AUDIO: CMTY-barcamp_08_26_2006.ogg
Who took Notes?? (me)
Barcamp Stanford
Community
Suggested topics
- What is community? (definition)
- How to leverage community for your project?
- How to stop toxic contributions?
- Community 2.0 -- where are we going?
- Expanding the unconference process
- Concrete goals for a community
- What's the glue that hold together a community?
- Balancing volunteerism & commerical interests
- What's the critical mass for a community?
- Technologies to support communities
What makes a community:
- Purpose
- Membership
- Energy (putting energy into a group)
How to make it work:
- Provide tools for the community
- Make the purpose explicit, get people who want to do that
- It's about what people want and what the existing circumstances prevent them from doing.
- Getting buy-in: the more responsible you are for the execution of an idea, the more you are respected in the community.
- Ownership, pride (e.g. barcamp)
- Help people with what they are trying to do, it will come around (eventually) ... don't look at what you want to do, but help others with what they need.
- Beware of barriers of entry (e.g. Barcamp New York)
- Latent desire of people to come together, if you hit it, community will happen.
- Also, community is a function of the willingness of people to build/have a community.
- Sometimes it takes real champions
How to build communities:
- Lower the barriers
- Using tools and technologies
- Initiative, and identifying issues that are important for people
Sometimes the purpose may just be to connect (no matter what the explicit "purpose"), with people with similar ideas.
How to stop/avoid toxic contributions?
- Benevolent dictator, takes a lot of consistent overview, not too strict a set of rules (then you get sidewalkers (?) ... if you enforce it, people will respect it and appreciate it ... requires a lot of oversight!
- Looking for results ... if you want to create a community, first you have to abandon the idea of ever succeeding at creating one ... e.g. Barcamp: tried to establish certain guiding principles ... e.g. open finances ... credit given for attendees ... first: try to give everything away ... commercial outset will be noticed by people. ... absence of pressure makes it easier for community to take ownership ...
Specific problems with online communities:
- Face-to-face: lots of none-verbal information (e.g. little annoying things, toxic behavior)
- Online: f-interactions (?), often impossible to do ... e.g. Amazon: only thing you have is logical interface ... need to highlight the right-brain-side, too. ... for online communities to work well you have to recognize that computerts are only technical.
Other ways to avoid toxic behavior:
- Invite-only combined with reputatation systems (some pressure can be applied based on existing structures)
Coworking:
- 5-7 anchors (pay rent), can invite n amount of others (who contribute also)
You have to build resilient systems: there's never gonna be no spammers. Think immune system. E.g. Wikipedia (currently thinking about being more aggressive against spam) ... think foresting and the forest self-policing itself ...
How to deal with bad actors?
- Applies when you have a reasonably open membership
- The beauty of invite-only: 1) you feel special (becaue you received and invite) 2) with a limited number of people whom you can invite, you will only invite your best connections ...
