About this site
Build Your
Site
images
visitor counter
signup cards
tips
About this site
Build Your
Site
images
visitor counter
signup cards
tips
"How was your week?"
Quick Tips for
Hosting Online Communities
© Caleb John Clark 1998/1999
All feedback welcome.
calebjc@well.com |
www.plocktau.com
A work in progress
1st full draft: 09-07-1998 | Last update:
02-08-1999
Feel free to print and/or distribute this document as long as you keep author citations with all copies and don't charge money for it.
This handbook is intended for people hosting online community efforts using asynchronous discussion software such as WellEngaged or WebCrossing. This is not about live chat, or e-mail lists. Familiarity with forum software and general idea of online forums is assumed.
This handbook assumes other folks are setting up the software, designing the overall online community space and running the managerial end of things.
Hi, I'm Caleb. I've written this little handbook based on my experience with, and study of, online groups. So just who am I? And why do I think I can be of some help to new hosts? Good question, and here are my answers:
1. I'm a professional host for Netscape Inc. Professional Connections. I host the "Issues and Ideas" forum and have been from beta testing through public launch. I've learned a lot and work with some great people. See www.netscape.com and go to "discussions".
2. I co-founded and facilitate the NoEnd group in San Francisco, a 2.5 years and counting high end Web developers group with a 300+ person mailing list and branches in New York and San Diego. Our charter is "humanizing technology" and "how was your week?" See www.noend.org for more info.
3. I'm halfway through a masters degree in Educational Technology at San Diego State University. I've built, facilitated and studied online forums, listservs and chat rooms while in school and in my graduate assistant work in the department's Instructional Media Lab.
4. I was immersed group consensus run alternative schools from 1968, until starting a public high school in 1980.
I've written this book because I wanted to pass on what
I've learned, so far, about growing online communities. I
hope it helps. My portfolio is at:
www.plocktau.com
We've got to have a catchy acronym to get things started and our minds grooving on the same subject: hosting online discussion forums.
G: Grow
Successful online communities, or any community for that matter, are grown, not built. You can build a community and wait for members to join, but to be a tight community it should grow naturally. The strongest communities, like the WELL, grew naturally from a small close group to a large close group with an even closer core group that started it.
This is an environmental concept. In growing a community the leaders should be the ones that create an environment that will let a group of people move in and grow closer. The original founders of the community need to be supported and encouraged to stay around and act like "founding fathers." New members join are welcomed by the founders, and also watched by the founders. This creates an environment of responcibility and a place with history.
R: Real
Be real. Hosts engage in a very public job so it's very easy to tell if they like their job. If you don't really like helping people get together and share experiences and information, don't do it. You don't want to go to parties with a surly and unhappy host with a plastic smile pasted to their made up face.
O:
Organize
Hosts organize things. They make all the plans that result in a great party that seem effortless. They create an environment in which a good party can happen. Think of a good party. You walk in to a party and there's usually a theme that is obvious, but not forced, music, a bar, a few of your close friends, but an interesting mix of new people as well. The host seems to be relaxed and happy, things just happen. You try and meet people at the door and introduce them to other people so they feel at home. A good host points out the bathroom and general layout of a party to newcomers. They make sure there is ice and that the music is creating the right vibe. If there's a fight, they call the police and meet them at the door. Nobody sees the week of planning that took place before.
U:
Undertake
As in to assume responsibility. As host, you undertake responsibility for the gathering, whatever the outcome. However, the real power is in the people in your gathering, you are really working for them. A big part of being a leader is artfully also undertaking the artful negotiation of the slopes of perception. Leaders are the people who perceive what the group as a whole and see what the group is doing before anyone individual in the group notices. Most often you job is to show the group what it's showing you. Confused, wait a few weeks and keep your eyes, and heart open and you'll understand.
P:
Proceed
Hosts keep things moving, a rhythm of energy. But this is not always up to you. Groups are not machines with buttons to push. Sometimes parties quiet down for a bit and you need to let that happen, but the host is the one who senses that after a lull in energy it's time to put on a James Brown song and do some sweaty dancing.
Forums are about topics. Here's some tested and approved ways of going about creating topics.
Planting topics
When you create a topic you'll need to name it, something like, "bugs and problems: Tell us so we can fix them!" Then you'll need to write the first one or two posts. The first post is usually neutral and generally considered a "starter," something short about what the topic is about and maybe posing a question. The second post can also be yours, if you want to voice something as the host to get things going.
