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How to build a community. Translation of the book "Social Architecture": Chapter 1. Toolkit

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My social architect toolbox consists of 20 tools, each of which corresponds to an aspect of a community or group. They can be used in two ways.


First , with their help, you can make measurements of an existing community , rating it on a scale of zero and above.


Secondly , you can use them to create a community , while making efforts where they are most needed.



Thanks to Sergey Danshin for help with the translation.


(If you have a suggestion how to translate a certain term / phrase more capaciously, write in a personal note, I want this book to become useful for many communities.)


We will look at these tools one by one and see how they work in different communities. First, a few general tips about creating a community. Be extremely honest with yourself and with others. The main thing for you is to overcome your own prejudices and preferences, and only then - those that are inherent to your colleagues.


Whatever tool I have supplied you, you will want to adapt it and adjust it to your own needs. Social architecture is still a young science, and many of my tools will be too cumbersome or incomplete.


Here is the best way to proceed:



Clear mission


The starting point for creating any community is the formulation of its mission. It defines the goals that we share, even before joining the project. It’s like a website header or a movie slogan. For example, the title of Reddit sounds like this: “the main page of the Internet” is an ambitious mission, which, however, is completed. Facebook slogan: “Helps you connect and share with people in your life.”


TIP: use your mission as a slogan on the site, in advertising, in presentations, etc. If you are investing money in your community, consider registering the mission statement as a trademark.


Without a clear mission, the online community will not grow. Friends who have started a project can all agree on what they want to achieve, but every newcomer will have to guess what they mean. People will be mistaken in their guesses and may change their mind over time. There will be disagreements, confusion and frustration as people understand that their hard work was wasted because the rest of the group is moving in a different direction.


The reaction of people to the company's mission should not be “yes, this is prudent”, but on the contrary: “you are not serious, right ?!” Wikipedia’s mission, “A free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” is a good example. This was the original goal, so everyone else, except for a few idealists, regarded this as something impossible and crazy. On this was the calculation of Wikipedia: that these idealists once boarded. Impossible goals attract the right people to a young project.


TIP: Change mission as your community grows up. At first, you will want to attract young idealists and pioneers, then leaders, and then first adherents, the general public, and further followers. Each of these groups tends to be different. Having understood this, change the mission accordingly.


To formulate a good mission, focus on one main problem that your project is dedicated to. Reddit, for example, solves the problem of how to get news from the Internet with too many resources with interesting information. Its “main page” is a 21st century digital newspaper. Wikipedia solves the problem of accumulating knowledge with a million minds. The words “anyone can edit,” as well as “The voice of the people — the voice of God,” say that if it is possible to find the truth, then only together.


TIP: If you intend to do something, a lot or a little, always try to start by defining the problem you want to fix. Only when you have a clear and real problem, with the existence of which everyone agrees, only then proceed to discuss possible solutions. The solution to a fictional problem is similar to a group without a clear mission. You may have several missions, accidentally or intentionally. If a mission pulls a community in different directions, it can end badly. For example, the growth of a group may require investments, which will conflict with the position on the issue of profit. If Wikipedia would become a commercial organization, with advertising and a set of well-paid managers, would you, in your opinion, lead to its expansion or decline?


In the case of ZeroMQ, our mission was: “The fastest. Messaging. Is always". This is a good and almost impossible solution to the problem, about the existence of which we all agreed, namely: the technologies available at that time were slow and cumbersome. At the same time, we and my founding partner, Martin, differed in goals. He wanted to create the best possible software, but I wanted to create the largest possible community. As the number of users grew, its dramatic change, which broke existing applications, caused increasing pain.


In this case, we were able to make everyone happy (Martin left to work on the creation of a new library called “Nano”). However, if you cannot resolve the controversy regarding the mission, they can seriously harm the project. Projects can endure many disputes, but disagreements between the founders are quite traumatic.


TIP: If the founders agree that “success” is defined as “the maximum possible number of participants”, then in subsequent years this may help to maintain a sense of purpose. It also makes it easier to measure your success as you progress.


Free participation


Having decided on a mission, you need to test it in the real world. This means you need to give a short but convincing answer to the problem you are aiming at. I call it "sowing." This process has two main objectives. First, start collecting idealists and pioneers (mostly those who were so insane to believe you) into the community. Secondly, prove or disprove your mission.


Projects can fail for many reasons. But the main reason - the underlying idea or mission was not as amazing as people expected. Failure is fine, even great, unless it has cost you several years of your life. Planting a seed and showing it to only a few people is not enough, because most people will not criticize. Out of pity. However, ask them to spend at least a few hours of their time to make the project better, and if they don’t say yes, then you will understand their true attitude.


