DIIA Blog

Many start blogs and social networking sites, but few build vibrant, self-sustaining communities. This panel explores some of the most successful ventures that grew independently and continue to grow today. Lessons learned, plans for the future will be discussed along with some best practices for those who seek to develop true communities.

BlogHer started as an online conference in 2005. Began as a community, grown to largest online women’s blogging community. Fark didn’t notice they even had a community for a long time. Preferred personal communication. Grew organically. Reddit.com sprang from having a community without an outlet.

How do you balance your own vision of the community with the community’s vision? Inevitably, you have to make the calls and take the lead. There is both a philosophical and practical aspect.

Is it a good idea? Is it something people want? Perspective. Beware the tyranny of well-organized dissent. Reddit lets users have the tools and develop their own communities. BlogHer is similar. Writers can have their own page. You have to listen to your readers.

Forums are a great feature to take the community’s pulse. Can give you a good idea of what your audience actually thinks. Makes the enterprise transparent.

How does the community view itself? BlogHer has fairly restricted community guidelines so that they will feel safe to have civil discourse. Very well self-policed. Most sites have a moderation team.

Reddit installed a wiki page to aggregate rules for the community. Communities regulate themselves.

What do you do with problematic comments? Delete? Lock out? Discuss with infractor? BlogHer won’t allow troll comments. Ars Technica doesn’t delete or modify content unless it’s spam. Not a 1st amendment issue, because it’s not public property.

Currently 5,000 folks are banned from Fark. Ars Technica approaches from a legal aspect. Cardinal and compulsory rules in moderating. When rules are broken, institute a 1-week ban, and try to rehabilitate them. Then will ban for 1 month. When banned members conform to the rules, they can rejoin the community.

BlogHer saw incredibly heated debate during the election, but remained civil. Tried to remain neutral, and encouraged conversations. Pumas = Clinton supporters. Made a coordinated effort to take over the site, and BlogHer was able to stop it from disrupting.

What big mistakes have you seen in other communities? What should you not do?

BlogHer: Tell rather than ask, don’t let community know when change is coming. Don’t involve the community in decisions.

Fark: If you listen to community too much, at least 20% of readers will freak. Can’t let that segment disrupt the site. Will usually get used to it in a couple of weeks. Reddit: the silent majority won’t tell you what they are feeling. You may need to survey this group to find out how they are doing.

Ars Technica is big on surveys–helps quantify things, and shares with the audience when the site is wrong, or doing well. They give away little stuff with the survey to encourage participation. Grew from 3 to 26 forums. Added as they were needed. Don’t add until your community becomes engaged enough to warrant opening new ones–don’t want them to miss out on the greater content. Difficult not to let your ego get the best of you. Must be able to take criticism, however harsh or unrealistic. Do not be vindictive–sends a bad message to the rest of your audience.

What do you look for in a community manager? A new job in the field. Patience and level-headedness. Someone who can remain as neutral as possible and handle a lot of people yelling at each other with grace. Not just the comments, have to vet the bloggers to weed out spam.

How do you mount a conference? BlogHer–easy–it’s community-driven. Add new features to give your community more tools to communicate. Find ways to let people follow the conversations they want to. The best kind of communities feel small. Make it easy for the 5 people who are interested in one topic to communicate easily. If they’re passionate, bring them in. Give them tasks or roles that they can reflect on their profile. Talk personally with the passionate members. Hire them as you grow.

Gain real-world ideas for markedly improved productivity from an industry expert and passionate speaker who always inspires SXSW audiences.

*DIIA’s Amy Miller took lovely photos of this presentation, which you can see here. Might help make more sense of the post below to see the graphics.

Where do you want to be? Or your product, idea, business. You > (wall) > goal.

Ways to get through the many milestones. Incremental vs. breakthrough. Breakthroughs are necessary to break through the wall.

Incremental doesn’t always work. Incremental = arms race. Marketing, Whuffie, Viral arms race.

You can’t get there from here. Breakthoughs: *ideas, *performance. Your USERS need breakthroughs. 15 different ways to make breakthroughs.

