This Time It’s Personal

This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building.  This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.

The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community.  In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t.  (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)

The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.

Before we get into that particular toolbox, I want to talk about the role of the blog, the twitter, the facebook presence in all of this (substitute your favorite social media site of choice).  In a very real way, these are at least micro-communities in their own right, each organized around the central “followed” person or organization and the followers.

A social media presence has an element of personal connection baked right into it, and it is very, very easy for followers to feel like they’re just one degree separate from the person they’re following even if they’ve never actually met or had direct conversation with them.  This feeling is cemented and amplified every time the followed replies to a comment by a follower. The personal connection made to one person feels like a personal connection made to all the followers, via transitive, representative interaction.

If the followers are deep, fervent fans, that sort of interaction is akin to something I saw at a rock festival a few years ago. Green Day was playing (they’re a fantastic live band) in front of tens of thousands of people.  For their next song they call out to the stadium: anybody out there know how to play a guitar?  Several friends of one dude near the front start pointing emphatically at him.  So Billie-Joe Armstrong points right at the dude. “You can play the guitar? Are you fucking serious? Because if you can’t and we bring you up here, everyone in this stadium is going to laugh at you.” I’m rows and rows and rows away but it’s clear the dude is nodding and the crowd around him is lifting him up, getting him to the stage.  The energy in the whole joint goes up several notches.  And the guy gets lobbed onto the stage.  And Green Day hands him a guitar. And he plays through the song with them.  We all played through the song with Green Day, because that’s that representational interaction, that personal connection made to one person that translates out to everyone else in the community.

Social media makes it possible for the inequality boundary to vanish.  It takes us from being creators and fans to just being peers of one another, at least partially.  This peer-to-peer relationship is what can induce and strengthen an emotional connection that a fan feels for an artist.  It’s very potent. The effect exists, and when we take on the role of being a Followed Person instead of a follower, we need to be mindful of it and make the most out of it.  This is that improv principle that’s shown up in indie gaming in action: “here’s how I make you awesome”.  Because when a FP reaches out to a follower, the follower gets that warm fuzzy leveling-up feeling.  And when an FP is a dick to a follower, well, the things you might expect happen, too.  Nobody wants to be a fan of an ass unless that ass is in their corner.

But to come at this sort of presence — like the one I maintain here at Deadly Fredly — from another angle, these venues also offer an element of heightened inequality as well.  Not a paradox: because I interact with you in the comments of my blog, we’re having a peer-to-peer connection; but because it’s my blog, there’s also an implicit authority model in place that I wouldn’t necessarily experience as your peer on a forum or mailing list we both happen to frequent (but not run).

And in a nutshell, that right there is part of why I’m not much for participating in forums any more.  As much as I try to destroy the perception of “the authority that speaks from on high” in venues such as these (as well as on mailing lists and forums that I do run), I rely just a touch on that authority too to enforce an element of respectfulness in the discourse that goes on in those places.

But I have to do that lead-by-example thing as much as possible: to get respect by giving respect, to speak to people as peers, but to take clear, polite action as that authority when conversations are going outside the bounds of what I think is acceptable.  Managing to do all three of these in a community you’re running — whether it’s a micro-community like the commenters on a blog, or a “macro” community like JimButcherOnline.com — is not easy.  The voice of authority can sound like the voice of condescension, and that is absolutely poisonous to the idea of peer-to-peer respect.  I have left forums in the past over such leadership failures, and I’d expect the same from people on my own when I louse it up.

So the core trick in this particular ramble is simply stay aware and stay on top of acting like a peer rather than an authority.  Golden rule, here’s how I make you awesome, yadda yadda.  If this one approach is your hammer and you try to treat every problem like a nail, you actually won’t go that wrong with it (save for in those moments where the Mr. Nice Guy element of it can end up undermining your ability to put a stop to something objectionable).

So if that’s the tool in your box, what are the ways you can finesse its use?  A couple things, to wrap this up:

Celebrate: Your followers have cool ideas too. Do not fail to point at them and call them cool. Better yet, make it clear you see those ideas as cool as or cooler than your own (because they are, in the same way that your kid is cooler than you are; maybe you spawned that idea, but seeing it take a life of its own trumps the original).  This is essentially what Green Day did.  The guy they got up on stage wasn’t as good of a guitarist as their guitarist was, but he didn’t need to be to be, in that moment, the coolest damn guy in the stadium.  Celebrating a follower’s idea destroys that whole inequality aspect of the paradigm in ways that kick off a party.  A community that parties together stays together, grows together.  There’s a reason the Evil Hat guys will offer their perspectives on the FateRPG mailing list, but never declare someone else’s different idea as any less valid (except in terms of whether we’d use it in our own play).  We’re in the business of celebrating the ideas that get kicked off by our products — not the ideas of our products.  That’s what being a game publisher is about.

