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As delivered at the Open Village Festival, Brussels, 21 October 2017.

I am here to help you. To empower you, and give you some essential for collaborations and community building online, and off – working and living. What I have to say, you will have to do - it will be up to you to make it happen or not happen. But this is what I know from my experiences, and it is what I do to this day. Our focus is on the Open Village - Edgeryders - Reef versions – and some of you are already actively involved and some of you will be joining us more deeply. But the principles, philosophy, concepts, and tools are useful in any online, co-working or co-living situation. This Master Class is a deep journey into some pretty fine points. I know that some of you have already done some or all of these activities - online

Community Master Class

John Coate

Why We Are Here

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community, co-working, co-living and even perhaps living in an outright communal fashion where you pool your money. And if you didn’t already know important things about it or already have some experience, you would not be here. So I do not wish to say anything that assumes you might not already know whatever point I make. I come to this with respect for you and where you are and what you have done - and that to which you aspire. The whole premise of OpenVillage and Edgeryders itself is that the entire network - online and in every physical node - benefits from the ideas, words and actions of every other active participant who shares the common assumptions and goals. Much of this happens online and in-person through a lot of conversing. But what makes it come alive is through action. Making manifest what those words mean. This is where the true synergy happens. Those benefits come in many forms such as exchanging ideas that lead to some action, growing friendships, finding a partner, helping each other professionally, and introducing trusted people to each other. There is no one way, no single path.

I am going to take you on a quick journey into my past. I lived collectively from the age of 19 to 32 in 15 different households over 12 years, in buses, tents and houses. I did it in the deep rural countryside and in the inner city both in New York and Washington DC. Over the years I lived with a total of around 200 different people.

Who Am I?

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I lived on this bus with as many as 9 other people and never fewer than 5. With that many people living in a bus, we had to sit in a circle if we wanted to have a meal or a deep conversation. From day one everything was held in common and shared: money, food, clothes, work – everything. It was super intense, especially at the beginning. We were trying to bring out the best in each other while ridding ourselves – largely via giving each other feedback – of our lesser qualities. It was hard to do, but we stayed with it until it worked pretty well. We came to trust each other completely. We had to develop unity. We were going across a USA that was largely hostile to our long hair, weed smoking, anti-war, peace-and-love countercultural lifestyle. The police and the establishment in general did not tend to like us on first impression. So we had to present ourselves as a together unit and quickly adapt to whatever situation we were in. We had many great adventures.

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We did this as part of a larger group that assembled a caravan of similar buses and set out across the US to talk about peace and consciousness at universities, churches and other venues. Our leader was a gifted speaker and explainer. The trip was structured around his speaking tour. In this picture you see the caravan on the night we departed from San Francisco, October 1970.

After months on the road we returned to San Francisco. But by then we had become enough of a community that we wanted to continue being together. We drove to Tennessee in the American south and found a large piece of land. Here you see us at the very beginning on the land. There were a couple of buildings there already, but really we started with just what you see here: a lot of buses with about 275 people and no real infrastructure. We had to build it all ourselves. We simply called it The Farm. We operated as a collective. All money was pooled.

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This is an aerial photo taken of The Farm a few years later. You can see that it had developed quite a lot with a water tower, more buildings and fields of crops.

This photo was taken in the summer of 1972. By then we had grown to about 400 residents, which included a growing number of children.

This is a picture of the Farm motor pool crew where I worked for most of my years in Tennessee. I’m the guy in the middle holding high the white cowboy hat. As you can see, we had a real esprit de corps.

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After some years we wanted to do more than just live together. We wanted to do things to help with larger social problems around the world. So we formed our own nonprofit organization, which still exists today (plenty.org). We helped people in Guatemala building houses after an earthquake and then helped them get running water to villages and improve their diet with soy protein, we did tornado and flood cleanup, helped native Americans and locally set up programs for city kids to enjoy part of the summer in the country, just to name a few of our projects.

In 1978 we decided to go to the South Bronx in New York City, which at that time had the worst health care in the country with 1 doctor per 100K people, to set up and operate a free ambulance service there. At that time of extreme flight from the city, we squatted in this building, one of hundreds of empty apartment buildings there. I was part of the setup crew. In this rather blurry photo I am on the right in the back row.