How to be an expert: Ability x time. Move from the Suck Threshold to the Kicking Ass Threshold. WOM (word of mouth) vs. WOO (word of obvious). Being better is better than saying you’re better. Are your users stuck in “P” mode? Can’t get better photos if you’re in “P” mode. Anyone can compete. Don’t necessarily have to change your product, just need to help your users make the breakthrough.

How to know someone: 1) iPod playlist and..

Flight vs. Invisibility–which superpower would you choose? Pick one. Defend your choice to the person next to you who made the other choice. Ask: what superpower do we give our users? What do you provide for them as a superpower. Picture it on the suit. “Photoshop Channels Guy.” Feels like a superpower when you realize what it can do. You get a big jump in capability. Some companies frame themselves through superpowers, whether they can deliver it or not.

“Twitter Man.” Sierra is a Twitter convert. Twitter is a superpower. “because it’s good for you…” boring! “Productivity Man.” If productivity is the broccoli, what’s the chocolate?

2. Superset Game–what are the bigger things you and your competitor are a part of? Force yourself to think there’s something bigger. Sometimes it’s more interesting. Or you can ask yourself “what COOLER thing” do I have or do I want to look at? You can promote the same product, just in a cooler way. The worst thing to blog about is your own company.

“Outlyers” book says it takes 10,000 hours to make anything good. 2 ways to shrink the 10K hours? Learn the patterns, shorten the duration. In some cases there are actual shortcuts. Think about ways to use the patterns.

3. Deliberate practice. Kicking ass in <1,000 hours if you do specific practice. After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. Tiger Woods pop quiz: how much practice time on his strengths vs. weaknesses? 80% practice his strengths. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things. Everyone expects musicians to go into practice rooms and practice by themselves. Noone expects coders to do that–they call it “beta” or “alpha.”  Assumptions need a “sell by” date. Google results could be outdated. Find out what’s gone bad and get it out.

4. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are. Treadmill gathering cobwebs in the corner? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Take all the chairs out of your media room, throw in some exercise balls. They’ll start exercising.

5. Get better gear (and offer it). Sometimes expensive equipment is more effective because it does the job better. Bought an expensive saddle, performance went way up. You want larger monitors. You think: you will be a god-like hacker. The problem is that your boss/sponsor will think it’s just a way of playing more games. Reality: you’ll see more pixels, can do your job better.

6. Ignore ???

7. Total Immersion Jams. Think about what it would be like 16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months. Ad Lib Game Development Society. A group of developers working for huge companies. Would get together for the weekend and build games. Goal was not to be good, but to get things done. “The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.” Less *Camp, More *Jam.

8. Change your perspective. Don’t make a better x, make a better user of x. A better book could be more content, denser, more complicated. You haven’t helped the user, you’re only helping yourself. Who are your user’s allies and mentors? You tech support? Your company is to  your user as [blank] is to Frodo. Exercise: What movie are your users in? What movie do they WANT to be in? If you can figure it out, you have a business plan. Software: theme song.

If you want to make incremental improvements, ask your users. If you want to make breakthroughs, do this stuff. Listening to users: what they say they want vs. what they really want. Don’t ask your users if you’re trying to make a breakthrough. Featuritis curve. Breakthrough: ask OTHER people’s users.

12. Be brave. Death by risk aversion. Ease of use police step in, we give them something that’s not good at all. Don’t shy away from things that are different and challenging.

13. Rethink Deadness. Henry Ford: If I’d asked my users what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The assumption is that faster horses = more money. Reexamine things you’ve sent to the dead pool. Horses were declared outdated. Now they’re a $40 billion industry. Look at things people consider dead or obsolete, look for new ways to make them fascinating or unique.

14. Change the EQ (equalizer). Incremental: move the sliders. Breakthrough: add sliders that fit that product. Equalize for your product. Combined sliders from one domain to retail store, come up with new initiatives. “Sierra Sliders” can add what you want to the lables, move the sliders, take screen shot. Gary Vaynerchuk “Wine TV.” He talked about wine from the heart, which noone else in the business is doing. Look at someone who has had a breakthrough and figure out what the labels are on the sliders.

15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. lolcats+translation: 52000 Google hits. If user A can out[whatever] user B, do it. Passive/Aggressive Notes. Send in photos of their statements.

