Critical Mass

I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct.  I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not completely convinced that I’m actually doing that much in the way of direct building.  A big part of this has been good timing combined with grabbing onto something big and powerful and hanging on (ala Jim Butcher’s career in its earlier stages, or the preexisting Fudge community when we started running our yaps about Fate).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little.  Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.

Communities result from common interest, collected into one place, focused on an exploration of its enthusiasms.  In that respect, you need to locate those common interests that have a critical mass and build on that, or you need to create common interests and focus them into a critical mass.  I’m not sure that there’s much I can say about the “how” of that, because you either have something that many people are interested in or you don’t.

That said if you’ve generated lots of smaller interests, you might be able to aggregate them usefully to create a larger common interest.  On the opposite end of the spectrum it’s possible you can have too much mass for your, uh, “containment mechanism”, to the point where the enthusiasm getting generated is in excess of the members’ ability to parse through it.  So there’s definitely some right-sizing going on here.

For small press games, there’s a very real chance that there’s not enough quantity of interest in an individual product to sustain a mailing list or a forum.  By “sustain”, I mean generate regular self-producing traffic to the extent that the community doesn’t fall into stagnancy.

If the publisher only produces that one game, they’re going to be out of luck in terms of having a viable community on their own.  If the publisher produces multiple games, it might be possible to create community around the aggregated interest in the publisher’s entire body of works, though that can be tenuous as wildly different styles of games are going to have a hard time finding enough common areas of overlap for the community to hang together sustainably.

If you’re such a publisher without that quantity of interest available (the critical mass), your only real path of action is to direct fans (and yourself) to larger communities that align with the interest you do have.  That means putting on your swamp gear and wading into the mucky territory of online gaming forums: RPGNet, Story-Games, the Forge, etc.  That’s no guarantee your area of interest will thrive there, but if it dies there it’ll be from something other than the lack of feeding it gets as a solo endeavor.

Once you do have that critical mass, it’s a case of right-sizing how you contain and focus it.

For most focused interest communities, at their inception, a web forum is not the right idea.  Web forums require people to remember they exist, and need to be interesting and important enough that the members have an incentive to make time in their days to venture out onto the Internet and check in at this specific destination.  Web forums also fragment conversation: people can participate in a single thread or a small selection of threads, and ignore all the rest.  For those small focused interests, that can be deadly, and will often lead to stagnancy rather than sustainability.  For this reason I only look to web forums as the solution for high levels of traffic and conversation, where the conversation is so active that it would drive more people away from a mailing list than it would bring in.

A mailing list is like a forum with a single thread. In order to participate, you have to parse at least on a basic level every message that comes through (even if that act of parsing is “nope, no interest, delete” or “do the subject lines in this digest interest me?”).  That’s a pain in the ass for large and highly varied conversations, but it’s perfect for focusing a lower-traffic interest into one continuous “stream” with enough mass and energy to become sustainable.  (If a mailing list version of your community is falling stagnant, moving to a forum won’t fix it; you simply do not have enough mass there to do the job. See above for what to do then.)

A lot of what I’m talking about here is art rather than science. I’m not putting numbers or quantified frequencies on what I’m talking about, because I can’t.  I do it by “feel”, and your “feel” very likely does not match mine.

There’s a point at which a mailing list feels dead or stagnant: that means the community doesn’t have a critical mass.  There’s a point at which a mailing list feels too damn busy for people to keep up with and still do everything else that’s important in their lives.  That’s where you have too much mass for your container, and it’s time to consider a move to a web forum, where your community’s nascent subcommunities can all coexist and occasionally cross over to one another conveniently without it feeling to the members like these interests are constantly intruding.

So as a community-runner, you need to keep an eye on these trends and be willing to take action when it’s clear that the community’s location is not a good fit for the community’s level of activity.

