Discussion Leader: FrankLester

Key points and claims

Key points from this chapter include:

Community growth means increased community complexity. Leadership roles, strcutures, and expectations can be informal and ad hoc when a community is smaller, but as communities become more complex, either because they become for-profit operations or because they grow in size and popularity, the need for clearly delineated leadership roles, structures, and routines becomes more crucial. Key questions in defining leadership roles include:

• What leadership roles are most needed?
• How do you build leadership?
• What is needed to train a corps of community leaders?
• What tools, rules, and uniforms are needed? Or do leaders do things their own way?

Some of the roles in the community that need clarity include the distinction between paid and unpaid staff; and the distinction between leaders and members who are enthusiasts. The Leadership Pyramid (p. 161) demarcates the roles as Elders (staff), followed by Leaders (volunteers and contractors), followed by Regulars (enthusiasts). A Leadership Ritual (p. 180) separates official from unofficial leaders.

Leadership choice involves ritual that ranges from selection to training to graduation. The site may want to move from calling for people to fill leadership positions to instituting routines that encourage people to apply for those positions without being asked. Training the leader candidates helps screen out those who are not sufficiently mature or rule-oriented to fill the positions. Small sites can train with informal methods, but as a site grows, it will eventually need to have a training manual ready for leadership candidates that sets forth written guidelines and standards. This manual will probably have to be constantly updated as the community evolves. The manual should cover community values, code of conduct, instructions for tools and system protocols, and a list of FAQs for coomonly encountered problems. Once a leader is trained and ready to graduate, he or she should be "ordained" by some sort of ceremony that marks the transition in status.

Management programs need "backstage" meeting places for feedbcak between leaders and founders. There also need to be systems in place for evaluating leader performance and for disciplining leaders who "go bad," and reward systems for those leaders who are doing extraordinary jobs. Eventually, as a community grows, pay vs. non-pay will become an issue. There should also be consideration given to having a Community Manager who defines key leadership positions and helps keep communication flowing between leaders and elders. There should be a clear chain of command for reporting clashes, crises, and problems, with a clear expectation that somebody will be ultimately responsible for resolving problems that arise.

Critique

The chapter seems fairly good as a very general sketch of the roles that most "leadership" candidates will fill in an online community, but it seems to assume that the roles are static and unchangeable. Not all sites will use leaders (or enthusiasts, or volunteers, or elders) in the same way. There are many volunteer-driven sites that would differ with the strong admonition by Kim that volunteers should not be used for positions that invlove "esoteric knowledge of the inner workings of your community." In addition, the material in the chapter could not have anticipated the different types of online community that have evolved since 2000, including (just as an example) the open-edited Wiki, which would seem to demand a more egalitarian approach than that provided in the chapter.

Connections

The interview in PowazekChapter2 with Matt Haughey of MetaFilter (pp. 28-36) is an interesting real-world example of the kinds of general principles discussed in Kim, although I would dispute his notion that MetaFilter still has a "small town feel," especially since he re-opened the site to new membership late last year after a long hiatus. However, he has good points about the pitfalls of a commuinity site, including attuning newcomers to the routines of the site (a leadership skill not covered in KimChapter5) and deciding how many members is too many.





After identifying levels of leadership and defining their roles, I had to wonder about how accurate theses really are. After all, while no one on the web knows that I am a dog, if I bark, scratch myself, and wag my tail in my posts, you'll start to wonder. Is community leadership the same, in that whosoever takes up the reigns gets to determine the route? If we follow our membership—giving them ways to do what they're already doing, but better, do we become hostages to their whims?