Everything I know about online community I learnt tending bar

Photo credit: Jani Helle

Betsy’s recent post “What makes it a community” made me think about my own experiences running communities and the approach that I like to take.

Community has been part of my life for the past 20 years. My first experience was with a homebrew Bulletin Board called The Nutwork that ran on my Commodore 64 out my parent’s basement. This board ran faithfully on my Commodore 64 and eventually ended up running on my Amiga.

The Amiga based BBS was one of the first non-PC systems to join FidoNet. FidoNet taught me the dynamics of having thousands of people participating in online discussions through echomail. With the Internet came Usenet Newsgroups and later on web based forums all upping the ante on the fun things that happen when you get volumes of people interacting from the safety of their computer.

Today, I am a part of an experiment at Microsoft called Channel 9 which is a community that combines wikis, forums, weblogs and streaming video to give an insider’s view to Microsoft.

Enough with my online community resume onto the purpose of this post. I am often asked by People who are starting an online community or involved in nurturing their community on how to handle the common scenarios your community will face in keeping conversations on topic, moving threads, etc.

In the spirit of Robert Fulghum and his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, I always reply, “All I really need to know about online community I learnt tending bar”.

I like to think of online communities a lot like your would a neighborhood pub or a campus bar. The administrators/moderators are the bar staff and the members are the folks who have stopped by for a drink, fellowship and entertainment. Our job is to make a great place that you want to come back to again and again.

We take this same approach in running Channel 9.

• A good bartender knows when to be a part of the conversation and when not to. If someone is alone and has no one to talk then the bar staff will often join in and make them feel at home. If the crowd is having fun then they should just sit back and keep the bar clean. That’s why sometimes we might be in a thread or we might just let one go and create a life of its own.
• Sometimes the role of the staff is just to clean up the mess at the end of the day. On a message board this usually means moving threads to the appropriate forums, deleting spam and fixing broken links in posts. I compare this to when bartenders make sure that the peanuts on the floor don’t start a fire or that there are no health code violations.
• Patrons of a bar are free to choose what conversations they have at their table, they can talk about bars where there might be different music, better food or how much they don’t like the atmosphere of the current place. As long as they are not beligerant to other patrons thats ok. On Channel 9 we have conversations about competing products, our products and even how we can improve.

The last bit is on tone. Whenever we talk or post videos on Channel 9 we try and keep a peer to peer over a beer tone. Someone coined that back in the Sitebuilder Network days at Microsoft and its stuck with me ever since. Its not about presentations and API slides it is about truly connecting with individuals, just like you would while having a talk over a beer.