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.

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What’s an Online Community and When Does It Need a Manager?

A community is a group of people who recognize that they have something in common. An online community is what they get when they interact with each other on the Internet.

Unlike blogs which have a mostly-standardized format, online communities show up in lots of different structures. These include:

• Forums and message boards
• Chat rooms
• Email discussion groups
• Blog posts
• Blog comments
• Wikis
• Community areas (groups, fan pages) within a big social networking site
• Community-specific social networking sites
• Any number of custom-feature websites, widgets, applications that let people do stuff
• Interactions happening anywhere on the Internet

Really, if you think online communities usually come in formulaic cookie-cutter websites, please go read that list again a few times. What we’re talking about here is how people want to interact — not how we think they should.

There are three other quirky things about online communities that I want to make absolutely clear:

1) The levels of commitment people have to them vary wildly. More often than we want to admit, it’s just a fleeting interest, and that’s okay. (Example: If I have a question about my HP printer and go digging through Internet forums for answers, I become part of the HP consumer support community for about an hour. And then I don’t care anymore.)

2) The levels of interaction people get into also vary wildly. See the 90-9-1 Principle: in any online community, about 90% of the people involved are just there to read (and please don’t demean this group as “lurkers” — think of how many websites you visit that you don’t say a word on!). 9% will respond to or improve the content that’s already there. And 1% will generate new content from scratch. Yes, this is an über-simplification and will vary by structure, but I can tell you from my own experience that it’s accurate enough.

3) The uniting factor for a community can be pretty much anything. Pick any combination of people, places, things, identities, experiences, and ideas. If people have it in common, there’s a potential community there. This isn’t to say that every topic is worth putting energy into, but please: if you have a limiting idea in your head about what people actually care about, now’s a good time to ditch it.

Now this leads us to the next question: “When does an online community need a manager?”

Not always. But sometimes.

If you or your organization created the space that the community is using to interact, and if it’s important to you that the community maintains a certain level of focus or respect, then you probably need a manager.

A manager is someone who smooths out the edges, advocates for what’s most important, encourages participation, and helps people get what they need. They are not dictators. If a manager’s unchecked goal and approach is to control a community, the community will find a way to mutiny. But if they’re just there to guide it in ways that meet the goals of the group, pretty much everyone involved will be grateful.

[Originally posted on my other blog, Dopp Juice]

Creators vs. Maintainers

Last week I attended a Forum One Community Unconference.  By the end of one of the sessions, my cohorts had put into corporate terms something I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for awhile:

The person responsible for the growth of the community is often different than the one(s) responsible for its health.

Or, in their corporate terms: the Community Program Manager and the Community Manager are different positions.

Here’s a version of the diagram I sketched out during the session:

Basically, the Community Manager is in charge of advocating for the community’s health needs — what will keep it running smoothly, what the users need to be happy, what the IT Dept needs to improve to keep it alive.  The Community Program Manager works closely with the Community Manager but interfaces primarily with the executive staff, other department leads, and other high-level stakeholders, making sure that trajectory of the community is meeting business goals.

Several people in the discussion confirmed that yes, once their job shifted to only having to do one of these things, their lives became immediately more sane.

In “free culture” / ad-hoc community development, this usually boils down to the creators and the maintainers. The person who came up with the community might not be the person who keeps it thriving.  They’re different skill sets, and require paying attention to very different things.

If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this.

If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this: Community structures.

But first, hi, I’m Sarah Dopp. Have we met yet? Maybe? Okay, here’s a refresher on my story…

Right now, a lot of people know me for creating Genderfork.com, a volunteer-run community expression blog about gender variance.  That puppy is a machine of love. All of the content comes from community members, and it pretty much runs itself. Three blog posts a day, an original stream of twitter content, 20,000+ unique visitors a month, and an active community of commenters who adhere religiously to our “Be Nice” policy with minimal moderation. All of that is built around a very obscure, very controversial issue: the rejection of gender norms. And the project can go so much further.  We just kicked off a Tumblr presence. And we’ve got a group of people setting up community forums. And we’re talking T-shirts. And performances. And a book. The momentum is absolutely there, and it will probably all happen, but not because of me. It will happen because of the people who feel passionately about it.

Despite how it looks sometimes, gender isn’t really my topic.

In my offline life, I host a monthly open mic in San Francisco.  It keeps me connected to my roots: I performed spoken word poetry regularly (weekly!) at a microphone through high school and college, eventually winning poetry slams and joining a team for it. One summer night in 2003, I decided it might be cool if I started publishing some of my friends’ work online. I built the website — TheWRIT.org — and within a month it had turned into a 30-contributor online magazine. We did another the next month. And the next month. By Christmas, there were over 100 local writers involved. By March, we had remodeled the site to let people upload their own writing and get workshop-style feedback from other writers.  A year later, 5,000 people were using it.  (That project is now closed… a long story that I’m looking forward to telling you.)

Meanwhile, it had also become clear to me that writing wasn’t my topic, either.

Since both The WRIT and Genderfork took on lives of their own, I’ve often joked that whenever I get excited about something, I accidentally poop out a community about it. It makes me nervous sometimes. What if I get excited about something boring next, like air conditioners? Can you imagine? Me? The Queen of the Air Conditioner Community? It could happen. (Well, not really, because I don’t find them exciting. But still.)

When you start a community based on passion, you become a part of it. It bonds with your identity. Moving on is hard.

So let’s make this absolutely clear. At the risk of becoming a meta monster, my topic is community structures: how they’re created, how they’re organized, and how they play out with real people affecting their paths.  If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this.

But let’s make it bigger than that. Let’s build a collection of resources to support people who are doing the work, and make it easier for people who are interested in the field to get started.  Let’s strengthen our understandings of Best Practices, elbow out sleazy manipulation, and work together to raise an army of army-raisers.  Let’s get to the meat of the subject, honor the nuances, identify the commonalities, and try to write down what works.

I have lots of people I want to introduce you to, and this is a very exciting time for me.

Thank you for being here.

Love,
Sarah