TIP: Attract the attention of the public to the “sowing” project and inspire people to join it from the very beginning. If people are involved in the project, rather promote them. And if this does not happen, then consider it a sign that your mission may be false. Use the "seed" project to create a community.


When people agree to help you, you need to provide them with a place to work together. You need a “platform for collaboration”. My two most beloved ones: Wikidot for informational communities and GitHub for software development projects. The platform should be free. It should be easy in school and at work. Your seeding project should be visible to anonymous participants. It should work for anyone, regardless of his or her age, gender, education or location.


All this allows potential interested strangers to come in and look at your work, and if they like it and they feel the challenge in it, they can gradually get involved in the project. You want to work on your seeding project in public and talk about your new project from the very beginning. This means that people will be able to make offers and feel involved from day one.


If we, as the founders of the group, choose those with whom we will work, we create a basis for biased choice. It is much easier to work with those sweet, intelligent people who agree with us than with those idiots and critics who express their disagreement. And when you agree with me, you confirm all those my illusions and assumptions that, as I know from my own experience, may turn out to be false in the most amazing way.
Over time, an increase in the number of people who share the same wrong assumptions and prejudices can lead to the death of the project. For example, when developing software protocols, requirements for large companies can differ greatly from the requirements for small open source teams. Therefore, if the protocol committee consists entirely of large companies, then the result of their activities would be unacceptable for the mass market.


The solution is free access for all concerned, no matter how crazy and unlikely their point of view. This gives us a broad and diverse community in the future - the forerunner of the smart crowd. At ZeroMQ, we never turned away from those who wanted to participate. I draw people in, even if their contribution to the common cause is small or incorrect. The community is more important than the product.


When the seed crop community matures, participants will want to create its second generation. As a social architect, you must lead this so that the efforts of the smart crowd will be directed towards the development of a “real” product. Somewhere around this stage, you may want to find a good domain name and make a “decent” website.


TIP: If people do not join your seeding project, do not continue to do it. Instead, figure out what stops them, and fix it. Start over with weeding. Do not kill the shoots prematurely, people need time to assess what you are trying to do.


Transparency


Transparency is very important for quickly receiving criticism of ideas and progress in work. If several people from the team leave and work on something together for some time, for example, a couple of days, it's okay, but when it comes to weeks, then what they are doing should be presented to the group as a fait accompli. If one person does this, the group may simply brush it off. But if two or more - it becomes difficult to disown bad ideas. Secrecy and incompetence go hand in hand. Groups working in secret will not comprehend wisdom.


TIP: When one person does something in a dark corner, this is an experiment. When two or more do something in a dark corner - this is a secret conspiracy.


In the case of ZeroMQ, it took several years to create a truly open and transparent atmosphere. Prior to this, the main participants worked in secret, publishing their work only when they considered that it was ready for a public review. But when they did, the rest of the community found it hard to say no. And often the work was not the topic ... yes, an excellent solution to the problem, but to which no one cares. In the end, we explicitly banned such things.


Ironically, the secret seems inherent in some business models. Profit often comes from ignoring consumers. Most businesses, even large communities like Twitter, depend on a strict demarcation of “them” and “us.” However, digital society grows best when the scale of profits is prioritized and when it refers to neglect as a problem to be solved. If your clients are not allowed to your internal processes, then you will be denied access to understanding where errors lie in them.


Free members


Money is a fun thing. Too little - and the community will starve (I will come back to this later). Too much - decomposition will begin. It is necessary to understand why each of the participants is doing this at all. What are their economic motives? Even in voluntary communities, each participant pursues their own interests.


At ZeroMQ, we initially started with a low-paying group and two years later we came to a voluntary community, pragmatically - if not to say cynically - intentionally spending money and being forced to dismiss developers. Some of them were dissolved in other companies, some returned as participants, and the project became more exciting and fun than it was before. People worked on ZeroMQ because they needed it for their own projects - having spent some time improving it, they won or saved many times more.


When you work for someone, you will do what he or she wants. When you work for yourself, you do what you need. This is a huge difference. People with money, but without skills or taste, are the husks of society. We despise paid Wikipedia members, paid bloggers and moderators on Reddit, because we know that their opinions are almost by definition a lie. Will a blogger paid by Hollywood criticize the new summer blockbuster?


