FOWA: Matthew Haughey - Creating communities

This is part of a series of posts with my notes on various talks I attended at the FOWA conference in London. Here are my notes from Matthew Haughey's talk on Creating and managing communities:

Creating communities - Matthew Haughey (Metafilter)


Matthew Haughey talked about the lifespan of communities, and mentioned that they follow a graph like this one:

He mentioned that a community site has to become a third place for the user, after home and office. If has to compete with pubs, sports teams, TV and other such attention keeping things. The internet, Facebook and World of Warcraft are examples of this.
To do this we need to have a compelling idea.

He suggested that online community developers should have a basic model of a social toolkit in mind, and websites like Flickr is a good example of this.

He also emphasized that one must use their app themselves, and force oneself to use it even if it is bad.

In the beginning (and even later), Highlighting the best (features and content) in the app is very important, and we should make it easy for users to find this. One should also elevate the power users. Not just the content writers/submitters, one should highlight/award the readers too. The best contributors can be made moderators.

Once the community starts growing, one should get out of the way and let the users carry it the way they want. One should build in flexibility and allow for unintended uses of the your site.
It is very important to find and build out of the edge cases, or the weird ways in which your users are using your site. This will give us new ideas and maybe new directions.

Instead of rules, there should be guidelines from the beginning that define how to be a proper member of the community. While making decisions, emotions should be kept out of the decision process.

Happiness for users is ephemeral and one downtime can kill lots of goodwill. Every community suffers a revolt.

You'll spend more time on customer support than on coding.

How to avoid disaster:

1. Be transparent. Be honest and responsive with the community and explain things to them.
2. Have a dedicated place to talk about the site and its issues. Otherwise the talk will be all over the web.
3. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it and be quick in the response (same thing said by Kevin Rose of Digg).

Legal issues: Find a lawyer/expert who knows the internet. You should have a Corporation LLC, TOS, Privacy Policy and DMCA(copyright) policies in place.