Community Signal

“Is this person helping the community or hurting the community? If they’re hurting the community, can you define what it is that they are doing that hurts the community? [Is it] written into the community guidelines?” – Wesley Faulkner ▶️ https://lnkd.in/gGdvpCT #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“[When I started building INmobile,] I didn’t know anything about running an online community. I was pulled from Yankee Group where I was a wireless industry expert, to run this community, because I was a knowledge expert. The idea was they’ll come talk to me. They didn’t come talk to me. They came and talked to each other.” - Adam Zawel ▶️ https://lnkd.in/gptRbXG #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“[At some point, vBulletin wasn’t giving developers] the tools that they need. That’s the thing a lot of software companies forget. Who do you have to make happy first? The developers and the designers. They are the ones who are actually going to build out the third party resources. ... “The developers are what make your community sustainable and powerful and a place where people will sometimes come to your platform just because of these certain features and tools. And I feel like [vBulletin] didn’t listen to what the developers were needing but other platforms were, and it wasn’t even a hard decision for a lot of people [to leave them].” - Mike Creuzer ▶️ https://lnkd.in/g6W28xF #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“[If you’re worried about starting a community in a crowded niche,] go to your regular supermarket and see how many soft drinks there are. You can look at the same for communities, how many communities for kittens are there? I’m sure you can make a new community for kittens that is very relevant to the people that you invite. “It’s all about finding your niche. Finding something that’s relevant to people. Finding those couple of people around you that find it relevant so you’re not on your own. There’s always a place to start something new. You just have to do it really well.” - Kirsten Wagenaar ▶️ https://lnkd.in/gr2Xmre #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“[When I joined CustomMade,] there was no code of conduct, in terms of how to act on the platform. Rather than send them down from the mountain top, I created a process where the makers themselves created those rules. There were some emails. There were some surveys. Some of the more experienced makers, I spoke with them on the phone personally. We basically got feedback on what we thought should be part of that code of conduct. It came from them, not from us.” - Dave Cayem ▶️ https://lnkd.in/g8VFDCm #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR #CodeOfConduct

“During the Black Lives Matter protests … I’m really paraphrasing here but [a prominent white man in the community industry] effectively said community is going to be the solution to discrimination such as racism. I actually just responded to him and said, ‘It’s also the thing that’s currently perpetuating it.’ It’s part of the problem, because community [is] effectively groups. “The most extreme example is the KKK meets up every week. That’s a community. There are absolutely extreme right-wing versions of communities that exist. Just because we don’t acknowledge them or may not see them in our everyday lives, they are still communities. We have to understand the power that community has –– good or bad.” – Faisa Mohamed ▶️ https://lnkd.in/eE5cSEm #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“If you would send me into the desert with one metric to rule them all, [active members] would be the one. How many members do you have, and do they keep coming back? Are they active? Do you manage to draw more people? If that number goes down, there’s something wrong. “The problem is, it’s a bit of a lagging metric, so it’s probably that something went wrong a couple months ago. But still, it’s a very, very strong indicator that something is amiss, or if it keeps rising, it’s a very strong indicator that something is going well.” - Bas van Leeuwen ▶️ https://lnkd.in/g6JkZKdB #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

From 2017: “I think a more productive way of approaching the [online abuse] conversation, at least right now, is not say, ‘How can we engineer our way out of this? How can we create technology to get us out of this?’ “It’s encouraging communities to grow healthy patterns and healthy ways and encouraging resilience among more marginalized members of communities who are marginalized for discriminatory type reasons, not because they should be marginalized because they’re terrible.” – Emily Temple-Wood ▶️ https://lnkd.in/gVdWNky #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

From 2017: “As much as we’ve been getting steadily better on [casual sexism and misogyny at MetaFilter], in general, it has remained an incremental process because you have to get people on board. You have to set that expectation, you have to do education. You have to teach people to question things that they had taken for granted previously and that includes things like, who is impacted when you’re just joking? Who actually takes the brunt of your disinclination to re-examine the stuff that you learned in middle school? ... “Even when people are trying, it’s really easy when you’re dealing with discussions of isms, in general, for someone to have a fairly defensive reaction to being told that they’re doing something, even if their intent is reasonably good, even if they aren’t a real jerk.” - Josh Millard Listen: https://lnkd.in/gDEG-iAm #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR

“The ultimate measure [of successful policing] is lack of crime and support of the community. Those are the ultimate measures. Measuring those is very, very hard; very, very difficult. When we enshrine arrest as a sign of an officer’s productivity, rather than ‘Did the officers solve problems?,’ that means we haven’t found effective methods yet to [quantify] department-wide measures of solving problems against just law enforcement. “I don’t want to back away from law enforcement as a means of solving problems because, at times, you use it, but it seems to me there are myriad of other ways to solve problems.” - George Kelling (1935-2019) ▶️ https://lnkd.in/ghgu-MNn #OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CommunityManager #CMGR