How to lead a community

A while ago, I mentioned an article in which was explained how a successful community ought to be build. Today I ran into a different article in which Matthew Haughey talks about how someone should lead a community.

A few specific points that I’ve stolen from the article are:

1. Take emotion out of decisions
A community is a place of discussion, sometimes these discussions include some unpleasant posts about a subject or person. It’s important to take a neutral stance in some of these discussions as a community leader. Give people the opportunity to rectify their mistakes and remain patient. Deleting topics, merely because they do not suit your vision, sometimes leads to you disagreeing with other members of your community.

2. Talk like a human, not a robot
While you have be neutral and decisive, people do not want a dictator or a robot as someone who is moderating and leading a community. Give them someone they can identify with, be honest and talk to people as if they stand right in front of you. Be the best member of your site. Lead by example by participating as much as you can in your own community. This is a good way to attract other well-intentioned members of your site and also reminds everyone a real person is behind it all and building the best community they can for everyone. Speak honestly and be supportive of other members.

3. Give people something they can be proud of
By giving people the ability to customize the information they can show to other people you encourage them to communicate with other people. A mere name and a comment is very impersonal and doesn’t instill a community sense a fullblown profile page would.

4. Bring users in during community decisions
You can’t make rash top-down decisions and expect your community to be okay with it. Give your community the opportunity to present their own vision. Welcoming the opinions of users gives the community owner(s) valuable feedback and gives members another way to contribute positively to the community.

5. Guidelines not rules
Try to run a community based on hard and fast rules, and instead try to steer members into following community norms in looser guideline form. This often works for the majority of members that want a nice, respectful community. Once you start down the path of absolutes and rules you’ll quickly end up in two bad places.

• 1) you’ll get the edgecase loving lawyer/engineer types that will argue and interpret rules ad infinitum and break them just to see what happens. These people will drive you crazy.
• 2) you will find yourself in a situation where you have to make a bad decision you know is unfair, but you have to because it was one of The Rules That Got Broken.

Guidelines allow for nuance and though it’s hard to scale nuance in a large community environment, it’s another way you can run a site like a human and not a lawyerbot.

A very interesting piece of writing, if you have the time I would say to make an effort in reading the whole article at fortuito.us

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