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.
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]
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