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The Plenty Ambulance Service did well for the six years we operated it. Many lives were saved. In addition they trained more than 100 locals people to be emergency medical technicians, of which more than 50 found employment.

I then moved to Washington DC where I lived for five years in an urban Farm household. We too focused on Plenty projects. We collaborated with local doctors to fund the first bilingual free clinic in the city, La Clinica Del Pueblo, which is still going strong today.

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After more than 12 years living communally I decided it was time to move on and try something new. I moved with my young family back to California. At first I worked for three years as an auto mechanic to support my family, but then I got a lucky break in 1986 when a close friend (who had also lived at The Farm) offered me a job at a new computer communication network called The WELL. The WELL was an offshoot of a famously influential publishing group called Whole Earth. I was hired to do marketing and customer support but in time I became what is now called an online community manager. There was no name for the profession then because nobody had yet done it. When I started there I was already 35 years old and had that intense live/work community experience that taught me a lot about how to get along with people in different situations. This photo, a still from a video, is the only existing image of a sign I made in early 1986 for a computer fair. It is the first public use of the phrase “online community.”

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We received some fame for our work. This is one of several news stories about our pioneering work in this new field, now widely recognized as online community. I am the one sitting in this photo and standing is Cliff Figallo, my close friend and fellow ex-Farm member, with whom I had lived back in Washington DC. He and I had a powerful partnership.

In 1997 Wired! Magazine ran this cover story about the WELL. From right to left are Cliff Figallo, Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant and me.

Then in 1994 I co-founded first big news website and was the first to do many things on the web, including the first to offer public dialogue connected to news stories. My real goal was to create ways for journalism to combine with community dialogue to raise the intelligence of a community. This is the home page in 1998. I ran sfgate.com for six years.

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Most recently for 7 years I managed a public radio station in the northern California region where I live. This work required that I perform many tasks, including climbing up on the antenna tower, which is what I am doing here. So that is a quick sketch of my background. There is much more on my website, johncoate.com

There are a lot of co-living and co-working spaces. Many have websites that allow and encourage interaction. And there are a lot of online communities. edgeryders.eu is a perfect specimen. But to do them all at the same time is rare. This is a hybrid of physical and virtual community. The two have equal importance. Our vision is for them all to blend harmoniously and not as completely separate entities. It is one community with a set of focus areas. Online brings the entire community into each autonomous space and the

What Makes Open Village And The Reef Different?

Working Space Living Space Online Space

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live/work spaces provide avenues for deeper R&D. Each feeds the other and each depends on the other. The online community members who do not occupy a live/work space can’t think, “that’s some other experiment, very cool, I hope it succeeds, but it’s not anything I plan to do, so what happens there is interesting but not that relevant to me.” And the people at the live/work spaces can’t think, “those other people can’t know what we’re going through here so I won’t open up to them about life on the ground and those challenges because it won’t help and I don’t have time anyway.” We use the term “Reef” when it is created and operated by the Edgeryders Organization and “Open Village” is a term for a network of houses and physical spaces that include Reefs but have a more autonomous network affiliation. Either one means it is a live/work space with a deep ongoing connection to edgeryders.eu These communities need to be shaped in specific details by the actual participants who take responsibility for their day-to-day existence, sustainability and outcomes. I will lay out some basic ideas that cover all these spaces, say some things specific to co-working and co-living, then focus on the online space then go back to the overall view. A blending naturally occurs. What makes sense for the one often makes sense for the other.

I offer you a toolkit to improve your likelihood of success. A lot of what I am going to tell you is how to not screw it up.

Community

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And if you are here without intention of being part of an Open Village or a Reef, that is fine.

Living in the Farm community for 12 years with so many people, I had learned a lot about how to get along with people. But after I left the physical community where I had lived my whole adult life, I did not want my community experience end. I didn’t know what form it would take. When I began working online, I saw quickly that the basis for everything was the human relationships, just like it was in group living. So I threw myself completely into doing whatever I could to help strengthen the relationships of the people online: to make it as meaningful as possible to the users. With our Farm and bus experience we brought the unshakeable, certain knowledge that deep relationships can form and last, and be made stronger, by honestly and compassionately working through issues with each other openly and honestly. I knew it could work even in computer-mediated communication. Because of my experience, once I figured out that it was all about the relationships, I pushed it to go farther into creating what the people would identify for themselves and the group as a real community. This they did, and online community was born. Managing and participating in community really means helping those relationships develop and thrive.