Subsistence topics
These are some standard starting topics that have evolved over time.
Introductions
You always need a place for people so say "Hi" as they enter your forum. Try and find out general, but not too private information, about your members. Where people are from? what they do? And use their name when welcoming them. Example: "Hi Jim, welcome. Great to have someone involved with teaching technology in the forum. What general part of the globe are you from?"
"Introductions" is also the first topic you should check into and the place you should most frequently post to.
Help
Have a place for "newbies" to go for a basic outline of using the technology. How to read back posts before jumping in, staying on topic, etc.
Topic
Suggestions
A place for, well it's obvious what it's for. What may not be obvious is the need to listen to even the most outrageous topic ideas and respond with your thinking on them. If you don't listen, people tend not to talk.
Crop topics
Once the general subject matter of your forum is decided you've got to lay down a foundation of topics. If you're working for a game company, these might be "Bugs," "Play Tips," "Online gathering," "Suggestions," and "Web Resources." This is the land the members will settle on. As new issues come up you can add new topics like "release 2.0" and archive old topics that haven't had any traffic for a few days or weeks.
When to harvest a topic
Topics grow and eventually they also start to die. Unfortunately, you're the one who has to make the call as to the actual moment of death, and you're also the one who has to pull the trigger. Timing is up to you, usually a month with no traffic and it's definitely time to kill a topic, or at least archive it. It's a sad thing to do, but take heart, they'll be new topics to plant soon.
Original topics with proven growing powers
These topics are the most difficult and the most important. This is where your community can really come together. I've seen this kind of community building work wonders in several groups on and off line. These kind of topics are really about humanizing technology and valuing human identity and experiences. Amazing things can happen when people feel valued,unique and respected!
How was your week?
My favorite off all! Everybody has an identity, but online it's tough to establish because we are separated from our bodies, the anchor of our "real life" identities. One way I've found to get around this is to always have a space where people can express how their week was. Seems trivial, but it's very powerful. As soon as someone writes, "This week was bad, my 10 year old got sick just as I had a big presentation at work which I botched" they've made themselves unique and invested emotions in the community. When someone writes back, "I hear you, I've got enough trouble juggling work and home life and I'm single! More power to you" then you've got a community. I started a permanent "How was your week" on Netscape's forum and it was successful enough for several other hosts to make it a permanent topic in their forums.
Random Babble
This is the steam valve for a forum, a place to release and play. As a host your job is to keep people on topic. If you're discussing bugs and people start going off on politics, you need to either create a politics topic, or gently refocus the group.
But what about when you have something to say that doesn't fit into a topic. What about when you just want to say it and not think about whether you're following a topics thread?
I've found success having a topic called something like "random babble." Surprisingly the discussions can be amazing in such a topic, from silly to heartfelt. It's a place to blow off steam and be crazy, which makes it easier to stay on topic on the other forums.
A great redirecter of bad energy in a forum.
I came up with this forum from the bartenders saying, "Take it outside." Or , as my mother used to say when I got too rough, "Go play outside!" Well I thought, why not have an "Outside" in a forum?
There needs to be an outside place to go when what you are doing is bothering people. The point being that certain behavior is no appropraite for certain spaces, but that doesn't mean the person can't behave like that, just that they need to do it in the right place.
Most people hate to be told what they can't do. But they are more receptive to suggestions about where and when to do something. I came up with this forum because people sometimes get in flame wars, and rouge posters occasionally come in and just start randomly insulting people. I've found that sending an e-mail that says, "I've deleted your posts, please take future posts Outside," or "OK, time to take this little word tussle Outside, it is not appropriate here" works much better then just telling the person they can't do something.
I also found that people loved to go into the "Outside" topic and just play fight. Very interesting...
I was getting spammed in a forum with solicitations and, instead of e-mailing the solicitors, I decided to make a forum called 'Community Bulletin Board" for them to post their stuff in. After all, most communities have a place for solicitations, junk mail and the like, why not online?
I e-mailed the offenders and suggested they repost on the bulletin board area. Surprisingly, this ended up attracting several people to the community as valuable posters who had originally just stopped by to spam an advertisement.
Can you build a good town with just a construction crew? No. You can build the buildings, but unless you're building prisons, it's hard to fill them by force. You need people to decide to live somewhere and over time a community will grow up around the town . You can help, you can build a fire station, church, school, but you can't build a community because a community is more then just a town with buildings, it's a group of people.
