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.

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.

1. 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.