The Art of Community

Excerpts

When the community begins to see more bureaucracy and repetition than useful and enjoyable contributions, something is wrong.

as team members interact, attributions about underlying differences based on race, gender, and age are likely to be minimized; however, the underlying differences in terms of personality, values, and attitudes are likely to have an increasingly negative effect on team cohesion and performance

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

Retaining contributors sounds complex, but is thankfully pretty simple. If you want people to stick around, you need to offer them a regular sense of achievement. Your community members need to feel (a) that they are productive, (b) that their contributions are appreciated, and (c) that (a) and (b) happen repeatedly. This is particularly important for new contributors. When someone first expresses interest in joining your community, she needs to follow what I call the contributor ramp: ▪ Identify an area in which she can contribute ▪ Learn the skills required to contribute ▪ Know which specific task to work on ▪ Know how to submit her work When you start attracting people to your community, you are encouraging them to begin interfacing with this process. As such, you need to make sure you have all of the above in order before you even make a peep. The most logical home for this information is your website.