I've experienced the same thing with online communities, the good ones grow in the right environment. I see online communities more like plants.
Your job is to create the environment, seed it, and keep it growing. You are the farmer, if you will.
Host farming duties
Hosts should check in five to six days a week, read every post, respond to all introductions and topic suggestions and post a few thoughts to active to topics. This is vital, if a spammer hits your forum, or someone posts something totally out of line, you've got to see it and take care of it quick. Depending on your pay, this should take less then an hour a day. Once a week, hosts should take a long look at the forum as a whole and archive stale topics or start new ones.
Length of posts
The shorter the post, the more like a conversation it is. Long posts often leave one with the feeling of having been to lecture. Unless long posts are wonderfully written and leave openings for questions, they can be real topic killers. It seems as though a long well-thought-out post is almost a complete entity in itself, and one that doesn't need any additional response. Short posts, ones that have a thought or a comment, but don't necessarily explore all its possibilities leave more openings for others to chime in.
Giving
Taking is easy, but in this new information world, taking does not work like it used to. The hoarding of information now ends up leaving you with less information than people who share information and thus receive shared information from other like-minded information miners. Hosts need to share information and create a give and take environment in their forums. Hosts need to constantly think if they've read or seen something that would be of interest in one of their threads. A URL? An article? A study? and then remember to share it with the forum.
Feedback
Get it. When in doubt about archiving a topic, ask your forum. If a post seems out of place, but you're not sure, ask the forum. Wondering how you're doing as a host, ask the forum. People love leaders who listen to their constituents.
Water questions
Conventional wisdom says that when in doubt write short posts that end in an open question, such as, "...sure, but what about those using older computers to access the information, what if the access time is too slow, do people think they'll wait around?"
Not posting
You've got to know when to post 'em, know when to walk away.... Although it's tempting to post after every other post, it's not wise. Hosts can carry a slow forum for a little while, but in the long run its the members of the community that must carry the forum. When you come upon a post that seems likely to elicit a response, leave it be for a few days.
Killing Weeds
Weeds are always a problem. In online commuities, weeds are rouge insults from hit and run posters, flames, adversisements, and solititations. One concept I've found helful in dealing with undesirables in a forum is that weeds themselve are not bad, they are just bad when they are in a garden. In other words, rouge posts, insults, solicitaions, and flames are themselves not bad, just bad when in the wrong place.
Hosts should have the power to "scribble," "hide," or "delete" posts. If you are using software that saves posts you hide or scribble, like WellEngaged, you don't need to save them because the software does. But if posts are truly deleted, then you need to copy and paste all posts before you delete them so you have a record. You're the judge here on what gets deleted. It's pretty obvious most of the time when a commercial entity spams a topic, or someone posts a sexually laden post out of context. Host etiquette says that you need to send an e-mail to the author gently letting them know what you did and why, and where their post might have a more receptive home in another forum or topic. The goal is to redirect the person's energy, not directly counter.
For examples of redirection, jump up to "Outside" and "Community Bulletin Board" above.
Off the farm contact
The party was loud and active. Sherry walked up to Bill, took his arm and said, "Hey Bill, can I talk to you for a minute" and pulled him aside. This is an example of how much of a person's attention you can get by taking them out of a group situation and communicating to them one on one. In the online world, this is e-mailing forum members privately. There is great power in gently e-mailing members of your community directly and privately. Sometimes you may do this because you've deleted one of their posts, but even better is when you do it to answer a question that might be better answered privately to save embarrassment. The best is when you e-mail to thank a member for their time and effort.
Frequent posters as farm hands
The demographic of most forums look like this: lots of lurkers, a group of sporadic posters, and a few frequent posters. It's like a good town has lots of citizens, a group of whom are sporadically active and outspoken, and a few volunteer citizens who are very involved and outspoken. Given this spread, it's a great idea to stay close to your frequent and active posters. These are your informal leaders and the people with the most invested in your community. You can ask them if they want a topic to informally host and sometimes they can even be hired to host forums from distance. At the very least, treat them as informal hosts and honor the time they put into your forum.
Humor
Don't forget about humor. Have fun, know when to laugh at yourself and when to lighten up. Hosting is at its core a social and experiential thing. People need to take away positive experiences, value for time spent, and have had a little fun. And you do too.