16. Be amazed. Even in tough times. Everything’s amazing now, and noone is happy. Who’s awesome? You’re awesome!

Open source art evangelist and political activist James Powderly talks about his craft and his mission with Virginia Heffernan, who writes The Medium column for The New York Times Magazine.

Powderly is working on a new free art and technology lab. Heffernan focuses on the convergence of internet media and television in her NYT column The Medium.

One of the guys in the graffiti research lab. Office of Homeland Graffiti. Doing their best to plan and maintain graffiti. He lives in Germany now. Used to be a NASA engineer. His friend was a cubicle architect in a cubicle designing cubicles. Tried to capture graffiti everywhere. Open Source, Contagious Media, and Bored With the Work You’re In is their latest project. There are graffiti labs all over the world, now out of control.

Powderly was invited to Beijing for a show. Planned it all out, then discovered that the Chinese government was watching the artists who were participating. Govt asked them to make it politically neutral. The political push cancelled the original show. A student group asked for help with the tool to express themselves. If you come to FAT with a free speech issue, they will try to give you a voice. Used common materials to make a laser magnifyer to project all the way across the bay in Beijing. Good clean images, projected at a distance.

Powderly offered to put up the installation on the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium. Then he noticed that a woman was following him. He tried to evade her, Twittered so as not to leave cell phone numbers on phones when the phones were confiscated. Friends urged him to complete his tour. As he was leaving a bar, he was surrounded by 50 police, several TV crews. Interrogated them, were incarcerated for 10 days in a prison along with others.

All he did was project a sign that said “free beer” in a test, had not even projected on the stadium, but was charged with crimes against the public.

Multiple paths to the truth. Powderly comes from DIY mentality. Found a partner who could tweak. Make your own marker, hack off the city system by tagging on trains, buildings. Early taggers in the 70s wanted people in other parts of the city to see what they were doing, so they “hacked” the metro transportation system to spread their messages by tagging trains.

Online video is a big part of graffiti writers’ arsenal these days to document what they’re doing. Creating black books with still photos of their work. Cities spent lots of taxpayers money to hunt down and arrest taggers. Powderly wants to keep it illegal, otherwise it will lose it’s character.

Some graffiti artists dislike the internet–becomes a common media event that leaves out the spontaneous perspective. Some have embraced it. Video graffiti used a lot in music videos, especially hip-hop.

Heffernan trying to label Powderly as being light and portable, which gives him a certain purity–doesn’t stay on the walls like aerosol paint.  His kit is small, can be rained on, inexpensive. Fabricated a bicycle that would carry the kit. Ended up weighing 500 pounds.

Do it fast, do it with a certain disregard for the illegal issues. Any writing is graffiti. Project to enable a writer who has ALS to write again. Mashed laser tagging with instruments that track eye movement.

Experts from three different (but connected) industries talk about game design, learning theories, collective intelligence, transmedia entertainment, and the value of play in a participatory culture.

James Gee is a professor of education at Arizona State University. Finding that games can be a gateway drug to learning.

Henry Jenkins moving from MIT to USC next September. Exploring how to put into practice the educational value of games. “The Lure of the Labyrinth.” Gaming culture as a site of informal learning, applying to school and after school programs.

Spector is still an active game developer. Junction Point Studios, bought by Disney Interactive Studios a few months ago. Done 19 games. A steady progression of involving players in the dialogue. Through that dialogue, can learn about yourself, others, about who you are in the real world as well as in developing. Set up gaming communities around the world.

Jenkins: sat down with his son to play Sims. Son immediately ran out of money. Game started degrading. Dad gave him some direction. Told son to order pizza, son died just as he answered the door. Learned a lesson. Then could apply reasoning to surviving in Sims.

Digital media is wrapped up in the community you create. Sims give challenges. You have to think about how to make it a better simulation. Have to write up a story board and what you’ve done, the impact of the challenge in order to win the game. This is really hard core problem solving, not a game.

Games can support collaborative, interactive learning. In some games you get to design a part of it. Study the structure and tools of problem-solving rather than simply solving the problem. User-created content is huge in games right now.

The game narrative must fit with the game play. Exactly what does the story have to do with the ideas behind the game?

Failing is not bad, and collaboration is not cheating. Need to get these points across to educators. Develop more toward problem-solving.