I have nothing against hired employees. However, if you are aiming at creating the largest, most successful community, then you need participants who will try for honest, understandable reasons. If the filmmaker comes to Reddit to discuss the film - great. If its marketers come in to rub critical comments, that's disgusting.


TIP: one free member costs ten paid employees.


Freedom to work with materials (remixability)


The group needs many agreements to work together. I call them "protocols." Perhaps the most important of these for the creative community is the ability to recycle material (remixability). Whether it be music, art, images, videos, comments, programs, or wiki pages, the following question will arise: “What kind of copyright license is behind this material, and how will this affect the community?”.


Roughly speaking, there are three types of copyright licenses:



Users prefer the free to take model, because it allows them to use the content as they please without reciprocal obligations. Imagine a DJ who releases a popular track on the model of free to take. Then the company makes a remix and uses it in advertising. And this remix will be closed for use. Now, the DJ will not be able to rework this remix and may not even be able to play this remix.


Yet communities work better with the third model, because then users become members. With a share-alike license, a DJ could use a remix, remix it and turn it into a disco hit. Knowledge and ideas flow in all directions, and do not flow from the community into a stagnant swamp. This is a powerful current, and this is especially important for those of us who build communities with a minimum budget. If you are a large company that invests a lot of money in the community, then the free to take model will suit you better.


TIP: If each member owns what he brought to the community, and you are using a share-alike license, you do not need to assign any copyright or renew the license from the members.


Protocol clarity


Good protocols allow visitors to participate without prior approval. They resolve destructive conflicts and turn them into useful contests. The fact that anarchists can join a smart crowd as successfully as any other is explained by the fact that the crowd can develop its own rules. Usually these rules relate to recycling, identity, rank, etc. No matter what form they have, good rules are simple, clear, clearly stated and approved by everyone.


If you are creating a software project, you can take an existing manual, for example, the C4 protocol , which we did for ZeroMQ. Or you can start with a minimum of instructions and add them as you identify the problems that the community is facing. By the way, so it was with the leadership of Wikipedia . Some rules must be established from the very beginning (for example, copyright and participation). Others may be invented as necessary (for example, a conflict resolution procedure). Difficult, aimless or unwritten rules poison a group. They create a space for disputes, confuse people and increase the cost of entering or leaving a group.


TIP: Write your rules carefully, starting with the content license, and evaluate how they help people. Change them as needed.


Competence of power


Without the authorities, the rules are null and void. The founders of the community and the main participants are their de facto representatives. If they abuse their position, they lose participants - and the project dies or forks, depending on different rules. Power must be scalable (that is, be able to cover the activities of a group of any size) and allow transfer as the group grows and changes.


While we use power to build a playground, many groups use power to control their members, keeping them in a group and forcing them to meet the standards. Favorite technique in cults is to randomly punish and reward people so that they are confused and stop asking administration questions.


TIP: Assign the most active participants to administrative positions and quickly. You have a short period of time to do it, otherwise they will go to other projects.


You must be part of your community, and you must follow your own rules. If you notice that you are breaking them or you want to do this, then they are inaccurate and need to be corrected.


In the ZeroMQ community, we fought over the question of who could determine the rules, and in the end it led to a trademark and domain name. The person or company that owns the name of the project is the supreme authority and can determine the rules. If they are idiots, then the project will die.


TIP: If you are investing money in a community, consider using a trademark in the US to be able to prevent other people from using similar imitating names that are not relevant to you. It costs about 750 dollars.


Non-tribalism


Membership should be a symbol of the union, and not serve as a certificate. As Mr. Spock often pointed out, emotions are not logical. Some groups are guided by logically sound goals, while others are ruled by emotional factors, such as pressure from members of their circle, herd instinct, and even collective hysteria. The defining moment seems to be the relationship between the group and its members. We can reveal this by asking: are the participants “exclusively committed” to the group? Exclusive commitment means giving more importance to the existence of the group, and not its work. Such a commitment ends in conflict with other groups.


TIP: Stay away from formal membership models, especially those that are trying to turn people into group ownership. Allow anonymous or non-personalized participation. Encourage people to create their competing projects - a space for experimentation and for learning new things.


Groups of the industrial age, like cults, own their members. Employee owned by the company. Even the ideas that came to your mind under the shower are also your employer's property. And when a group owns its members, it motivates them with fear, hatred, envy and anger, replacing conscious logical motives. The fear of exclusion is widely used to subordinate people to the same standard: “Do what I say, or I will dismiss you!”.


TIP: To determine how a group resembles a tribe, simply start a competing project. If the reaction is negative and emotional, the tribal paradigm dominates in the group. In a group with a healthy atmosphere, applause will meet their rivals.