It’s all about relationships

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This is a basic theme for Edgeryders and is a core part of our own online and physical community. And so it goes for any viable community. It must express itself in thought word and deed, offline and online. When it falls short, it needs to be discussed and corrected. And not “put off until later.” However you decide to structure yourselves, this culture of sharing and respect has to be clearly evident to yourselves and to anyone who shows up, visits, works, stays, or lives nearby.

This is how it manifests. All of the above. I’ll just add that from my own experiences, it isn’t enough to be ok with all this togetherness. You have to thrive on it. Otherwise the ups and downs of it all will get to you eventually. I remember a lot of good people who chose not to continue because of the intensity. But they missed out on something of incredible value.

A Culture of Sharing and Respect

Work Hard Share

Be Open and Honest Provide Service

Don’t be a Complainer, Grouch, Jerk (or worse)

Make Time for Fun

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Work hard: I confess I was not naturally a hard worker. I was a young hippie kid who liked to hang out, make music or do whatever enjoyable thing was happening in the moment. But I also happened to love being with high level, accomplished people. It took being with the group to change me. In the first case, I lived on a bus with a group of high level accomplished people, who were also older by five to eight years, had college degrees and had “dropped out” of real careers. Their commitment included real sacrifice. They made me bring my game up to a higher level or they wouldn’t want me to hang around. I wanted to be with them more than I wanted to stay the same as I was. Later, when I lived at the Farm in the countryside with hundreds of other people, I lived and worked with people who absolutely loved to get up and get working. They inspired me to learn to enjoy working hard. I wanted to be more like that. And of course if I were a slacker, they too wouldn’t want me hanging around. Often in a group there is one or more persons who works harder, or more productively, or more efficiently than some of the other people in a group, and sometimes everyone else. The hard workers notice and almost certainly are not happy about it somewhere inside. But at the same time they may not have the authority to be the boss. So they either hold it in and get resentful, or it all comes out in some blowup where the particular incident seems too small for the size of the eruption. I told that story about myself because I think there is a burden on those who have less natural hustle to pay attention that they are really bringing their A game to the endeavor. I’m not suggesting people burn themselves out. I’m saying to let the hard workers lead the way. It works so much better that way. Share: This is something each group should decide for itself how sharing will work. The main thing is that share is a verb. It is an action. It is something that you do and the default should be that you initiate it and don’t wait for everyone else. In world commerce a nation can be designated as a “net energy exporter.” Think of yourself as that, except it is your own energy you export to other people. Be open and honest: Tell the truth and you don’t have to keep your story straight, as the old saying goes. But how open? How honest? Is there a threshold of privacy and personal boundaries? This is something a group should discuss early and make decisions about. Talk about what limits you want to set. However, if you carry around with you an unspoken and unresolved personal problem that impacts the group in a meaningful way,

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you do have a responsibility to try to resolve it and to not get mad if someone asks you what’s going on. “Oh nothing” isn’t a real answer sometimes. Provide service: It means that you have thrown in with something bigger than yourself that you keep in common with others and your attention and effort goes beyond your own project, job or interest. It means that when you see something that needs to happen then it might be your responsibility to deal with it and it is for you to carry it through. It means you pay attention to the whole, the group, the community - and that includes you as well. Don’t be a complainer grouch jerk or worse: Another crucial form of service has nothing to do with the physical plane. Everyone knows that chronic complaining brings the energy down for everyone. Still, we all have our moods. But do you let them drive you? Unless you have a problem. In that case, see #3 above: be open and honest. Make time for fun: If a group doesn’t learn to have fun together, it will not properly wire itself up for the long haul.

