A Conversation with Caleb Clark (Con't) - Page 9

What makes a good host? Any helpful do's and don'ts to share?

A good host is the person most in touch with the community, the one who holds the group's goal safe and communicates it so the group will recognize its own success. Good hosts are more concerned with the community as a whole than with their own issues or any one person's issues. This does not mean they spend as much time actually in the community as some of the regulars, however. It just means they are the most tapped into the group as a whole entity than anyone else.

Specifically, they are good at posting short question posts that spur posts from others. They are good at giving more than getting and fostering gift economies. They know when not to post and let things take their own course. They are known by the community as the host and respected as a leader. They welcome new members and explain the "rules" of that particular community. They also respect the members of the community and know when to communicate one-on-one with them. They are strong enough to deal with trouble quickly so it does not destroy the community. Also, good hosts understand that they are not really in control of the community's future. They get that it's more like being a farmer than a construction worker. While you can build a community space, you can't force a community to use it and grow. It's more like a garden with the host making sure the soil is good: There's fresh water, the right amount of sun, and then planting seeds and helping them grow. It's all about environmental control. Good hosts should also have fun and obviously love their job.

What role does the host play in guarding the community? Can a host sometimes act as, or work to create, a barrier to entry?

Barriers to entry, good question. In my experience, the forces that govern the community set up barriers to entry. For example, the university that controls the number of students in an online class, the corporation that decides to run a normal web community where you can read for nothing, but have to register to post. The professional organization that decides to start an email list, or the moderated community that decides to approve each post. Rarely is it just one person/host.

So, a host usually plays the role of enforcing rules set down by a group. What I think is really important is that there are filters. A listserv can only handle a few hundred folks, a web community can handle as many as can register, but without rules of content, decency, and thread and subject control, can easily become a ghost town to half-started subjects and empty threads.

I believe exclusivity is not inherently bad, and that having to work to get into a community is often empowering. Perhaps barriers to entry are a result of the equation of the goal of the community balanced with its resources. I think of it like communities in real life. There are small towns whose barrier to entry is geographical. There are cities whose size means they have more good and more bad. Reminds me of Groucho Marx saying, "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

In your time with virtual communities, you've come up with a great standard set of topics to spur conversation. What are they, why are they important, and how did you come up with them?

Over the years I've invented and tested three topics.

1. How was your week? If I could have only one topic in a community, it would be this one. It is the single most powerful tool for community growing that I've come up with.

This topic was born during the NoEnd Group's early days when a bunch of webmasters would meet in a bar and go from person to person asking that question. I moved the group along by timing about 10 minutes per person (an example of why hosts are needed). The answers were always different, personal, entertaining, and started mini-discussions of sharing experiences. Two hours later, we'd have gone around the circle, and everybody had a strange feeling of comfort and release. Very different from being a spectator at some boring talking-head meeting.

Later in graduate school, I learned that this had a lot to do with identity and stories. From Judith Donath's work at MIT's Media Lab, I learned that everybody has an identity, but online it's tough to establish because we are separated from our bodies that help anchor our "real life" identities.

I found that a successful way to get around this is to always have a space where people can express how their weeks were. Seems trivial, but it's very powerful. As soon as someone writes, "This week was bad, my 10-year-old got sick just as I had a big presentation at work, which I botched," they've made themselves unique from everybody else by sharing personal details with the community--a mini story. When someone writes back, "I hear you, I've got enough trouble juggling work and home life, and I'm single! More power to you"--then you've got a community.

I started a permanent "How was your week?" in my Netscape forum, and it was successful enough for several other hosts to make it a permanent topic in their forums.

2. Outside. I came up with "Outside" after a WWII veteran told me a story about bar fights in New York city right after the war. He said there was a lot of tension and anger among the GIs coming back, so there was a lot of drinking and fighting, and the bars he went to adapted a system to handle it.

When two guys started getting in each other's face, the bartender or bouncer would grab some chalk and take them outside where he'd draw a circle on the pavement. Then he would make sure they had no weapons, and let them go at it. When one gave up for whatever reason, he'd make them go back into the bar and have the winner buy the loser a drink.

This is about the fact that fighting in a community is inevitable. But fighting is not the problem: It's where and how the fights take place that makes for problems. Most often fights, or flames as they're called, happen in the middle of the forum and make everybody angry. This is not appropriate, but stopping fighting is not realistic either.

Well, I thought why not have an "Outside" in an online community? A place to go when what you are doing is bothering other people, but you still need to do it. Most people hate to be told what they can't do. But they don't seem to mind so much a little structure on what they can do. So it's worked great whenever I've tried it. When I encounter flames sparking up, I send an email saying, "Take it outside." It's a great re-director of bad energy in a community. Interestingly, it seems to take the gas out of flames very fast, since there are not bunches of people "watching" the flame.

I've also found that people will go use an "Outside" topic to just pretend fight, thus limiting real flames. Very interesting...

3. Random Babble. We can't categorize everything people want to talk about, so I always have a Random Babble area. It's like a steam valve for a community, a rule-less place to play where you don't have to talk about anything that makes sense. As a host, your job is often to keep people on topic. If you're discussing politics and people start going off on entertainment, you need to either create an entertainment topic if there's enough need, or gently refocus the group on politics. But what about when you have something to say that doesn't fit into a topic and yet isn't fitting for starting a new one? Thus, random babble.

Surprisingly, the discussions can be amazing in such a topic, from silly to heartfelt. It's a place to blow off steam and be crazy, which makes it easier to stay on topic on the other forum because you have one that has no topic at all.

Has a virtual community ever surprised you?

Constantly.

I've seen people from the farthest corners of the globe connect with each other. For example, small business people from New Zealand connecting with ones deep in Mexico and sharing information that helped save both businesses.

Once a virtual snowball fight broke out in an "Outside" forum I was hosting. For two weeks we just wrote back and forth things like "Caleb falls to the ground from Sharon's ice/mud ball, but his force field protected him enough to stay conscious. Reeling, he calls in his secret alien ship and creates a storm of snowballs!"

Last question: If you could give one piece of advice to new hosts, one guiding principle, what would it be?

Grow, don't build.

A Conversation with Caleb Clark - Page 8
Design for Community