Self-organization


Some people like being told what to do. The best participants and teams themselves choose their tasks. A successful society recognizes problems and organizes itself to solve them. Moreover, it does this faster and better than any hierarchically controlled structure. This means that the community should accept assistance in any area, without restrictions.


Top-down distribution of tasks is antipattern with many inherent weaknesses. It prevents individuals from acting when they find a problem. It is characterized by feuds, where the work and the necessary resources belong to individuals. It creates long communication chains that do not allow responding quickly. He needs a layer of managers, just to connect decision makers with those who will do the work.


TIP: Write rules to improve the quality of work, emphasizing that everyone can work on what is interesting to him.


In the ZeroMQ community, we got rid of the task assignment. For example, we did not accept requests for any particular features. If someone needed a special function, he either sends us a patch, or offers to pay for adding changes, or he is waiting. This means that people make only the changes that really need to be made.


TIP: Communities require a hierarchy of authority. However, it must be mobile and strictly delegated. That is, choose the people with whom you work, and let them choose those with whom they will work. The structure of powers, like liquid cement, it hardens and constrains the movement of people. Any structure tries to protect itself.


Tolerance


In a mixed group, conflicting opinions arise, and a healthy group covers and processes these conflicts. Critics, iconoclasts, vandals, spies and trolls keep the group on their toes. They can be a catalyst for the involvement of other participants. Wikipedia is flourishing thanks to, and not contrary to, those who click “Edit” in order to turn the article into a jumble. This is a classic anti-pattern, overwhelming the ideas and views of the minority, using the premise that they are "dangerous." In addition, it inevitably suppresses new ideas. The logic is usually that group coherence is more important than its diversity. Then it turns out that they do not react to errors, but only become more isolated. In fact, a group may be more important than the results of its activities if it is diverse and open to new arguments. This is a difficult lesson that is useful to society as a whole: there are no dangerous judgments, there are dangerous answers.


How communities deal with trolls and vandals is one thing. Dealing with the fundamental differences of opinion is another. I said earlier that conflicting missions can be a problem. The best solution I know is to turn a conflict into a match. For example, the Google Chrome browser has become an easier, faster alternative to Firefox, which has become bloated and slower. Then the Firefox team got down to business with the mind, and now Firefox is faster than Chrome.


TIP: If there is an interesting problem, make sure that several teams compete trying to solve it. Competition is a very fun thing, and can produce better solutions than a monopoly approach. You can even organize competitions with prizes.


Measurable success


All this is good: try to turn conflict into a match. However, you need to provide group members with information on how well they are doing. The best tools, such as GitHub, show the exact number of people who are observing or flagging a project or starting a branch project (reflecting different levels of interest and commitment).


Of course, the Web has always been concerned with “hits” and traffic analysis, which shows the popularity of a site or page. This makes it easier to measure the success of an online project. In the old days of the industrial age, teams received feedback on their work from superiors. What turned into grimaces before the authorities: you will be rewarded more for obedience than for diligence. To make your bosses happy so that your salary will be raised is not a healthy attitude.


TIP: If your platform does not directly support this, find ways to inform your participants about how well their projects are developing.


High award


There are many reasons why people participate in communities. The prevailing motivation is the need to admire for the success achieved. As an individual, and as part of a team. Success is a relative phenomenon, so we need a metric, some high score, which people will be guided by in their aspirations.


In the ZeroMQ community, we did not attach much importance to scoring, although the participants get more love with a greater contribution to the common cause. This is recorded in their track record. Participating in ZeroMQ can help you find a good job.


Reddit, like many other sites, uses "karma", which shows how many votes received an account for its publications and behavior. It works pretty well. Some sites do not show all the karma to prevent people from trying to bypass the system and get a higher score. Some sites, such as StackOverflow, are extremely addicted to “gamification” using orders, high scores, achievements, etc. I think it gives away manipulation and distracts from the mission of the community. People should be involved, striving for the success of the project, and not to a large number of game points.


Social commitment - to make groups of different people happy - a task that brings great satisfaction, and it does not pollute the planet. Industrial society is aimed at material rewards (higher wages, more house, better car), linked to a hierarchical structure. It is effective because we all love wealth or we have an inferiority complex; whatever the reason, the desire to make the boss happier means taking less risk.


TIP: When people ask you to do something, and you don’t know how, then publicly announce that it is “impossible”. Or offer a solution so ridiculous and hopeless that real experts will get down to business.


