Evilrooster Crows - Abi Sutherland's Blog

How to sour a community, in one easy lesson

Posted by Abi on Sun 12 April 2009 at 13:32 | Comments (8) | Web, Work

Simple. Tell them that they're not one.

It won't destroy it, of course. Wherever a group of people collaborate for a common endeavor, there we find community.

But communities come in different flavors. My favorite kind includes a substantial amount of trust among the community members, and between them and their leaders/moderators. They are often powerfully goal-oriented, whether the goal is to build something or simply to have good conversation. These ones are electrifying to be a member of. Shared endeavors and a sense of shared ownership seem to actually create energy.

Other communities, however, just depress everyone. A group of rules lawyers, whose shared energy is absorbed in the feeling that bad behavior is punished but good actions go unrewarded, is still a community. It's just not a very pleasant one. One doesn't go out and evangelize for such a community or for what it does. One doesn't hope that others will come join it.

(There is a third kind of community to be mindful of, of course. A mob, like a depressive community, is a common failure mode of an energized community.)

The breakdown of trust is of course the most common reason that the first kind of community turns into the second. It's easy, particularly as a leader or moderator, to feel betrayed by everyone when the crowd goes in a direction that you don't want it to. And the fear of the mob is a powerful motivator. The temptation is to lock everything down, pretend that there is no community ethos but the one you provide.

But people don't work that way. Clamp down on a community, and it turns sour; the community spirit becomes one of grumbling and nit-picking conformance to the stated rules. Spontaneous action for the common good, being unrewarded, goes away.

I've seen online communities go completely sour at this point, as the members in their turn feel betrayed by the moderators. Subsequent events just confirm the mutual hostility. Eventually many of these things break up completely.

This isn't universal; sometimes the shared endeavor of the community is motivating enough to overcome the mutual mistrust. Gradually, a new balance is found; member behavior builds moderator trust and moderator trust reduces member resentment.

Communities may recover in time, but it's not a pleasant process.

This rather discouraged rant has been brought to you by the letter M and the number 2.

Alex deduces

Posted by Abi on Sat 27 December 2008 at 09:09 | Comments (5) | Family

Yesterday, Alex turned to his dad and told him there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy.

Apparently, lying in his bed the night after Christmas, he had started thinking. He knows fairies don't exist¹. The Tooth Fairy is a fairy. Therefore, she doesn't exist.

But he didn't stop there. He went on to consider the problem of the exchange of teeth for money. Was there a more plausible agent than the now-deprecated fairy? Of course there was; he knows that I creep into his bedroom every night after he's asleep to give him one last kiss and tell him that I love him.

So he reckoned that Martin or I would exchange the tooth for money in the night.

Coincidentally, he lost a tooth yesterday evening. He considered setting a booby trap to catch whoever was doing the money exchange³. But he forgot to put the tooth under his pillow last night. I'd left it on the shelf in my bindery.

*** ⁴

This morning, I was in the bindery getting a hair stick. I called him in and pointed to the shelf where his tooth had been last night, and where a nice shiny Euro coin was now sitting.

He laughed and laughed. He accused me; I said I'd left a tooth there the night before and there was a coin there now. He reckoned it was his dad instead.

He won't take the coin, either. Principled little guy.

Why? I told him, in the context of Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, and it accords with his very good reality/fantasy distinction²
Unlike his reality/science fiction distinction, which is weak
He's capable of it; he has a couple of kiddie spy kits that have motion sensor alarms.
This is a Murder of Roger Ackroyd reference, if you are familiar with the book.

Alex's First Day at School, Take Three

Posted by Abi on Thu 19 June 2008 at 20:13 | Comments (8) | Family

For the third time in less than three years, Alex spent his first day in a new school yesterday.

Take One

The first time, he was a five year old in a necktie, starting Primary 1 at Gilmerton Primary School in Edinburgh.

He loved his time at Gilmerton, though we didn't fit into the primarily working-class community. We also had occasional differences with the school administration, but we kept them away from Alex. He learned to read that year, and discovered a real love of maths. But he knew that he wasn't going to stay; we were up front with him that we were moving to the Netherlands after that first year.

Take Two

The second time was last autumn, when he started school here in Holland*. We weren't sure how we were going to handle this, since he came here speaking virtually no Dutch at all. After discussions with the schools in our area, we found ourselves with two choices:

Drop Alex back a year to playschool-type schooling in the local village school, so that he could spend the time working on his language skills. All being well, he could then skip a grade and be back with his contemporaries. The American family† in the village did this with their eldest a year before we arrived, and found it a successful strategy. Unfortunately, we knew that Alex would be bored senseless by a return to playschool after a year of sit-down learning.
Put Alex into a school a little further away that specializes in teaching foreign children Dutch in a year, while continuing their ordinary education. (Kind of the reverse of an international school, basically.) Demographically, the school is very different than our village, drawing much of its student body from people who live in the city.