Deputize: This is, really, the big one. It’s celebration on steroids.  It’s what you do when you take someone from that community of yours and give them some of the power in the authority you have as a nominal “head” of the community.  You’re not pulling someone onto the stage to play a song; you’re picking someone out of the audience and making them a member of your band, for keepsies.

It’s often pretty easy to figure out who should be deputized.  They’re your best fans, the ones who are really regularly adding good positive energy and support to the community.  They’re the people who are making your life easier by running off and compiling that list of information about the books y’all are so geeked about, or finding links all over the ‘net about your particular fandom and bringing them back to the community table so everyone can get pumped about ‘em.  They’re the people who speak up when you say “Hey, I could use a little help with…”

Rather than get into a generalized perspective on deputizing your best fans, I’ll get into some quick examples from my own experience. I’ve done this several times, in several ways, so this will be a cross-section at best.

Lenny: That guy who’s the lead system developer for The Dresden Files RPG, and Fate in general at this point? Yeah. He’s a community member from the FateRPG mailing list who regularly posted showing keen insights as to the nature of the system, the finesse of play, all that.  He and I started chatting about Fate after several of his posts caught my eye.  After a while it became clear he had an incredible amount of energy for what we wanted to do, so I asked him to help us get Spirit of the Century to completion.  It was ten kinds of rocky as Rob and I tried to figure out how to go from a duo to a trio on this, but we pushed through the work (eventually — I had my own flameouts here and there, everyone did) and ended up with a really satisfying new iteration of Fate in SOTC.  There’s a reason Lenny’s name is on the cover of that game: his relentness energy for Fate kept things going when fatigue was taking the rest of us.  Deputizing him has paid off in spades.

Priscilla: Priscilla Spencer’s one of the original superfans on Jim Butcher Online.  She’s a constant, positive presence there. She collated and maintained the timeline of the Dresden Files books. She posted a lot.  Hard not to notice her, and notice how much of a contribution she was making.  So I invited her to help moderate the forum.  That went well.  Then I started to notice how much I was failing to update the news items on the main jim-butcher.com website, so I asked her if she’d be willing to take that on too (she usually scooped the rest of us on newsworthy Jim items anyway).  Jim noticed her too. She also happens to be a capable artist.  Got a copy of First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher?  Like the Map of Alera found inside?  Art credit on that: Priscilla Spencer.  In my particular corner of fandom, she’s the guy up on stage strumming the guitar along with Green Day.

Rick, Stacey, Scott: There are plenty of other names I could list here, too. Each of these people — Rick Neal, Stacey Chancellor, Scott Acker — are part of the alpha testing crew that we assembled for the Dresden Files RPG.  When I assembled the Alpha groups, I didn’t have them sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). I had them sign a Disclosure Pledge — they had to promise that they’d get out there on the net and actively talk about the playtesting experience, offering perspective, answering questions, and (frankly) achieving a grass-roots free advertising effect.  Each of these are accomplishing this in different ways.  Scott has helped make sure talk about the Dresden Files RPG occurs on RPG.net and in other venues, and he’s run several demo sessions of the game at conventions (rather than just running the game for a private group of playtesters).  Stacey makes sure the Dresden Files RPG community on LiveJournal gets updated about the progress of things, helping us cover that vector for getting the word out.  And Rick Neal — man, Rick Neal.  You want to see what he’s doing for us, go read his Dresden Files posts over on his blog — which he started, originally, to satisfy the Disclosure Pledge’s requirements.  It’s turned into a real destination for me, and not just because he talks occasionally about the game we’ve been working on.  These are all the result of a (stealth) act of mass deputizing — the Disclosure Pledge is all about doling out portions of the authority to speak publicly about the game Evil Hat is working on.

One thing you might notice in these examples is that in each case, the deputized folks are able to get more accomplished on the part of the community than I was able to do by myself.  That’s the true benefit of deputizing.  Communities that exceed the leadership’s ability to push for growth and activity will fall apart in some way (not necessarily die; just fall into chaos).  Deputizing is how leadership can grow in response to the growth of a community, and it uses the peer-to-peer value of those occasional personal connections to do it.  And every time it happens, it brings along the rest of the community for the ride.

Rock on.