To affirm someone is to encourage something positive in a way that uplifts. To me, affirmation means to find something to like in the other person and being comfortable affirming it to that person or about that person when you see it. These days a very easy and common but lightweight form of affirmation is the “like.” However, that doesn’t go much beyond short-term feel good. What I mean is where you observe someone’s words or actions and your

The Magic of Affirmation

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affirmation comes in a form of positive encouragement with the idea of showing that: 1. You pay close attention to that person, which qualifies you to express yourself and 2. You want to help grow more of that in the other person. One trick I use when dealing with a lot of different people is to find something to like in the other person and speak to that, focus on it and see if you can bring it out more or grow it. Never fake it. If you don’t really feel it, don’t say it. It has to be real. You might not see the benefit right away, but over time trust and greater bonding develops. By keeping it real and not overstated, it makes it easier at other times to give a different kind of affirmation that says something like, “I see your better self inside, but what you just said or did was not its best expression.” In other words, there will be times when you need to tell someone that you disagree with something they say or do. But that too can be affirming if you deliver it without anger or other confusing emotions. This is not about stoking someone’s ego or even building up their self-esteem. It is not “you are great” but rather “what you just did or said is great.” Do you see the difference?

Let’s focus now on the physical spaces.

Living and Working: Physical spaces

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Someone or some group will find a space. Hard as that is, it’s the easy part. Unless you choose wrong. Then you start in a hole. But let’s assume you chose well. Can you maintain it? And Can you sustain it? Living Arrangements: First you have to make some decisions about how you will arrange things and manage yourselves. If you are an Edgeryders-sponsored Reef, some of these things are pre-decided. There are crucial roles such as house steward, project managers and coordinators. If you are an autonomous space in the network, take the time for the conversation in which everyone has an open mind and lays out your skills, strengths and weaknesses. And even if you have some pre-decided rules and arrangements, have the conversation to fill in the rest. And don’t put too tight a time limit on it. It might take a few tries to come to an understanding that works well enough for everyone. Not doing it means trouble down the road. A word about the local community in which you locate your space. Any group living space is going to attract the attention of your neighbors. They may or may not like you doing your thing in their neighborhood. That depends on you. You want to put out a clear sense that you are positive people who are an asset to the local community. That should show itself in every person and every interaction. When we lived in the South Bronx it was one of the harshest ghettos in the country. We were white people living in an all-black area. It was dangerous. We were watched closely at all times by the neighbors. It could have gone badly if we gave the wrong impression.

Living Arrangements Maintenance Sustainability

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At the Farm in TN sometimes drunk neighbors showed up with shotguns to shoot up the hippies. We had to calm them down and get them to go away without trouble. Maintenance: means the basics: warm, dry, clean, good water, good sewage, enough to eat, decent power and connectivity. That gets pretty expensive after awhile in a long-term situation where you pay someone else to fix things. And a lot of landlords are lax. Someone needs to know how to use a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and knows how to not get shocked or overflow the plumbing. I recall a well-funded commune that totally fell apart form the overflowing toilets and neglected hygiene. Sustainability is the hard one and is the grail which we all seek. There is not enough time to go into all detail of how this is to be achieved, but without it, then nothing much was proved. There is no success without it. When I say sustainability I am not just talking about paying the bills on time and staying in good shape materially. This live/work/online life is based on growing strong human relationships. There must be commitment to, and effort towards, developing and keeping this essential atmosphere of sharing, respect, openness, honesty and enjoyment alive and strong.

No money = no roof, no food, no projects. Everything falls apart. None of us want to be slaves to money, but we have to have it. Grants can get you started, and sometimes pay completely for a deliverable. But grants don’t pay for operations. This has to be earned. It may be that one of the projects pays for more than just its own expenses, but it might not. If not you have to come up with other ways to pay for yourself.

About the Money

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Someone has to keep the books and someone has to manage the money. It shouldn’t just be one person because that lowers accountability, but it is cumbersome as a full democracy. This is part of your setup. Whoever does this work, know how to account for money coming in, money paid out, what is owed, what is owed to you, what is on hand or easily available and know how all of this works on a calendar so nothing is late. Mess this up and it’s like a big hole in your boat. And how much of it will be group money and how much will be your own? If you are working under a grant then it isn’t money paid out to you personally, but rather is paid to your project and comes with requirements for how it is spent and accounted. But if you get a job to help with the bills, you and the group will have to decide how that will be parsed out. This is a big aspect that distinguishes an Open Village house from a bunch of roommates paying into the rent. Are you willing to pool your money with everyone else and decide from there how to spend it? It is proof of a deep commitment when you do.

How Will the Money Work?

