Online Community Management

Missed the first part of the discussion, sorry.

Discussion of reputation – how to compute them
Pros/cons challenges of making reputations transferable between communities
• How do you do it technically
• How does a rep qeuight between different types of communities BarCamp to Bacon?
• How do different communities equate their rep scoring problems
KarmaSphere – solving the global reputation system
Sabre (travel) is building a travel community, their rep system very complex

New Topic: Routing Around the Bozos: how can you route around them or wrestle their sphere of control out of their hands or route them back into the community. Not just trolls. Techniques: sweet talking, smoothing, phone calls, finding them a handler.
• Related problem: someone who is incredibly frustrated by something going on in the community. Helps to give them more responsibility – like putting them in charge of what is frustrating them. Sometimes just someone with a passion but no social schools.
• User group management – generally if you respond to someone who’s really angry, if you’re nice after they’re jerks, they’ll become your best ally.
• Bozos are: misguided passionate people, solve them by acknowledging their problems and give them some ability to fix it. Karl Vogel’s book on the subject is good.
• The Rabbit Holes: send all the bozos off to work on a separate project.
• Collaborative massively multiplayer game design: when you find malicious bozos, put them in charge of the monsters. Let them channel their energy productively.

New Topic: Mailing List
Need good mailing list software. Something better than MailMan? Problems with search and figuring out how to join a list (and how to post).
Another person finds it pretty easy to administer a large list.
Dawn finds mailing lists easy to user for our generation who are familiar with them, but not so much other users that are not email-oriented. People have their preferences as to what mode they like – email, forums, RSS feeds.
Problems with email lists – long discussion and if you don’t follow it you miss the conclusions.
• Pay somebody to write a weekly summary of the discussion, which pushes out as a blog.
• Convert the discussion thread into a document, and write a summary at the end of it.
Search in MailMan: can be set up by admin to have a built-in google search right in every message.
Email lists still good for very unsophisticated users.

New Topic: Scaling communities.
ParentHacks: parenting blog. One person blogger bottlenecks the community, keeps it from growing. Suggestions?
• Invite additional bloggers to write and submit, maintain editorial control
• Switching from TypePad to Drupal – overhead for administration is pretty high.
• Important to keep the voice the same.
Relevant issue: Is it one to many? Or is it many to many? Different models.
• Make it an “Honor” to post, kees quality up.
• Find the champions of that community, and identify their subnetworks. Has her champions, advisory board to come on writing product review, so they’v ebecome well known.
• On JiveSpace – Dawn created a ‘friends of Jivespace’ blog so they get special exclusivie visibility and voice.
• Discussion of how Apple did it – got the Hacker Community to work for them, write their APIs.
• What makes a community work? Things that people can contribute to scaleably, like plugins or API developments.
• Reputation counts – of the community, of the contributions. FireFox, IPhone, WorldPress, Cream floats to the top. Use is what matters

New Topic Plug-ins:
wrote a testing system for Perl, became very popular, became overwhelming for one guy to write, the interface becoming too complex. Instead of maintaining it monolithic, he took the guts out and turned it into a framework and pushed it out for anybody to use to build testing apps against.
Monetizing the Community? How do you gain money from running a community?
• Can monetize creating a community personally, just as a resume builder.
• ParentHacks – is monetizing it somewhat
• Request payment – if its popular enough people will pay.
• Offer special support for elevated levels of participation – like Flickr does