Maymay and ‘Free Culture’ Community Building

The following interview is with Maymay, a brilliant and experienced online community organizer who operates well outside of traditional systems. His methods are fascinating, and we plan to get into greater detail on some of them soon. For now, here’s the big picture on his work.

Please note: some of the links below will take you to pages that include sexual content. Use your own judgment when you click. ~Sarah Dopp

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Q: What communities have you worked on?

A lot of my projects have had community-like aspects. When I was 14 or so, I made a website called “Ups and Downs: The Personal Story of a Bipolar Teen,” through which I received upwards of approximately 33,000 personal emails.  That was very much “a community,” with forums and everything, but for me it was very different because most of the communication was private, that is, between one reader and myself.

Similar things have happened with my personal “sex blog” (mostly about sexuality and politics) at maybemaimed.com [sometimes contains sexually-explicit content], as well as my other blog where I curate and critique erotic imagery at malesubmissionart.com [contains graphic sexual content], although by the time I started Male Submission Art in 2009 there was much more intentionality on my part. While maybemaimed.com sort of functions like a forum through its comments, with people responding both to my writing and other people’s comments, I specifically opted not to include comments on Male Submission Art so that interested readers of that project would need to disperse their thoughts across the Internet. I wanted Male Submission Art to start a conversation that migrated into a lot of other spaces, rather than flock to a single, localized point.

To a certain extent, the weekly podcast I co-host with the very cool Emma Gross at KinkOnTap.com has engendered a community in that some listeners regularly participate in the live chat room, communicate with us and each other on Twitter (notifying us of relevant news stories), and even help us maintain show notes on our wiki. But what I would call the “Kink On Tap community” is much smaller than our general listenership.

Far and away, though, the project I work on that has most engendered what can really be considered a “community” is the KinkForAll unconference series I founded with my then-partner Sara Eileen in 2009.

Q: I’ve heard you describe your communities as “free culture.”  Can you tell me what that means?

Sure. Free culture communities are fueled largely by passion, personal interest, and self-motivating forces other than money. Wikipedia is a great example.

I explain “free culture” as the notion that value is self-defined, can’t be reduced to a single form of currency (or “dollar value”), and that people can self-organize to achieve mutual benefit even if they don’t share the same values. The fact of the matter is that many (if not most) innovations have been “free culture” in nature—or rather, at least they were at first.

Really, it’s about developing an ecosystem with different norms from the ones capitalist or other dominant economic modes of being have. The term is borrowed from Lawrence Lessig’s book of the same name. I argue that sexuality communities, cultures, and subcultures are perhaps the preeminent forms of free culture because of how tightly interconnected sexuality is with all the other areas of our lives.

Q: How would you describe KinkForAll to someone who’s never heard of it before?

KinkForAll is a community of communities. To use marketing speak for a moment, it offers a few different tiers of engagement, and it provides a means for people to interact with others in a variety of tiers in a way that encourages them to become leaders of their own, smaller communities. It’s a bit like bubbles-in-a-bubble. All of the KinkForAll communities, from the very local ones to the series of unconferences as a whole, are about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life.

Q: How did KinkForAll get started?

As mentioned, I co-founded KinkForAll with my ex-partner, Sara Eileen. We were living in Australia at the time and I had just participated in BarCamp Sydney 4, which was the first unconference I’d ever been to. BarCamp uses an “open space” model of event organizing in which everybody who comes is welcome to participate and give a presentation, and the schedule of presentations is generated during the event itself as people decide what they want to talk about and when.

I thought this idea was pretty amazing and, since I didn’t have to ask anyone for approval to speak, I surprised myself by spontaneously giving a presentation of my own. I was gushing about the experience and how good it made me feel to Sara the next day when she looked at me and said, “You know who that would work well for? Kinky people.”

It was a lightbulb moment.

Together, we organized the first KinkForAll in three months. We held the event in New York but organized it from Australia, with no previous experience of how to do such a thing. We carefully dissected everything that BarCamp was, thinking about which things we could easily transfer from a technology-focused event to a sexuality-themed event and which would not translate as well. We talked to our friends and got them doing legwork in New York to find and confirm a venue, and we billed it as an event at which our social group could welcome us back from our year abroad.

The cool part, though, was that because there were no barriers to participation, no price of admittance or advanced registration, and because as we pulled our friends into the idea and they, in turn, pulled their friends in with their excitement, the first KinkForAll unconference saw something on the order of 200 to 300 people participate.

Q: How did other people begin to become leaders in the community?

At first, I really had to push and encourage other people to start taking leadership roles. When we wrapped up the first event, I asked everyone to share the unique experience they’d had with their communities back home, and to use that experience to start KinkForAll unconferences in their home towns.

Since that first event in New York had attracted people from other cities ranging from Chicago to Washington DC, there was a lot of momentum—but that didn’t mean people, even those who’d been at the event, started out knowing how to put a KinkForAll together. So the first thing I did to help others was put together an “Unorganizer’s Guide,” in which I wrote down absolutely everything I could remember about how we put together that first event. I wanted it to be documented and ready for everybody who would need it in the future.

Q: What’s your ongoing time commitment to the community, now that it’s grown and spread?

It varies a lot. If there’s not an unconference actively in the works, I keep up with the mailing list and do what I can to keep the wiki in order and free of spammers. If there is an event being planned, even if it’s not one I’m specifically taking the lead on, it takes a lot more of my time. New unorganizers often ask for support and, as I’ve been around since the beginning and set up a lot of the infrastructure, I’m frequently the quickest person to point people to the resources we’ve created. I also often act as a spokesperson for the idea because I’m still so actively involved and it’s still growing.

Q: How much would you say KinkForAll as a community relies on your ongoing support and energy?

At first, I was really trying to do everything, and most of the events and structures came from efforts that I lead. At this point, though, a lot of other people have stepped up to take a lot of ownership of their local communities, and they put a lot of love into it. The core group is probably around 20 people or so, mostly people who have actively produced KinkForAll unconferences in the past or who were instrumental in making sure the ones they’ve participated in ran smoothly.

Then there’s a group of about 80 people who orbit these 20, and they function a bit like a marketing group. These are the people who are very excited about upcoming KinkForAll unconferences and will help promote them. That group is growing pretty quickly, which is nice to see.

Beyond that group, there are hundreds of people who watch the KinkForAll Twitter account, sharing links to videos taken at the events themselves, and will send emails to listservs and whatnot to talk about them, but they don’t actively jump into the organizing or planning for more events. There are a lot of different ways in which people participate in the community, but the key thing is that not all the forward motion comes just from me anymore, it’s all of us now.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about the KinkForAll community?

I love that people are so selfless. Everything that people share with KinkForAll is expressly put into the public domain. Only once has anyone ever asked to keep their copyright when they shared something with the group.  People who make their living off graphic design have donated hours of time to create beautiful flyers and logos for us, and people who make their living speaking at conferences about sexuality-related issues have spoken for free and even circulated recordings of themselves doing so on the Internet after the event.

And so much was just given freely to the public domain. I thought people would freak out about that, but most were actually really accepting of the idea. That’s the most awesome thing about the unorganizers: they really are in it because they want to change the world, and they’re not only willing but actively excited about the idea of contributing to a public library. They’re not even putting their work into Creative Commons; so much of this is true public domain!

It’s such a beautiful thing to see. I love it.

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Maymay blogs at MaybeMaimed.com, maintains MaleSubmissionArt.com, co-hosts Kink On Tap, co-founded KinkForAll, and twitters as @maymaym. Most of those links will take you to sexual content.