Decentralization


In his book, Surowiecki explains that the Columbia shuttle crash was caused by a bureaucracy in the hierarchical management structure of NASA, which ignored the views of ordinary engineers. If a group is decentralized, its members are more independent, they get more different inputs, and they are diverse from the outset.


If a group is not geographically scattered, then it becomes homogeneous, where all members have similar inputs and triggers. The similarity allows the minority to dominate the mood of the group and discard non-ordinary ideas. It allows him to literally intimidate or deceive the majority, thereby subduing him. The requirement that all team members sit in the same office, department or building is an old antipattern that is difficult to overcome. That is why all cults are so united.


TIP: Do you need meetings to get the group to work? This is a sign that you have deep problems in working together. You exclude people who are not physically close.


It can be difficult to move away from the old discussion-action collaboration model. And, of course, it will be easier for you if you collect groups from the very beginning, rather than trying to change existing ones.


Free working environment


The community needs space to grow. In the realities of the Internet, this is usually a site or a set of sites and related structures like email lists. mail, blogs, etc. We see this becoming a very cheap or even free way to create “space” in a digital society. The question is whether individuals can create their own personal spaces within the community. If so, will they bring more value to the overall project?


Freedom to create a structure annoys people who believe that it introduces chaos and confusion. However, if you use conventional structures (see the next item), there is no damage to the participants from this. But what is harmful is the creation of a structure based on an unreasonable opinion about its benefits to people. When I headed the FFII association in 2005, the previous president created several hundred email lists. mail, so he noted those projects on which, in his opinion, people had to work. This did not correspond to how people wanted to be organized, and it was very difficult to remove these lists and create new ones that we actually needed.


Of course, industrial age groups distributed work and resources to carry it out. Any new infrastructure - such as a website, email list. mail or wiki - requires approval and determination. It may even require legal valuation of copyrights and patents. The price is high, so people are reluctant to take risks. It turns out that without experimenting and continuing to work, they tie their hands.


In the ZeroMQ community, only one click is required to create a new project. In Wikipedia, you can create a new page simply by clicking on “create a page”. Both projects have mechanisms to protect against accidental debris. Wikipedia conducts a rather aggressive cleaning of new pages. ZeroMQ has a special procedure for submitting a project to the official community organization.


TIP: Make creating new projects for registered users as easy as possible. If the project is created by the user, then do not worry about the garbage. If they are in a shared space, then you may need tools for cleaning up trash and abandoned projects.


Standard structure


As the community grows, it becomes more difficult to direct it. If you are doing a single, constantly evolving project consisting of many separate tasks, then it becomes more and more difficult with time. Imagine a medieval castle. , , .


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Second, invest time and money in the community only if there is no other way out. This may include trademark registration, hosting payment, or a fee for doing work that no one else can handle. And finally: beware of people who are willing to take on serious risks without demanding an appropriate reward - they tend to burn out, which I will discuss in the next chapter.


TIP: Every time you are going to spend money on the community, ask if anyone can help you with the problem.


To be continued...


Translation of the book "Social Architecture":




about the author


"Unfortunately, we do not choose death for ourselves, but we can meet her with dignity so that we can be remembered as men."




Pieter Hintjens - Belgian developer, writer. He held the position of CEO and chief software designer at iMatix , a company that produces free software , such as the ZeroMQ library (the library takes care of some of the data buffering, queuing, connection establishment and recovery, etc.), OpenAMQ, Libero , GSL code generator , and the Xitami web service.



Much detail here: Thirty five years I, as a necromancer, inhaled life in dead iron with the help code


It's time for my last article. I could write more, there is time, but then I will think about other things: how comfortable it is to sit in bed, when to take painkillers, and about people around me.

... I want to write one last model, the last protocol, which is dedicated to how to die, having some knowledge and time in store. This time I will not format the RFC. :)
Death report

Peter Hinchens website
Wikipedia article


about the project


I, with the support of Filtech-accelerator , plan to publish on Habré (and, perhaps, in paper) the translation of the book “Social Architecture” . IMHO, this is the best (if not the only adequate) manual for managing / building / improving communities focused on product creation (and not on mutual grooming or “worship” to the leader, sports club, etc.).


Thoughts and ideas of Peter Hinchens on Habré:



Call to action


If you have projects / start-ups with a high share of technologies aimed at public benefit in the first place and to receive profit as an auxiliary function (for example, like Wikipedia), write in person or register for an accelerator program .


If you send links to articles, videos, courses on the Coursera on managing / building / improving communities, focused on creating a product , with me chocolate.


')

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/344090/

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