Originally published in Open Source Business Resource January 2010

“…success comes entirely from people and the system within which they work. Results are not the point. Developing the people and the system so that together they are capable of achieving successful results is the point.”

Leading Lean Software Development

Recently, that quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about “results are not the point” was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren’t results always the point? Well, as with most things, “It depends”. The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place.

This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

The Law of Attraction

One of the fundamental principles of nature is that objects tend to attract other like objects. The term homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with others of a similar bent. This same principle of attraction is what pulls communities together and keeps them together. People are attracted to others that have similar interests or problems to overcome. It is that commonality that creates the link, the attraction, that holds communities together.

Unfortunately, many projects and businesses forget this basic principle. They instead believe that communities form around products, brands or buzzwords. They forget that people want to belong to groups that they share some interest with. Providing a shared interest doesn’t necessarily translate into building a vibrant, action oriented community. In order for a community organizer to stimulate results in a community, the following ingredients are needed:

• a mission that will attract others that are passionate because …

• passionate users create excitement for a cause and …

• excitement elicits action and results from the community

The goal is not simply to build software but to attract users that share a passion for a particular subject. It is this belief in the cause that will ultimately determine whether or not a community is successful.

Leadership

Leaders are people who see the world from a different and new perspective. Leaders dream of a future that is different from today. A leader’s vision of tomorrow is inspiring and solves real problems for real people. But leadership goes beyond this by introducing others to a future that they can embrace as their own. The ability to make the vision their own is what draws people to an open source project and moves them to action.

How does a leader craft a message that resonates with the community? Listening is the key that unlocks not only the problems of the users but also their perspective. Leaders must understand where the pain points are and what motivates users. A leader’s goal is to provide just enough of a blueprint for tomorrow so that users are able to finish crafting the story for themselves. This gives them ownership and enthusiasm to solve the problem.

This quote from the French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is especially important for community managers as it relates to creating a vision of the future that people believe in and want to become a part of: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

The other aspect of leadership that is often overlooked is the art of coalition building. As the message begins to resonate within a community and adapts to each user’s needs, leaders need to manage the alternate messages that form within the community. Leaders have to continually revise the vision to include any new or divisive stories that develop. New leaders will emerge within the community that could have agendas that differ significantly from the original vision. These leaders may eventually harm the community if their ideas are not embraced early on and elements of their story are incorporated. Embracing and incorporating input builds a stronger community and additional leaders to help within the project. The community will be stronger with them than without them.

In Community We Trust

Trust influences nearly every interaction we have during any given day. Every communication, every action, every conversation is shaped in some way by the trust and reputation inferred on the interacting party. Trust is the currency that communities, both online and offline, trade in. Without trust, lasting relationships can not be built or maintained. Part of a community leader’s job is to build reputation and trust for the people associated with a community.

Trust is not something you can ask for as it is earned through actions and competence. It defines relationships between people, governments, communities, and businesses. The text book definition of trust is “…reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or entity”. You can rely on someone or something when you have a history of past experiences by which you can infer future experiences. Without these past experiences, people have no way to place you within their trust metric. They resort to lumping you in with “the rest” or basing their trust on any reputation you may have.

As a community leader, you must build trust in you and your project. People trust people who get things done. If you say you’re going to do something and never quite get around to it, your reputation will suffer and hence the community’s trust in you. Remember, actions always speak louder than words.

Any Fool Can Criticize

Benjamin Franklin once said that “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do”. One of the things that keeps people from getting involved in open communities is a fear of criticism. Criticism that they’ll ask the wrong questions and criticism that they’ll do something wrong. There are probably dozens of reasons people are afraid to participate and they almost always relate to being afraid of something. It is a leader’s job to see that the community is a hospitable place for new people to participate.

Many project veterans may not have the patience to allow foolish questions to pepper the project’s mailing lists or forums. They think that everyone should put in the same due diligence they did to understand the project and its code. But, if you want the community to grow, you will need to set the example of always having a cool temperament, even with newcomers who may not have done their homework before asking a question. This is not to suggest that you coddle newcomers, but that you need to ensure that responses to questions are civil.

Recognition

Mary Kay noted that “There are two things that people want more than money and sex…recognition and praise”. Especially early on, you’ll need to work hard to ensure that every little contribution to the project is warmly welcomed. This may mean that you have to work with contributors to rewrite a patch or help them fill out a bug report. The name of the game is getting people to open up and get involved. This typically involves coaxing and lots of encouragement.

Don’t be afraid to recognize new participants and draw attention to their accomplishments. If you are constantly praising your community users and helping them feel good about the work they are doing, you will find that members have a greater sense of responsibility towards your community efforts. Greater responsibility equals more action which results in a productive community. Communities run on recognition. This doesn’t mean that you need a user rating system or a User of the Month classification. You simply need to express honest gratitude publicly for what community members are doing. Try it and you’ll notice a remarkable difference in how the community starts behaving.

Simplify, Simplify

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify”. He was expressing a concern with the complexity of life while encouraging people to strip away the unnecessary and to focus on the important. Communities sometimes forget that they have to present themselves in pure and simple terms in order to grow. The message must be simple. The ability to communicate should be simple. The tools must be simple. This is not because people can’t understand complexity, it is because they don’t have the time to. In order to grow a community, concentrate on the most important elements that have an impact. