When you’re doing something big and interesting (like, oh, say, organizing an online community) and are looking for people to help, please, for the love of niches and all that matters to you, understand that not all yeah totallys are created equal.
Here are some of the ones I’ve come across:
“Yeah, I totally think what you’re doing is great, and I’m going to be super supportive whenever you talk to me about it. I’ll even Twitter about it!”
“Yeah, I totally want to hear more about how I can help. Please give me more info so I can think seriously about the details.”
“Yeah, totally, I’m excited to help in whatever way you need! But you should know that I get excited about lots of things, and something else might be more exciting to me next week, and that might take up some of the time I’m promising you. You understand, right?”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only if I find the work satisfying.”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only when I’m available.”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only if it’s something I’m really good at.”
“Yeah, I totally want you to feel supported. I also know that you know I’m really busy, so by ‘help,’ you’re just asking me to be interested, think about it sometimes, and offer a hand or idea if the moment seems right… right?”
“Yeah, totally. And that job description you just asked me to commit to seems fair enough. But I also know you contacted me because I’m bringing my own skills and interests to the table, so I’m just going to adjust it to fit what works for me. That’s cool, right?”
“Yeah, totally. … and by ‘help’ you mean ‘sleep together,’ right? Oh, I knew you were looking at me that way for a reason. Of course! Just tell me where I ‘sign up’ *wink wink*.”
“Yeah, totally. And that means you’ll help on my project just as much, right?”
“Yeah, totally. I’m committed to your project and I trust your judgment. I’ll let you know if your requests don’t fit what I’m able to do, but overall, yes, I’m in. Tell me where and how.“
That last one is gold. But it’s not the same as all the ones before it, even if you want it to be.
And here’s the real kicker. The person saying “Yeah, totally” probably doesn’t know which one they mean. All they know is that they’re interested. Chances are they need to know what committing will feel like before they can affirm what they’re in for. It’s your job to help them feel it out.
It’s also your job to stay alert to the possibility that their yeah totally might mean something other than what you’re hoping for, and to work with that whenever their real interest is as soon as it becomes evident.
Accept their real interest. Be grateful for it. Don’t get bitter about it.
Unless they’re just trying to sleep with you. Then you can slap them.
Very few conductors organize an online community alone. We work with volunteers, paid staff, collaborators, and power members who want to help keep things on track. The following interview is with Amanda Richardson, an experienced team manager coming from a corporate environment. While she’s not discussing online communities directly, everything she says here about team management is directly applicable. Enjoy! ~Sarah Dopp
Q: What personality traits would you say are most useful in people who manage teams?
Lack of ego: to help with delegation and let go of attachment to outcome.
Vulnerability: it’s tough to earn trust when you aren’t being genuinely trusting yourself.
Decisiveness.
A sense of humor, particularly of the sort that can point inward.
Accountability! Managers who aren’t accountable to themselves are going to have a rough time achieving it in others.
Patience, patience, and more patience.
“The ability to distinguish the important from the urgent is of huge benefit for any type of leader.”
Q: How important is it to you to build trust with your teams? What are some of the ways you do that?
Really, it’s pretty much the number one job. People management is the subtext of your day in, day out work and it’s threaded throughout your interactions with your team and with everyone you engage with. Your integrity is under scrutiny, as is your consistency.
Be present and be yourself, and try to stay true to that regardless of your audience.
As for dealing directly with your team, be sure they know they can bring issues to you, even ones they may feel they should know how to handle. It should always be safe to ask questions and get clarity. Be incredibly accessible.
Q: What would you say is one the biggest or most common problems team managers run into?
It can be tough to switch gears from the strategic to the tactical and back again, constantly throughout your day. A lot of managers are naturally inclined toward one or the other, and it can be a challenge not to get so caught up in the nuts and bolts of their team’s work that they lose the big picture, or to step out of planning land and realize you’ve become distanced from your team.
Q: How do you recommend they solve or avoid that problem?
A little over a month ago, Meitar “maymay” Moscovitz and I gave a collaborative talk about “free culture” online communities, and how corporations can find them and benefit from them without hurting them.
We presented this at Forum One Network’s “Online Community Unconference” in Mountain View, CA. The whole session (which is also available) was about 50 minutes. Above is a 17-minute abridged version, boiled down to our main points:
What (and “who”) is free culture? (“We follow our passions.” “We find value in things other than money.” “We’re the ones who edit Wikipedia.” “We give our ideas away for free.” “We don’t let our jobs interfere with our work.” “We are the market makers. We’re creating the trends before they are capitalized on.” And so on.)
