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:
That’s Deb Schultz, Kevin Marks, and Heather Gold — all tummlers who like to talk about tummeling. But first, what’s a tummler?
tumm·ler // (t
m
l
r)
n.
1. One, such as a social director or entertainer, who encourages guest or audience participation.
2. One who incites others to action.
In other words, the person who engages a group. (Kinda like a conductor, you might say…)
Here’s the full show for your listening pleasure:
Tummelvision 28 with guest Sarah Dopp
Tip: The first segment is about current events. If you want to skip to the part where we discuss Culture Conductor, jump ahead to the 39:15 mark.
Here are some more detailed notes on what was discussed in the show, with timestamps:
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There’s a great article on Mashable today called “HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable Community,” which introduces the concept of Community Mitosis:
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:
- “If you build it, they will come.”
- “Once I’ve launched it, I’m done.”
- “Bigger is better.”
Any of those can break you.
Go read the whole article. It’s good.
(Sent my way by Jenka of Social Creature. Thanks!)
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.
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Photo by JD Lasica
Lisa Williams has extensive experience as a online community organizer and builder. Her current project, Placeblogger, support blogs about geographic communities. Through generosity and a light touch, she’s able to bring readers, funding, and a broader context of belonging to many communities at once. And she’s damned thoughtful about how she approaches it. Read on! ~Sarah Dopp
Q: How would you explain Placeblogger to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs. If you want to know who’s blogging in Timbuktu, we’ve got ya covered.
Q: What’s your role in the project, and in the community?
I started the site in 2007 as a way to answer a simple question: how many blogs really were doing journalism and online community for geographical communities? At the time I started looking, in 2006, we found that 1 in 7 Americans lived in a community served by a placeblog. Now it’s 1 in 2. I don’t know of any other form of community media that’s had that kind of explosive growth.
One thing I’m not: I’m not the pope of placeblogging, nor is Placeblogger the Vatican. I’m really against efforts to “professionalize” any placebloggers who don’t want to do that. Most placebloggers run their sites as a labor of love, and I think we have to respect the kind of authority that gives them to run their sites however they please.
There are three ways I want to help: One, I started the Placeblogger Angel Fund to fund investigative reporting at grassroots news sites. Two, I want to get placebloggers connected with each other. Three, I want more people to find and participate in their local online communities.
“I love that placebloggers have dug underneath the bland, big-box chain retail surface that’s encrusted so much of the earth to the deep magic and humor that resides there, that is still under there, and will always be there.”
Q: What do you love most about the community?
I love that placebloggers have dug underneath the bland, big-box chain retail surface that’s encrusted so much of the earth to the deep magic and humor that resides there, that is still under there, and will always be there. Placebloggers get that communities are the ultimate inside joke.
Q: What makes the Placeblogger community stand out, to you? What makes it special?
In a strange way, Placeblogger is an anti-community. Over the years I’ve been running it, I’ve had countless approaches from large media organizations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs who wanted to enhance their own professional standing or make money off the thousands of people serving their local communities by writing blogs, ferreting out news, and being a local watercooler. Some wanted placebloggers to abandon their own sites and write for theirs; others wanted to indoctrinate them into the values and standards of their own profession. My least favorite of these were people who wanted to give placebloggers ethics training, as if somehow they were inherently untrustworthy.
Placeblogs don’t look like each other, and that’s good. They don’t look like conventional news organizations, and that’s great. What’s happening isn’t a community where shared values and practices are being passed back and forth — it’s a giant pool of simultaneous experiments aimed at figuring out how to save journalism and civic engagement for the next century.
Someday, the day will come when we have a professional organization and get together and have panel discussions. But that day hasn’t come yet, and when it does, I’ll be a little sad about the end of the great florescence, the great gold rush, of competing ideas and ideals.
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This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd
Okay, so lack of hate isn’t really “magic” — it’s the tone we set from the beginning.
Have you ever shown up to a conversation that was already in progress? What did you do? You listened to what was going on, how people were interacting, and where they were in the discussion before you joined in. You drew all sorts of conclusions about expectations and protocol just by taking a quick inventory of the situation, and then you went with the flow, adding your perspective in a way that seemed to fit.
That’s what people do when they show up to online communities, too. They take a brief scan around, they pull in whatever cues they can gather, they decide if they want to join in, and then they do so in a way that fits all the factors. Think of the quality of comments on Flickr versus YouTube. Flickr takes community management very seriously, and people have gotten the message over time (whether consciously or unconsciously) that being respectful in comments is important. On YouTube, the expectation is more or less that people will be idiots. So people are idiots.
Take note of what kind of conversation people are experiencing when they show up to your site. If you monitor it carefully enough in the beginning, it will begin to (mostly) monitor itself.
How do you set the tone? By contributing in the style that you’d like others to contribute. By offering some simple, clear guidelines on how people should treat each other and why. By suggesting to the people in your inner circle that they engage in a certain way. By showing up and being personally involved to positively redirect things when someone goes off course.
This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd
Be careful about comment and moderation policies, and make sure they’re addressing real needs rather than pre-emptively striking against imagined ones.
I anticipated that Genderfork would get a lot of hate mail, and I strongly considered turning on the “you have to be pre-approved to leave comments” setting to guard against it. If you’ve ever left a comment only to see a “now waiting for moderation” message, you know what a slap in the face that setting feels like. Fortunately, I decided to wait and see if I really needed it. 70,000+ total visitors later, we still don’t get a single shred of anti-queer hate in our comments. ZERO. NADA. GOOSE EGG. (Okay, well there was that one day, but it was super-isolated, and there was a miscommunication, so I say it doesn’t count.) I now have it set up so that people can even comment anonymously — no name or email address required — because I know they appreciate the option, and they respect the privilege. Still no hate. Magic.
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
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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.
“We held the event in New York but organized it from Australia, with no previous experience of how to do such a thing.”
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is an excerpt from my essay, Aikido Moves for Online Community Management, written last fall. It may not be relevant to every community situation, but it worked for me. I’d love to hear your version. -sd
If your job is to keep the community healthy, then your “at ease” stance needs to be slightly above any emotional discussions. You’re at your most helpful when you’re keeping a bird’s eye view on things and can understand everyone’s perspectives.
This might make you feel like the community’s not really yours. That’s right. I’m sorry. It’s not. It’s theirs. You are the steward and caretaker, and when you’re hanging out there, you’re on duty. Like a bartender at a good club, you get plenty of perks from being in the room, but you still need to stay behind the bar. (And, preferably, sober.)
If you find yourself emotionally involved in a challenging situation, that’s your cue to go find someone else to advise you — someone who understands the community but isn’t involved in the drama. You can’t hold the Smite Buttons and be angry at the same time — that’s just not fair.
But even if you are angry, and you are getting advice from someone more balanced, you still probably need to keep your venting off the Internet. People need to trust you, and blame-heavy ranters are hard to trust.
So go off and kick trashcans, let a friend keep an eye on things while you’re gone, and come back when you’re ready to be sane again. You just saved yourself from a mutiny.
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