We chose Option 2, and Alex had a fairly intimidating first day at the Kernschool last autumn. He's a trouper, though, and plunged in wholeheartedly. He worried a lot at first, unsure if he was learning well enough or fast enough, but found his feet academically after the first term. But he never settled socially, making few friends and struggling with the fairly rough and tumble school culture. He has, however, learned a lot of Dutch, and is about half a year ahead of his age group in maths.

Take Three

The Kernschool's program is designed to slipstream the children into their local schools, once they have the language skills to cope. This meshes well with the local school's program of settling new children in with their class groups before the summer vacation. So yesterday, Alex went to the village school for the first time, for a half day of sitting with next year's classmates. (Wednesdays are short days in Dutch schools).

He was nervous before he went in, worrying about his hair and his appearance. I helped him peer into Fiona's classroom as we went to his (she had no special Dutch training, but started school normally in January; youth is an indisputable advantage to language learning). When he went into the room and his teacher began to speak Dutch to him, I felt a lurch: I didn't follow everything she said to him. But he did, having already surpassed me in learning the language.

Apparently, he came out triumphant and ecstatic, declaring the new school "super cool". He liked his classmates, enjoyed the academic work, and had no trouble talking his teacher's ear off in Dutch. He can't wait to start.

And then he woke up at 11:30 at night, desperately missing Scotland. I lay in bed with him for half an hour, talking about homesickness‡ and the delights of the Netherlands.

* Pedantic note: Although Holland is not actually a synonym for the Netherlands, we live in the province of Noord-Holland.

† By this classification, we are the English family in the village. It is really not worth trying to correct this.

‡ A matter close to my mind at the moment, since two of my colleagues went to San Francisco last week. One of them even went across the Bay to meet my parents and see my dad's printing press. My thoughts were often with them, and the world I had left behind to come to Europe.

Ink, turpentine, paper, water

Posted by Abi on Thu 29 May 2008 at 21:43 | Comments (7) | Testing, Work

For at least 1500 years, Japanese artists have practiced suminagashi, the art of marbling paper with ink floating on water. The marbler uses brushes to place alternating drops of black calligraphy ink and turpentine on the surface of a full basin, then lays a sheet of paper down to capture the resulting patterns. They look like clouds, or smoke, or the grain of twisted trees. Each pattern is unique, unlike in Western marbling, where the creator can reproduce essentially the same design many times.

Ink, turpentine, water, paper. It seems so simple.

And it is very simple, but only after you accept one thing: you are not in control of the outcome. The ink goes where it wills, and the marbler can only follow. There are tricks to give the pattern an overall direction, such as controlling the amount of ink and turpentine or gently blowing over the surface of the water. But the heart of suminagashi is trusting what you can't predict or control.

I recently read George Oates's essay about the ways that Flickr created its community: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow on A List Apart. Two particular paragraphs really jumped out at me:

Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can't predict—they'll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

There's no way to design all things for all people. When you're dealing with The Masses, it's best to try to facilitate behavior, rather than to predict it. Design, in this context, becomes more about showing what's *possible* than showing what's *there*.

Flickr's history has proven her right. There are any number of wildly varying communities on the site, many of them either accidentally or deliberately experimental. Flickr groups are even cited as a case study in Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirkey's recent book on online community dynamics.

And now it's our turn.

Last year, my company (MediaLab, which makes a library search software package called Aqua Browser Library) released our new social library software: My Discoveries.

The essence of My Discoveries is this: allow users to add information to the library catalog. Let them tag things, make lists of related items, fill in ratings, write reviews. Then let others see what they've done. Turn the patron's interaction with the library's catalog into a conversation with the catalog, and with each other.

I've been involved in both the design and testing. One of the core principles we've kept in mind throughout the process is that we cannot predict what people will do with it¹. Designing and testing in the light of that kind of uncertainty is very different, and much more interesting, than working to a known, restricted usage profile. It affects everything we do, from what characters are allowed in list names to which statistics we want to gather. How does one design metrics to detect the unpredictable?

Tags, lists, ratings, reviews. It seems so simple.

Of course, we are not so naive as to think that all the new ideas that people come up with for My Discoveries will be good ones. I moderate a web community in my spare time, so I know how bad things can get. As a result, I have put a lot of attention into the administrative interface—and I expect do more on it in the future. If we give users room to innovate, we have to give librarians the wherewithal to detect and clean up misbehavior.

Run down the Jolly Roger, Run up the Union Jack

Posted by Abi on Mon 5 May 2008 at 23:24 | Comments (4) |

Making Light is back up, substantially populated with the lost data. Our saintly datameisters are still filling in the cracks, but we have active threads again.