When trying to promote to a community, go to the community itself, rather than to the community manager.
When trying to sell to a community, don’t start with what your selling. Start with what you know about the community and why your product matters to them.
Rather than poaching a free culture community manager, support that manager where they need it, and invite them to advise you.
Rather than try to absorb or adopt a free culture community, set up your shop next door and be a good neighbor.
You don’t need to be a long-time member of the community to engage with it. But you do need to be familiar enough with the community to engage with it respectfully, in accordance with its customs, values, and norms.
The point is not that we’re free. The point is that wehave a culture, and it’s our own.
(The sound is a little crackly — sorry; I blame the outdated version of iMovie I was using. If it’s bugging you, go view the full talk instead.)
I’m intrigued by the relationship between corporate and free culture and want to dig up more examples. Open source software is the most obvious one. Threadless also seems like an interesting case study. Any other juicy ones come to mind?
The same day we launched this site, I was also a guest on the weekly Internet webcast, Tummelvision. Take a good look at these cuties, cuz I’m gonna be talking about them again around here:
Mitosis: Core community members become disenfranchised with new participants who don’t share the same values. These core community members seek more focus as they gravitate towards specific topics and relationships. Successful communities enable this and allow the community to split into smaller nodes, thus returning to an Established phase and repeating the life cycle process.
While the value of the community to its creators increases as membership increases, the value to individual members may diminish. Disregard for, or lack of understanding of these behaviors can lead to the failure of a community.
The author, Rob Howard from Telligent, offers a community lifecycles infographic and everything:
This is absolutely real and true and okay. When something gets too big, it stops being what a lot of people were looking for. You can either stop caring about those people and let them leave (and probably blog angrily about what a sellout monopolizing set of jerkheads you are), or support them in creating new, smaller spaces within the eco-system. The latter is more awesome.
Howard also lays out the three cardinal sins of mindset, often committed by community builders:
Genderfork.com, a community expression blog about gender-nonconformity and androgyny, is one of my own projects. Here’s how it turned from a solo art blog into a community project. It was all about the volunteers. – SD
Before Volunteers: The Solo Year
Genderfork started as a solo project, and I wrote one rule in stone for myself on Day One:
This will not require more than two hours a month of my time.
If I chose to spend more than two hours a month, that was fine, but the bare minimum amount of work needed to keep the site consistent and stable would have to fit into that time slot. I could commit to two hours a month. If the project needed more than that from me, it was too likely to die.
For a year, I blogged a photo a day, and I kept my time commitment promise to myself by doing the work in batches. I would dig through Flickr once a month, find 30 photos, blog them all as “draft” posts, and then schedule them to appear one a day, every day, at 10am. It took about two hours a month to maintain, and it was beautiful.
But when people started gathering around the site in larger numbers and asking for ways to connect with each other, “two hours a month” began to sound idiotic. I started adding new ways to contribute and increased my time commitment to two hours a week. (“But that’s it!”)
That plan lasted, oh, about three days before I realized I was screwed. Not only were the new contributions turning into a disorganized pile, but blogging photos was becoming much more time-consuming — I had found all the easy photos, and now I had to dig deeper. In order to go any further down this path, it was clear that I needed to ask for help.
(Sidenote: I should add right now that Genderfork has always been a money-free [or money-super-minimal] project, and that this simplified any ethical question around “paid vs. volunteer staff” for me considerably. We’ll talk more about that potential can of worms sometime. It’s an issue that needs a lot of careful thought.)
Volunteers: Phase One
On a whim, I put up a blog post explaining that I wanted to do more with the site, but that my time was too limited to handle all the work. Would anybody like to help? Three people I had never met or heard of before (Adisson, Erica, and Jakk) emailed me right away to ask what they could do.
I divided the photo blogging work between them (“please blog 10-12 photos each per month”), and made the requirements very concrete, basing them on everything I had learned from doing the work myself. This meant I had to write out everything from our editorial guidelines, to how to set up the Flickr-to-Genderfork account connection, to how to avoid accidentally offending photographers. It was a lot of writing, but it was worth it.
Communicating all of that to them and helping them get their first photos blogged took about a week or two. But once they got into it, they handled the responsibilities easily. Blogging photos was officially off my plate.
Hey Everyone! Welcome to Culture Conductor! It’s July 22nd, and this project is officially being born TODAY.
This is a project about online communities: how to create them, grow them, and keep them healthy. It’s a collection of interviews, stories, tools, tips, and wisdom from people who out there on the wild, wild internets doing this kind of work. It’s a place to share ideas and practical advice. It’s a place to find help and get work. And it’s a place to hang out with a people-geek like me.