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Do you have one? Are you sure? What if you are a houseful of people full of great ideas looking for help for your projects? Is everyone in the kitchen a chef? Or, can any two or more projects combine? And if your project is one chosen for group focus, how much ownership do you have over it? Will you manage it in all aspects? Can you let go of some part of it? If it has commercial potential, do you know how to read a contract? Do you know where to go for advice?

What if it falls on you to spend more of your time making money for the group and less working on your own project? Would you do it? Does your involvement and commitment rely only on you being able to pursue your own idea and project in a pace and manner that works for you?

The Projects That Make the Money

A Crux Question

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Or is the wellbeing of the whole group equal or more important? Are you willing to set your own project aside for a time if you are needed to earn money that sustains the space even if it means someone else’s project gets the focus? Over the long haul it can mean that roles change and even reverse. You may well have a great project, but it just isn’t yet the right time. In my own experience, I lived in two urban group houses over the course of five years where we as a group undertook important social projects. One was the South Bronx free ambulance service. In Washington DC we co-founded a bilingual free clinic and helped other important social causes. In both cases I worked as a carpenter as part of our full time construction and remodeling crew. And I maintained the vehicles and repaired the appliances such as the laundry. So I spent my time mainly in support of the whole. In each place I also was able to do meaningful work and give meaningful service to our mission-based projects at various times, even though I worked mainly at making money and keeping us in good repair. So overall my role was one of sacrifice to the greater good of the whole. But after a few years, in the case of the DC clinic, it turned out that I found the connection that raised the seed money that got the project started. So, even in a supporting role, if you are engaged and thinking in terms of helping the whole, it might be that you do something that makes the core project move forward.

What will be your structure for making decisions? Voting? Consensus? Consensus minus one? Put someone in charge? Have a committee? Just sit in a circle?

Who Decides What?

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Different spaces will have different structures for making decisions. There will be decisions about your own project and about the living and working spaces in general. What is important is to take the time to be thorough and to not be attached to only personal desires but to look at the group as a whole. Leave your egos at the door when you have the discussions.

Who is good at what? That is one of the first things to find out. What about chores? Everyone should be involved in basic household work as well as the usually more fun project work. And stuff breaks. When you see something that needs attention don’t just walk away. Take responsibility for making it right. Most kinds of work require someone to make the decisions and others to carry them out. But with live/work, the work or project leader is not automatically the leader in the living arrangements. And in some cases the authority shifts around. I have lived in households with the person who was my work boss. They may have been individuals with a natural authority based on their maturity, experience and general good sense, but it was not a given that their authority carried over into other parts of the group life. When I lived at the Farm I worked on the cars and trucks and I drove them, including long distances. I lived with a guy who directed me in that work. But at home he didn’t direct me at all. In that case he had no other natural authority so it made no sense for it to be any other way. In Washington DC I lived with a guy who was my boss for almost five straight years. Again, when we were in the home that was not our relationship. But he was a more mature guy with greater wisdom and

Who Does What?

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experience and I did grant him a larger leadership role in other parts of our lives.

People who live together share a lot of germs. What happens if everyone gets the flu? It sounds obvious but if you live and eat together, to stay healthy you must pay attention to basic hygiene. I lived in a house where someone came to visit. One dinner she cooked some soup for us not knowing that she had been infected already with hepatitis B, which can spread in your food. Most of us, including me, came down with it one summer. We could barely function. It took months for us to get back to normal. It almost trashed our whole project.

Stay Healthy

Privacy and Personal Space

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What is private? What is your business and nobody else’s? And when does your own business spill over into the group to the point that it then becomes relevant to the group? It depends on the situation, and what your collective goals are. When I lived on a bus with seven or more other people there was no real chance for a normal understanding of what it private. And it was our goal to dig into each other’s minds, attitudes and habits so much that we would bond as deeply as we possibly could. There were no secrets; there was nothing one could hold back. The intensity of it was not for everyone - you had to really want it and you had to thrive on it - but for me it was a personal breakthrough in seeing how I more fully felt part of the group. Later, in every other co-living community situation, that experience served me well. Living in houses we had rooms with doors we could shut. Privacy was possible. But it was important to not drift off into the habit of increasing my need to get away from the group. Group energy needs pretty steady care and feeding with your time and attention. But when two people get together and become a couple or if there is a family with children, it is better to allow room for a couple or a family to work out their own issues. Provided whatever problems need to be worked out do not affect the group in meaningful ways.