So thank you, everyone, for behaving so nicely here, but let's move the Making Light discussions back to their natural home. I'll sweep up and fold up the guest beds, and restore normal evilrooster-type behavior here over the next few days.

Rebuilding the threads

Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Sun 4 May 2008 at 21:50 | Comments (26) |

Here's what I've got for Making Light since March 1: original post date, abbreviated name of the post, and the number of comments I have actual copies of.

3/1	Who's surprised?	66
3/3	All come singing	69
3/3	Can you read this	53
3/4	Greyhawk	253
3/11	Collect underpants	265
3/13	Open thread 103	936
3/16	Just do it	38
3/16	Literary divination	106
3/18	Arthur C. Clarke	177
3/20	Bigger laser	174
3/28	Divided by errors	34
3/28	Open thread 104	931
3/30	London photograph	204
3/31	Deep value	434
4/1	Amsterdam	70
4/2	Pity the Times	167
4/4	Forty years gone	70
4/6	Heads they win	320
4/6	Employ the scythe	126
4/9	SFWA deadline	25
4/11	Future of publishing	32
4/12	Book by its cover	37
4/13	Bury my acorns	87
4/13	Goose-stepping (actually 469)	468
4/14	Open thread 105	906
4/16	Housekeeping	7
4/16	Newsweek	245
4/17	Little Brother	180
4/22	Penn for Hillary	124
4/23	Font game	125
4/23	TNH in San Francisco	18
4/25	Indistinguishable from parody	186
4/26	Clapton	107
4/26	Feeling the heat	31
4/26	SFWA election	45
4/26	TNH in the Observer	105
4/27	Open thread 106	288

In addition, I have a 131-comment version of the Clay Shirky post, but in fact I know there were at least 254 comments; if anyone has a 254-comment version, please do send it on. (Apologies if you did already. I may have lost it. Processing all this stuff on the fly has been a challenge.)

I also have the recently-posted comments to old threads "Worldcongoing," "New Magics," and "Abi on catz." I do not to have the recently-posted comments to "Darwin fish found"; the same apologies apply as in the previous paragraph.

Who's been saved

Posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Sun 4 May 2008 at 15:30 | Comments (36) |

Teresa here. I've figured out how to make a Google doc universally readable. Please understand that vast amounts of what we've been sent is still being logged. This just means you get to see it happening.

There are now two spreadsheets. One is the general spreadsheet Abi built yesterday. I can't make it visible because Abi owns it, and I didn't ask her about it before she left for the day. The other is a new one I just put together. It lists individual users known to have posted on or later than 01 March 2008, and notes whether their comments have been saved, and by whom. (If you're working on that project and want to be able to enter data, write and ask. Our addresses are in their usual spot.)

Here's the link:

Individual commenters: saved or unsaved.

It's too bad Mike Ford isn't here to write "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Google."

Needed: Movable Type mavens

Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Sun 4 May 2008 at 13:57 | Comments (17) |

Patrick here, again. It's Sunday morning in Brooklyn.

Last night, Hosting Matters set us up with a new server (larger and more powerful, and all to ourselves, I gather), and we uploaded the complete March 1 backup of our home directory. This is why there's been a March 1 version of Making Light's home page visible for the last twelve hours or so at the usual location. Up until a few minutes ago, this was a version of the front page that looked all right, except that links to individual-post pages-with-comments didn't work, and the Sidelights and Particle sections were empty, along with every other sidebar section that works by pulling data in from a file external to the main index page.

We also uploaded the March 1 export from the site's MySQL database, and while we slept, Hosting Matters verified that the database export seemed to be okay, and re-created the database and the user. They suggested that we do a full "rebuild" from inside Movable Type, which should recreate all the internal links.

I've just now been trying to do that. The first thing I tried was a full site rebuild, but it crapped out and reported "internal server error" somewhere in the midst of rebuilding the second hundred individual-post pages. (A full site rebuild does individual-post pages first, then monthly archive pages, then index pages last.) The next thing I tried was an "index pages only" rebuild, which yielded the version of the front page that's now visible, with the entire center column empty. I then tried an "individual archive pages only" rebuild, which once again failed in the middle of the second hundred pages. Finally, I made another attempt at a full site rebuild, and it failed ("Internal Server Error - The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request") just after the 300-pages-rebuilt mark.

Rebuilds that fail to complete have been a constant bane of our Movable Type installation, but in the past we've dealt with them by simply trying again another day. Does anyone have a better idea that will get the site (at least, the March 1 instantiation of the site) up and functional now?

(Noted and of interest: You can get at the individual archive pages that are linked from the "recent comments" sidebar; you can even load the "last 4000 comments" page and get at lots and lots of individual archive pages from that. But as far as I know, until I get a full rebuild to happen, the middle column of the front page is going to stay empty.)