Who is this course aimed for and what can they expect to get out of it?
The course can be taken with confidence by communicators, marketers, researchers, managers and planners, both newbies in community management or people who have considerable experience in online or offline environments and would like to probe some of their assumptions.
Online communities open up a space for compassion as well as conflict. How much of this is aligned with the conflicts that appear in a physical community? How can real connections bridge the gap between the two?
It is essentially the same as in-person in the emotional value of compassion and conflict, but because it is based on the written word, more care in one's word choice is necessary to develop and maintain real understanding. And, on the other side, it helps to remember that the other person might not be saying perfectly what they want to say. Oversupplying understanding as both writer and reader leads to better overall quality of the experience for everyone.
The Edgeryders community, now 4000 members, spans multiple time zones and age groups. Where do you see the commonality between the members, what brings them together as a community online?
I see the online often builds up the anticipation - being asynchronous as it is, it allows people to show up on their own schedules and have complete freedom over who to interact with, comment, reach out to, or simply ignore. But meeting in person is a wholly different experience and I've seen it play out mostly as a celebration, as if there is a secret people are happy to share. After a while spent together chatting they can see friendship play out in real life. The best for us is having team members fairly acquainted with each other meet face to face and resume connection immediately, due to the in-built familiarity.
With most community networks and management tools now locked into a proprietary platform, where do you see the place and viability of independently managed communities today?
The Well was founded in 1985, before there was an internet, and a year before Mark Zuckerberg's first birthday. It started as an inexpensive way for people to converse online for whatever purpose the people using it wished. Over time, through innumerable online conversations and in-person gatherings, many of those people bonded into relationships deep enough that they described themselves as a community. That people talking through networked computers could form such lasting bonds served as an influence and inspiration for other online communities.
If there is a vision to draw from this course, how would you like to see networked communities evolve, what would they look like? A return to the early days of independent messaging boards, centralised platforms or something entirely new?
It is hard to predict the future, but the direction we are rooting for is the one of decentralized platforms with considerable member autonomy, where rules of engagement and participation costs are clear for most people and the benefits accrued by all those who make the leap and give themselves to openness, collaboration and generosity towards peers on the other side of the world fighting the same struggle. This has implications for new political movements and a counterbalancing citizen act to today's gloomy crises playing out at all levels and corners of the Earth, from climate timebombs to infowars, rising authoritarianism and so on.