I wanted to point community management folks at some discussions and resources that are coming out of this year’s OSCON. David Eaves did a keynote and a longer talk on the Science of Community management that I found just fascinating — I’d planned on doing a quick glance at it to see if I wanted to squirrel it away for a more detailed look this evening, and got sucked into it.
The keynote is on Youtube in O’reilly’s coverage of their event. His longer talk isn’t online, but a writeup of what he said has been posted.
A big takeaway from me was his comment that these communities are viewed to be meritocracies, but really aren’t. Whether it’s Open Source (i.e. geeks with code) or other kinds of communities, expertise in the subject matter is likely what brings you into the community and begins your involvement in it, but promotion within the hierarchy of the community structure is tied much more strongly to soft skills than pure knowledge — it comes down to communication and leadership and interpersonal skill sets instead of how much you know.
Eaves also talks about a few techniques to try to mitigate some of the friction points that show up in communities, such as flagging new users so that the community can cut them some slack and help indoctrinate them into how the community operates. I’ve done that in the past with good success (I also think it can be useful to build a team of volunteers willing to act as mentors who will take new members under their wing and help them jump off the first cliff of interaction that intimidates so many people, and run some interference against the more — willful — members in the community).
Lots of fascinating stuff here, and it’s too bad his longer talk isn’t online. It’s great to see people starting to work on creating community metrics and how we can build data to help us understand the drivers within a community and help us understand how to create systems that will help us monitor the health of a community.
Definitely check out his keynote. Also check out Tim’s keynote, which is a fascinating look at what boils down to “the stuff that isn’t in the metrics tends to get ignored”, which I took as a warning to understand what your numbers aren’t saying about what you’re studying…
And finally, Eaves recommended the book Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at community management at OSCON. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.