Community management wiki
This is part of my “Craft of Community” series of blog posts; you can find more through my craft of community tag.
The other day I got to wondering whether there was a good wiki out there that collected and synthesized knowledge about the tools and techniques of community management. I went a-googling, as you do, and found… not much. So I tweeted…
it seems kind of ironic that i can’t find a solid, well maintained, active community management wiki. anyone know one?
A lot of people started suggesting resources to me, but what I found was that most of them were:
- a single opinion – there are a lot of community management experts out there who would like to tell you how to do things their way.
- ephemeral – chats and discussion groups were common, but none had summarised or synthesised the results of their discussions to make a more lasting resource.
- commercial – a surprising number of resources required paid memberships, or were focused on promoting for-profit consultancies.
- unmaintained – I found two wikis out there that had no more than a handful of pages and no updates in over a year.
I was actually quite surprised at how many CM resources had a blend of one-true-wayism and commercialism. One resource — a consulting company’s newsletter — forwarded to me by email had ten tips for building a great community, one of which was that you should require members to use their real names and create a profile. Ironically, I’d just been reading up on 4chan (link goes to Wikipedia), an enormously influential community in which most participants are anonymous, immediately beforehand.
I’ve thought about it a bit, and I have a theory (eh-hem!) about why I couldn’t find a good community management wiki out there. To my mind, you need three things to have a wiki like that:
- You have to believe that community management is important, and that there is a set of skills and knowledge pertinent to community management that is worth sharing.
- You have to have an open, collaborative approach.
- You have to have the technical know-how and experience to set up the platform.
The field I come from — technically oriented Internet communities — is only just starting to realise that community management is an important role with a particular skillset. Sure, there are a bunch of people who are talking about this stuff — Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, Jono Bacon, Selena Deckelmann just to name a few — but as far as I know July’s Community Leadership Summit was the first time a lot of us came together in one place to talk about it.
Most of the resources I found online by searching for “community management” came out of the commercial sphere: people whose task is “build a community around brand X”, or who consult in that field. It’s definitely a growing area and there is a lot of talk around it, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t really foster an open, collaborative approach in the same way that, say, open source software or other volunteer organisations do.
And speaking of volunteer organisations, the non-Internet-focused ones like neighbourhood associations, PTAs, book clubs, support groups, and other such communities are missing the third piece of the puzzle. Most of them are not sufficiently comfortable with the technology (yet!) to build a wiki. (I know you are all dying to say “How hard can it be!? Tool X is so easy to use!” but please don’t. My local NERT group, based on San Francisco’s Mission District, doesn’t even have a Yahoo Group, because the leader thinks it’s a huge complicated thing.
So anyway, all this is a long-winded prologue to the fact that I’ve started a community management wiki, and you can find it at communitymgt.wikia.com.
From the “About” page:
The Community Management Wiki is an attempt to document and synthesize what we know about community management.
What is this wiki for?
- Explaining terms and concepts relevant to community management
- Describing best practices
- Reviewing and recommending tools
- Offering case studies of well-known or interesting communities
- Offering further reading and other resources for community managers
I’ve stubbed out a bunch of pages and a rough structure, but I’d like to invite anyone and everyone to dive in and add whatever you think is interesting. There’s an Article brainstorming page where we’ve been gathering ideas of things worth covering. You could add to that list, or take one of the red links and write a page for it (even a few sentences or some links to other resources would be good). If you’re new to wikis, the Wikia Tutorial is a good starting point, and there is lots of help available.
Let me know what you think!
Comments are closed.
Just for clarity, are you interested in all communities, or focused on online communities?
I have (until this year) run many hackfests (more than 50 per year) and would like to contribute, but we do not use online space despite being a techie group.
All, please! Sorry, should’ve been clearer about that. I think online/offline communities have a lot to learn from each other. I went to a great session at Wikimania about how the Red Cross organises and retains volunteers, and I was really excited to see Hillary Rettig, who comes from a (non-Internet-centric?) activist background involved in the FSF’s recent Women in Free Software mini-summit. Would love to get more stuff happening along those lines.
There’s a Hack Day page on the wiki already but it’s only a stub.
Great initiative, will be happy to promote it to CMs Down Under. I’m looking forward to your craft of community posts. BTW I’ve just blogged about managing volunteer moderators – thought it might be of interest since you mentioned vols.
Here’s a mature Wiki that I found some time ago:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki
It does seem to have a fair amount of content.
Luke: that does look pretty good! And weirdly, I’ve heard of it before and I think maybe I visited it back in 2001-2002 for some reason or other, possibly connected to the C2 wiki. Looks to be still fairly active; I’ll have to go spend some time digging around and reading what they’ve got there.
I do wonder whether/how they expect anyone to find it. I can’t make it show up in google for any related term without using the words “meatball” or “usemod” in my search. Looking around, it definitely has the feel of “the wiki is the community/the community is the wiki” (similar to C2). Talking to a colleague yesterday about another community, he said something about how there’s nothing stopping you from joining, but you kind of get the feeling you’re at a party where you don’t know anyone, and they’ve all got backstory together. Know what I mean?
Yes, I think it was an early fork of C2.
I know – it does seem to be somewhat closed and cliqueish (clubby?). Maybe they’re focussed on helping their members grow communities rather than growing themselves as a community … ?
BTW what’s up with my avatar?!?
The site uses MonsterID to randomly generate an avatar for people who don’t have a Gravatar. The randomosity is based on your email address, I think. If you want to choose your own avatar, you can do it at http://gravatar.com/, and that avatar will then follow you to lots of other blogs that also use the same system.
Let’s try this then …
You might be interested in emint, a community for community managers (http://www.e-mint.org.uk/) I’ve learned an awful lot from them over the years. Highly recommended.
S.
I see someone beat me to it, but back in the day before the term “wiki” came to be synonymous with WikiMedia the place to discuss online community-building was MeatballWiki: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl. I don’t know how active it has been recently though.
I just had come up in my feed reader, a post about the upcoming Online Community Unconference East happening in Feb. They seemingly had one last year too, but it is more business focused than I suspect you’re looking for.
I am also aware of Commania started by Richard Millington (whose blog on community management, I really like), but it’s a forum/Ning not a wiki… a wiki is definitely a missing part of the puzzle.
A lot of older Wikipedia policies or essays have their roots in stuff from Meatballwiki/C2.
OK I’m glad you started that wiki. I managed to unbundle a heap of links and stuff I had buried away in various places. I’m sure more will come to light as I think of it too. :)
Beside Meatball there is also CommunityWiki which kind of budded off Meatball.