A few real-world examples from my experience:

The FateRPG Yahoo Group (a mailing list) is where we took conversation about the Fate variant of Fudge when it threatened to get large enough to drown out rest of the traffic on the original Fudge community mailing list.  It has stayed in this form for its entire lifespan to date.  Occasionally bits of off-topic conversation can pop up, but at this point it allows for discussions of Fate in general, Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, and Diaspora — as well as some other fan-produced variations.  Traffic is reasonably constant but rarely overwhelming.  There’s no reason to split it off to a forum, even though I’ve had it suggested to me before.  Frankly I think a forum version would just result in a lack of sufficient traffic; I’m betting the move would take an active community that’s thriving in its current “container” and put it into an environment where things would fizzle. Folks would leave due to the transition, and those that remained wouldn’t keep the conversation going enough for the value of community to really work.

Here, I’ll pick on my good friend Chad Underkoffler a bit to talk about another mailing list community I’m in occasional contact with. Chad insists on giving each of his individual PDQ-derived products their own mailing list.  Most of them have little to zero traffic.  While he has recently (at a fan’s request) started a general PDQ interest mailing list, that’s been done without shutting down the other specific-product lists and funneling traffic to the one place.  I suspect — though this is just my gut feeling — that this move is keeping the PDQ fans at large from achieving a critical mass.  The versions of PDQ in each individual product are not so different that there wouldn’t be plenty of value in some cross-over talk amongst the various small groups of people interested in each.  The Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies group has perhaps the best chance right now of sustainability, though part of the energy burst happening there is due to its relatively recent publication.  But who knows? I could be wrong. I just think that the various sub-groups of the PDQ community have much more to offer each other as a collective entity than they do as satellites nominally orbiting one another.

The Jim Butcher online community started as a mailing list a decade or so ago that I called McAnallys, named after the pub in the Dresden Files.  It worked great for the first few years of Jim’s post-publication career.  We encouraged a pub-like atmosphere, where folks could talk about whatever so long as we always circled back around to the reason we were gathered together in one place: Jim’s writing.  But Jim kept getting more and more popular, and the mailing list got to the point where it could kick out multiple long digests in a single day.  Plenty of folks on the list liked the fact that it was a mailing list, that they didn’t have to go out and check a forum, but the conversations were just too active. That started to create an “insider effect”, where the list was active and hoppin’ and great for the people who were already there and thriving in it, but which ended up being unpleasant to get into as a new member.  The thirsty man could either go thirsty or try to drink from a firehose pointed right in his face.  So I bit the bullet and moved the community to a web forum.

Today’s web forum on JimButcherOnline.com is still crazy-active, but by being a forum we’ve managed to support the continued idea of a pub atmosphere for some members, while allowing others to focus their interests only on the parts of the conversation that are actually about Jim’s works.  The “pub” area dates back to July 2007, with 93980 Posts over 2651 Topics. It outnumbers the board that discusses, say, the books of the Dresden Files by a 3-to-1 factor, and that’s after some pruning.

We absolutely lost some people in the transition — which is part of why I advocate making a move after a mailing list feels too busy, not in anticipation of it getting there. Change by its nature cuts off some of the old guard. In this regard, I was something of a casualty in the move to a web forum.  I just don’t directly participate that much these days, unless you’re talking about the Dresden Files RPG board on the forum. The way I work, I need something to intrude a little for me to participate in it.  At least a forum lets me pick & choose in that regard — I can subscribe to a thread that interests me, and it’ll “intrude” on my mailbox when something happens there.

…

So that’s my take on communities and the management of their critical mass. The term is particularly apt here. A community is a volatile substance. You have to handle it carefully.  Bring too little of it together and you might get a little radioactive but you won’t produce sustainable energy.  Bring too much of it together and it’ll blow up on you — unless you can contain it in something that can turn the explosive possibilities back into a sustainable energy source.  When it comes down to it, that’s what you want: the presence of enough common interest in one place that people fuse together and vibrate excitedly about the discovery of enthusiastic peers. That’s a community.