How to build and maintain communities
Whatsapp/Facebook groups or passionate open-source communities or even offline ones
Hello reader,
Here’s my cool surfing story from last week:
I have been struggling with creating a fruitful community of self-learners on Slack for quite some time now. I’ve got the people in it but I don’t have the engagement.
Having been a part of one really amazing group in an open-source organisation, I wanted to replicate its success. But to no avail.
This surfing session took me from being completely clueless about managing a community to sort-of cluey.
How did I stumbled upon this:
It all started when I stumbled upon this tweet on my Twitter feed —
Visakan often posts some really thoughtful tweetstorms. I have recently started following him.
This one included a link to the following article on his personal blog that showed me the rabbit hole.
How to build and maintain communities
(Visakan Veerasamy)This blog post started out as a bunch of notes and links.
If there was a book on managing communities, it would do good to include these articles as its chapters. If there was a course teaching people how to maintain good communities, these bloggers should be the lecturers delivering these very articles in their respective lectures.
Below I discuss the articles in some of those links.
Why you should dive deeper:
* A must-read if you have started a community or tried to start one in the past
* It makes for an interesting read even if you are a part of some community - maybe a Whatsapp/Facebook group of people passionate about X. This article gives you a new lens with which you can analyse its health and your role in it.
* “most people want their lives to be sitcoms that pretend to be adventures but if you can make the leap and decide that you’re an adventurer, and then, by going on small adventures, find the other adventurers, then you can pool your energies and resources and go on BIG adventures.”
This article suggests an interesting phenomenon that can cause the death of communities - evaporative cooling effect.
It occurs when the most high value contributors to a community realize that the community is no longer serving their needs any more and so therefore, leave. When that happens, it drops the general quality of the community down such that the next most high value contributors now find the community underwhelming.
What a clever name, right?
Why you should dive deeper:
The article suggests some ways in which the evaporative cooling effect can be prevented —
* Social Gating: “In the case of BayCHI, the social gate was the nicheness and unglamorousness of the content. […] Nicheness is just one possible social gate, charging money is another popular one.”
* Unequal roles of participation: “High value participants are treated as special because they have recognition & reputation from the community.”
* Finally it proposes that there are 2 types of structural designs that a community can take - plaza and warren. “In the plaza design, there is a central plaza which is one contiguous space and every person’s interaction is seen by every other person. In the warren design, the space is broken up into a series of smaller warrens and you can only see the warren you are currently in.”
* “It’s also interesting to note that the real world is intrinsically warren while the online world is intrinsically plaza.”
Well-kept gardens die by pacifism
This blogpost argues that communities that regard themselves too good to use censorship, will die.
Why you should dive deeper:
* Don’t you just love this line? — “anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter, and students fear their professors' grading”
Although, published in 2008, this article seems to be relevant now more than ever. Now, when it is common to witness trolls write inciteful comments, dominating the tone of the comments on social media. Now, when bad actors (governments) are using this behaviour to brainwash public opinion.
Paul Graham says that every disagreement can be classified into one of the following disagreement hierarchy.
DH0. Name-calling.
DH1. Ad Hominem.
DH2. Responding to Tone.
DH3. Contradiction.
DH4. Counterargument.
DH5. Refutation.
DH6. Refuting the Central Point.Why you should dive deeper:
* To read more detailed explanations of each of these levels along with examples.
* It has the genius observation and articulation skills that you can expect of Paul Graham.
PG suggests some advantages of making such classification:
* “But while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.”
* “The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments.”
* “Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional.”
* “But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier.”
Finally, I had to dive deeper into the source in search of the goose that laid this golden egg - Visakan’s blog.
I love the looks of it.
He even has a handy start here page. I plan to devour his blog soon!
Why you should dive deeper:
* Visakan is a really good communicator. He can articulate some really deep thoughts in writing.
* Hey, all Mean Girls fans - he has written an article titled - an analysis of power and social dynamics in ‘Mean Girls’ !
* Personally, I find him especially interesting because he has Indian origins!
That’s all folks!
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