You can go into your room and shut the door to escape from the group. This can become a bad habit though, which can alienate you over time. But today you can do the same thing while sitting right there in a group just by obsessively looking at your phone. I’m not saying don’t use your phone

Don’t Escape into your Phone

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when with your group, but be mindful of your motivation in a given moment and be honest with yourself about it.

Our network is both: an online community and a set of physical spaces connected through that online community. Each feeds the other. In situations where members of the online community cannot, or choose not to, engage in person, they still benefit from the strengthened bonds produced in the live/work group. People win the live/work group benefit from the thoughts and ideas of those who aren’t there in person. Bonding and relationship building takes place in all situations. The whole network benefits from this dynamic. One of the great benefits of an online platform is it keeps a record – the searchable repository of community intelligence. So besides being a way to stay connected with those who are not in physical proximity, it is a useful diary for those who live together. But it requires effort to make sure that the value is secured, organized and easily available by rigorously documenting, sharing, referring and linking. This effort has to be ongoing and up-to-date. However, neglecting the physical space by being online all the time undercuts the value of being physically together. If it’s not too noisy, do some of your online work in the common living rooms in a house.

Living and Working: the Online Space

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There will be a main person who handles most of the online activity for their Open Village and that person is going to need to know how to do this and do it well. But everyone who lives or works at an Open Village needs to know these basic principles so there is consistency and a reliably good feeling, even when there is debate or disagreement discussed online. And that main role may switch around over time. There is much more I can say about online community work, but because of time restrictions, I focus on the following.

It really comes down to this. You want other people to experience you as you really are. But since you only have words and maybe pictures, you can’t be too casual about how to accomplish it. Not unlike writing where you want your work to be as if you

Managing Online Community

You want your online self to be close as possible to who

you are in person

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were speaking naturally when in fact you carefully crafted your words to make it seem like you were spontaneously communicating. In order to get your online self to come as close as you can to who you are the rest of the time, you have to compensate for the loss of what you can’t communicate beyond words. There is deliberate projection involved. Ansell Adams, the famous nature photographer, once said that in order to make his pictures look real he had to make them “hyper real” to give that effect. The projection I mean is similar to that. It means looking at yourself and thinking about how you want to convey to the others. This was a key part of how I built the first online community. And it wasn’t just me. There was a group of us who agreed that being real was important and we consciously set out to have our online and offline personalities mirror each other. That said, I am not knocking role playing or gaming. They have their place and their value. We just didn’t see how we were going to get to a place of deeper connection if we did role playing or assumed a persona of irony.

Nobody is perfect. Everyone screws up, makes mistakes and wishes they could say or do something over. I once heard a Zen master say that the main point is to try, and keep trying. That is why they call it a “practice.” The online environment is restricted to words and sometimes pictures and video, but still something comes through along with that. There is an emotional subcarrier going out concurrent with the words. And even when you just have words to communicate, that emotion goes out there with the

Model the Behavior You

Want to See in others

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words and they will be received and interpreted by people using their own mixture of rational and emotional. Never forget this reality. It will serve you well.

Vouch for people. They vouch for you. Ultimately trust is the basis for everything functioning. Without it everything falls apart or never gets off the ground. Trust is often given up front as a kind of credit extended to another person, but long term it has to be earned through your actions every day. In the early days of the WELL, the people using it were extremely smart and talented and many had great social ability. But they had not yet experienced this sense of community in the online world because it didn’t yet exist anywhere. They had a natural skepticism about how much they should trust each other. In order to help them learn to trust each other, they had to trust me first. When I understood that this was an essential part of helping the group come together into something new and greater, I took it as a great responsibility being this trusted person. It made me more careful to not say and do things that would discourage that trust. I have been told by others that this was a crucial reason why that online gathering moved from being a bunch of smart people networking into something they themselves called a “community.”

