A Conversation with Caleb Clark - Page 8

For the inside scoop on the Zen of hosting, I went to someone with more experience in the field than almost anyone I know.

Caleb Clark has been a host to countless communities over the last five years. From big sites like Netscape's Professional Connections, to smaller ones like Y-Ride, a community site for teenagers. Clark has the unique ability to be both supportive yet administrative, encouraging yet authoritative.

I spoke with Clark via email in early 2001 about what he's learned hosting communities in virtual places. His interview demonstrates all the things that make him a good host-he's exuberant and engaged, creative and attentive. Notice how he even compliments me on my questions. Clearly, this is a man who knows how to have a conversation.

I hope you find him as insightful and entertaining as I did.

Caleb, please give us a brief introduction to who you are and what you do, specifically your work in community and the web.

I'm a techno geek born and raised in the crossfire hurricane of the late 1960s, a flower child, not to be confused with a hippie like my mother. See man, my revolution is technology, power to the geeks. Grab your ray gun, Annie, we're going sci-fi story hunting!

OK ... that was strange. Anyway, along the path of growing up, I was steeped in consensus-run groups, both successful and unsuccessful. There was a commune in the redwoods of Mendocino, California, the Haight in San Francisco, and three small free schools in New England that I attended up to sophomore year in high school.

This all resulted in a fairly flaky resume, elusive purpose at the hands of tremendous freedom, and 7 years/4 schools for a BA from ASU. My first formal flirtation with media and groups came with being a production assistant on several Hollywood feature location shoots. This was my first taste of a small group totally focused on one clear goal (screenplay), whose success depended a large part on good communication.

When the first Wired Magazine came out, I found myself working as a carpenter in Santa Fe, NM, while I freelanced for a local newspaper. After learning HTML and getting online, I followed Wired by moving to San Francisco and the web revolution in the mid-1990s, where I freelanced and wrote shorts for Wired. In January 1996, I was a lonely, small corporate webmaster so I started NoEnd, a group of web heads and artists hell bent on Humanizing Technology. My idea being that there must be other lonely webmasters out there doing a job they could not share, nor explain to hardly anyone.

We met upstairs in a North Beach cafe/bar and asked each other how our weeks were. Each week more and more people started showing up by word of mouth. Then a freelance web worker friend of mine, named Paul Vachier, who was thinking along the same lines groupwise came to a meeting with a bunch of folks he worked with. Paul and I then partnered up to grow this new entity called NoEnd. Since few people in the world had had weeks like ours, let alone understood our acronyms, the sharing became very popular, and we started using a warehouse for meetings. Big companies lined up to present to us. When they did, we insisted they sit on futons in the circle just like us, and cut short their presentations for ruthless Q&A. And they still came. We very quickly started a listserv that runs to this day. A hallmark of the NoEnd list is poetry, travel essays, family news, and personal sharing sprinkled in with a very high signal to noise ratio. I say without hesitation that the success of my professional and personal life is due in a large part to the people of NoEnd. NoEnd's success was definitely partly the luck of good timing and location, and it expanded quickly to what it is today, a quiet but vibrant and respected group of very experienced professionals who strive to humanize technology.

In 1997, I moved to San Diego to get a Masters Degree in Educational Technology at San Diego State University. I studied online community, usability, and stories. During this time, I was fortunate to work for Netscape Inc. (Pre-AOL) as a host in their "Professional Connections" online community from Beta to launch and for a year of heavy participation, due to Netscape.com being a very high traffic site. After my MA, I taught graduate web development courses (both in person and online) at SDSU for a year with each class having its own online community. This gave me the interesting opportunity to host the birth to death cycle of six communities. I recently completed a year of doing the dot- com dance as director of online community and project management at an irrational, exuberant start-up. At the time of this writing, I am the Director of the BAT_LAB (Ballpark Advanced Technology) for the San Diego Padres' baseball team. We're working on evaluating integrated advanced technologies for the new ballpark and surrounding 26-block re-development zone in downtown San Diego.

You've been a host at many web-based communities. Why are hosts important?

Groups need leaders to achieve goals. Hosts are leaders. Let's take a cocktail party, for example. A good party usually has a good host. The host of a party provides structure, information, and a single point of communication. At a good house party, people don't pee in the bushes because they know who to ask where the bathroom is--OK, that's a weird example. How about: The partygoers don't drink warm drinks when the ice runs out because the host gets more ice, or if there's a fight, the host calls the cops and talks to them when they get there.

But online it's even more important to have a good host, and here's why. Imagine a cocktail party with 200 people under a tent. You're talking to two or three people in a din of other unintelligible conversations. You move from group to group and keep talking, and you can't hear what everybody else is saying.

Now compare this with an online community of 200 where, because of the way the technology is structured, you can read what every single person is saying. It's a lot more information and takes a lot more leadership (hosting). It's as if someone at a real life party quieted down the room and said, "OK, we're all going to be quiet while one person talks and the rest listen." And then tried to keep it going with all 200 people while the party chemicals of choice kicked in. Hosts provide communication, macro-structure, information, and the law of the land--some fundamental basics of any community.

Looking the Part - Page 7
Design for Community
A Conversation with Caleb Clark (Con't) - Page 9