A surprising number of old friends seem to be asking me, lately, what exactly it is that I’m doing these days. I guess that after a decade of being known mostly as a Perl developer, it seems like I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent. So, to make it clear: these days, my day job is as the community manager for Freebase.com, specifically for what we call the “Freebase geek community”: open source developers, data contributors, and all kinds of individuals who just think Freebase is cool and want to play with it. (I have less to do with the big companies that build stuff on Freebase — we have separate business development people who work with them.)
This is the first time I’ve had “Community” in my job title, but it’s obviously not the first time I’ve done it. One of the first Internet communities I built, back in 1994, was a mailing list called AusBDSM, which had hundreds of members, events in most major Australian cities, and a couple of spinoff groups by the time I handed it off to my successors in… was it 1996? Since then I’ve founded dozens of other communities, ranging from technical to political, from a handful of members to several hundred, and from pretty-damn-successful to thoroughly moribund. As for how many communities I’ve participated in, it would have to be in the hundreds, easily, though of course I don’t keep count.
All of which is to say: I have opinions on community management. Oh boy do I have opinions. But it occurred to me recently that although I used to blog a fair bit about programming when I was a professional software developer, I don’t often blog about community management now I’m getting paid for that. Which is funny, because I originally set up this blog to write about work-related/professional subjects.
Speaking of my opinions on community management, tonight I started reading Jono Bacon’s new(ish) book, The Art of Community. (It’s available as a free download under Creative Commons, if you’d like to read it too.) And of course I have opinions on it. Most of them are along the lines of, “But what about…?” and “Why didn’t he mention…?” and I have to admit I thought I could have done it better — which is easy to say, of course, having never written a book myself 😉
I already (regretfully) decided against doing NaNoWriMo this month because I didn’t have time. But blogging? That I can do.
So I’m planning to do a series of posts called “The Craft of Community”, because that’s how I like to think of it. Craft is something anyone can pick up. We learn crafts informally, by seeing and by doing, and our early efforts are usually pretty ugly. While there are some craftworkers who produce pieces so beautiful they’ll bring tears to your eyes, for the most part crafters do what we do because it makes us feel good, and because we like to see something we made with our own hands, even if it the back of it is kind of a mess or the legs are a little bit crooked. And in most crafts (like in Perl, a craft language if ever I saw one), There’s More Than One Way To Do It, so we can learn the most when we look at a broad range of technique and experience.
Some topics I’d like to cover:
- The variety of communities
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, privacy
- Status and advancement within communities (incl. meritocracy)
- Community metrics
- Implications of hosted community tools/forums/etc
- Challenges for for-profit companies trying to build communities
- Conference formats
- Things to do at meetups
I’m not sure I’ll get around to covering all of those, and no doubt I’ll come up with topics that aren’t on that list, too, so I’ll just imagine those are rough notes for my future self. Let me know what you think.