Unlike pretty much every other blog I’ve ever made (and I’ve made way too many), this one was not built in an afternoon. It took a year. I’ve been carrying around and sifting through a messy pile of momentum and conundrums since last summer (if you go skim August 2009 – June 2010 in my personal blog, Dopp Juice, you’ll see a pretty clear evolution). I figured out what I wanted to create from it all in early May. And I’ve been working like a manic scattered crazypants since then to make it happen.
And here it is! Or at least, here’s the beginning.
What We Have Here
If you look around right now, all you can really see is a foundation. I’ve…
created a space,
filled it with some of my writings,
invited some of my favorite community workers to be interviewed,
set up a way for you to contribute content (if you’re interested in that kind of thing),
put out an invitation for community workers to come hang out with each other in a less public setting,
and built a form that anyone can use to ask for help.
What Will the Community Do?
Since we’re here to talk about community development, let’s take another look at that list. The only things on it I can control the growth of are this space and my writings. Everything else is just an invitation and an idea. This is a brand new community space. I’m throwing a party, and there is always a chance that no one will show up.
So what am I doing about it? I’m throwing the kind of party that I think is super interesting and want to spend my time at, even if I’m the only person in the room. If all this project becomes is a place for me to write about communities, I’ve won. If you join in, contribute, and make connections that lead to the creation of other great things, then something fabulous and way beyond my control will have happened.
What do I think is most likely to happen? People will gather and contribute, and they won’t be the people I expected. You’ll use some of the tools I set up, but not in the way I imagined. We’ll start connecting, and I’ll learn that this project is something completely different than what I figured could even exist.
And I will be in awe of how creative and adaptable we are. And I will love it.
My Undying Gratitude
Since this launch is pretty much the only concrete thing I have to show for an entire year of drawing on a whiteboard and being erratically, voluntarily unemployed, some serious acknowledgments are in order right now.
Jen Thomas designed this site layout in all of five days. She is a rockstar.
Denise Tanton, Lisa Williams, and Maymay all let me interview them before I had anything whatsoever to show for what I was doing.
Emma works closely with me to help me stay sane, organized, and productive, and I absolutely would not have pulled off this launch without her help.
Sarah Sloane worked closely with me to survive the first half of this year of conundrums, and nudged me into making sense of a lot of the pieces.
Chris Carfi hooked me up with an extensive pack of contracts, experience, and exposure, and basically funded these last two months of project building. Mark Resch has been a huge support from that team, too.
Everyone who signed up to be in my Dopp Brain support posse has been wonderfully supportive. Extra massive thanks to the Gold Hot Pants Site Testing Team that has been kicking the tires on this site for the last two days and telling me how to make it better.
My partner and my mother both shake their heads in confusion at me, but they also believe in me and support me without hesitation, and I survived the last year (without giving up on the thing I was chasing) because of them.
And there are a lot of other people I’ve drawn on for inspiration, advice, and support. If you’re one of them, I adore you.
Thank you.
Hang Out with Me on Tummelvision Today!
Today I’ll be a guest on Tummelvision.tv. If you like the scope of Culture Conductor, you’ll probably enjoy Tummelvision thoroughly — it’s about the ways in which we encourage participation and get people to connect with each other, especially online. It’s a live audio webcast happening at 5pm PST, 8pm EST, run by three people I have undying admiration and respect for: Heather Gold, Kevin Marks, and Deb Schultz. There’s a chat room to hang out in and be social about the show while it’s happening (I’m kind of addicted to it). So you should come!
So please… take a look around. Read through my kick-off content, and show some love to the brave folks who were interviewed. Check out the links in the “Welcome” part of the sidebar for the context and the community invitations.
There’s a lot more juicy content to come, so please subscribe to the emails (see the sidebar) or RSS, depending on which brand of blog reader you are.
And let me know what you’re most interested in, and what you’d like to see explored!
Want more juicy news, ideas, and resources for building online communities? With your help, we keep a running feed of useful stuff from the rest of the web...
m
l
r)
Recent Comments
— watchgleeonline on “Passing Notes, Playing Dead, Saying Thanks”
— RanTipz on “Kickstarter Fundraising: Myths, Facts, and Alternatives”
— freelancejoe on “Kickstarter Fundraising: Myths, Facts, and Alternatives”
— Joan on “Kickstarter Fundraising: Myths, Facts, and Alternatives”
— electrical on “FIRST POST! How the First Comment Sets the Tone for the Entire Conversation”