Be Someone Everybody Trusts

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If you actively host an online scene, large or small, whether you operate the system or not, you will have to switch between a number of roles, and you can’t always predict at what time you will need to fulfill which role. Leader: online communities such as Edgeryders (and many others) are dedicated to bringing people together and giving all a place to talk, meet and collaborate, but they are not democracies. They are owned by a company or an organization and someone has to be responsible for it. When you are an online community manager you are either that responsible person or you represent the people who are. That makes you a leader with responsibilities of leadership. Participant: at the same time, you actively participate in the conversations and the process of getting to know the people just like everyone else, even as you maintain your leader status. It seems like a paradox to be both leader and peer, but that is what you do. Because even while participating like everyone else, if you do it well, you still lead the group toward better understanding and overall value in using the service. Moderator: includes setting up topics and conversations and helping along ones that others create, including interviews and other “set” pieces. Mediator: Arguments happen. Usually they work themselves through without you needing to get in the middle and either calm everyone down or sometimes putting a stop to something that escalates out of control. But when you need to intervene, do so without expressing any emotion of your own. Helpdesk: no matter how easy your system is to use and understand, there will be people who don’t know how to find or do something. You

The Hats You Wear: Leader

Participant Moderator Mediator Helpdesk Librarian Analyst

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need to help them and promptly. Otherwise they might go away and not come back. Helping also means greeting new people and helping them find the people and conversations that bring them the most value. Librarian: related to helpdesk, you need to know where things are so you can either help someone find something directly, or more commonly, participate in a conversation and actively link to related material either inside your own system or elsewhere on the net. Other people can and often do this on their own, and you won’t have all the answers or relevant ideas anyway, but the point is to stay mindful of opportunities to illuminate a conversation or comment with a good reference. Analyst: how many people do you have and how many of them actively participate? How often do they come and how long do they stay? What are the connectors between the people? What topics are of most and least interest? You need to know these and other vital signs as a measure of your community’s health. And you need to weave them into the story you tell to anyone who might support or fund your efforts.

A person can’t really “multitask” in real time because you can only really pay attention to one thing at a time. Rather the brain does a lot of switching back and forth, sometimes very quickly. When you “wear a lot of hats” you have to become very good at this kind of switching because every one of the tasks you have to perform is important. Those of us involved in visionary work sometimes tend to not want to do administrative tasks that we might regard as boring. But not doing any one of them, and doing them well, can create problems that take much time and attention to straighten out and can even put your whole project in danger of failure.

“The Devil is in the Details”

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I never managed another person until I was 44 years old. And I had never managed a budget. Then, when I started the big news project sfgate.com it fell upon me to do both things. I couldn’t make mistakes, or if I made them I had to correct them fast or the consequences could be big. So I, who never had much interest in making budgets and spreadsheets, had to focus on minute details. It took a lot of time. On the plus side, learning to pay attention to the details gave me credibility with people more experienced in business or other professions. There are no shortcuts to gaining this kind of respect. Often, it is the difference in maintaining your funding.

Authority is earned, recognized by others and endorsed by the people. Authoritarian is imposing rules and structures more for the sake of reinforcing that authority than for constructively moving forward. Most social structures have a form of authority chain. Most online systems are managed by a system’s owners. There are times when a situation calls for quick decisive action and you don’t have time to “hash things out.” Make sure when you “grab the wheel” that you know where you are going. I have encountered people online behaving abusively and made the decision to cut them off. However, in the course of talking online to people day after day, I, like everyone else, am not right all the time. And back in the earlier days when I was younger and less experienced that was especially true. It would have been harmful to my goals and to the benefit of the group if I acted like I was right all the time just because I was the manager of the place.

Authority vs

Authoritarian

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Sometimes you are not correct and someone may point it out to you, either privately or in public. Admitting your mistakes and striving not to repeat them actually builds more of the trust that you need to do your work.

It’s a phrase we see used in the online world a lot, referring to everything that happens offline, or “in real life.” But in fact it is all real life and how you think and act in each “realm” is essentially the same. They vary in degree or emphasis in certain ways owing to the lack of full “bandwidth” between people. As I said earlier, you want to be as close to your real self as you can get, but especially in the online environment, you want to consciously project to others that which you see as the best parts of yourself so it is clear to all that your intentions are honest, that your interest in others is genuine, and that you are there to be part of something larger than yourself. So the following notes pertain to either environment: online or offline. It’s all real life. What follows now is based on years of working through problems with people.

