a question of the month, actively moderated to promote quality over quantity. A lot of questions here are dead ends where a question is asked, members share their time and experience to answer, and there it ends. There is no healthy debate, follow up questions, indication if a solution worked, etc. It's not even clear if the answers were read. A good moderator will listen, paraphrase for clarity, probe deeper, and lead the conversation in interesting directions. It's not much different than moderating discussion in a professional workshop. A person just asked to post a question is unlikely to be that moderator since it does require a lot more work.
Another idea that aligns with the PMI champions (?) concept is posting comments as a round-table with active members agreeing in advance to provide their input. If for example you had concurrence from a few of the most active posters to participate in a discussion on the topic of the month, then everything is fully transparent. It is not somebody pretending to be interested in a question to generate interest in others.
edit: One additional thought I forgot to mention is when someone resurrects a long dead thread, suggest they start a new one. That keeps it current and relevant.
Just my respectful and hopefully helpful two cents.
Keithbr type="_moz"br type="_moz"
Community Champion