IRL:

In Real Life

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As much as we all want happy productive lives in community with others, negativity and conflict are inevitable. It is part of the human condition. However, it does not have to dominate any group or person. It isn’t healthy to suppress unexamined feelings, ideas, or issues when they are negative, unpleasant or inconvenient. The idea is to get objective enough about something negative so you don’t spread it thoughtlessly or in a way that make someone else feel worse if it isn’t helpful. I don’t mean gloss it over or be fake happy. I mean trying to separate what you want to say from the emotion that might be driving you to say it. It’s hard enough to have a truthful discussion about difficult issues between people without making it worse by projecting the full load of whatever negative feelings you have. Part of mindfulness is recognizing when you are in a negative frame of mind and not letting it go too far. But what about when someone else is being negative, or when they react to your negativity in an equal or greater negative way? Everyone knows how it feel to be on the receiving end of an angry rant. Everyone gets in a bad mood sometime. We complain, gripe, see the ‘glass as half empty.’ What do you do to straighten it out? First, try to separate the informational content of what someone is saying from the emotion of it. They might be saying something valuable. Then it becomes more effective to ask someone to tone it down.

Regarding Negativity

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Unless they are screaming at you. At those times when the ratio of “signal to noise” is way too far on the noise end of the scale, it is probably best to get things calmed down first before you dig into what is really going on.

In all parts of life, conflict is easy to get into and hard to resolve. This is especially true in the online or virtual world where it is made more difficult by the constraints of the medium. We’re all just so calibrated to MIS-understand each other.

Now here is the good news. Relationships, individual and group, gain their temper like steel when you know that you can resolve, or at least live with, your disagreements. Knowing that you can – because you have – makes relationships stronger. Neither seek nor avoid. Don’t be afraid of conflict if you have to go there. But do not seek it for any reason other than to gain mutual understanding.

Conflict: easy to get in

hard to get out

Conflicts can strengthen bonds as well as weaken them.

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When is someone else’s business and none of yours? You can decide up front where the lines are between what you keep to yourself and what you say to someone else. Sometimes a problem can resolve to everyone’s understanding and satisfaction without stopping to talk about it. Relationships often have a kind of honeymoon phase. One thing I have learned is that the more you get to know someone, the more things you learn about them that you don’t like. You do want to avoid buildup of irritations that start small and fester into something that is not just bigger, but potentially hard to sort out. Does someone else’s habit or way of being bother you enough that you need to tell them about it? Or can you let it go? Some people are not aware that whatever they are doing bothers other people and would appreciate knowing so they can stop doing it. But you don’t want to be the one who always acts as a kind of behavior police correcting everyone. That leads to resentment. Online it is easier to get up and walk away from a conflict for some period of time without making it worse because you did. If you work or live together, that might not be a good strategy. Bad feelings in the air can linger and get worse when a problem goes unspoken.

When do you talk about it?

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On the other hand, it might be that the problem is because people have different habits and it just isn’t that important in the larger scheme of things. You have to make these choices. But as a default it is better to agree to say something than keep quiet.

Before you go blurting out to someone your issue with them, take a minute to ask yourself the question. Remember, problems in any relationships are usually not 100% one or the other person.

When someone criticizes us we often get defensive. Even when delivered calmly and honestly, it can be pretty hard to sit there and listen and then unemotionally have a conversation about it. But giving that kind of feedback is hard too, and sometimes it is harder because of the need to strip away the emotional payload that is so often carried along with the informational content of whatever someone is saying.

Am I the Problem or are You the Problem?

Receiving Feedback can be Hard. Sometimes Giving it is

Harder

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So have compassion for the person giving it, especially if it is given in a good spirit.

The only way I have seen that works in smoothing out conflicts is when the participants oversupply understanding. This is one of the best ways for anyone, and especially online managers, to lead by example. It is the art of listening. And it means being diplomatic. My father was once a delegate to a UN conference and he told me that the essence of being a diplomat is that if you are one of ten people at a table that means you talk 10% of the time and the other 90% you listen.

This is not a lecture where I finish, you take away whatever you find valuable and we go our separate ways. I invite you to stay in touch with me. Thank you for your time and attention.

Oversupply understanding

This is not the end

tex@well.com john@edgeryders.eu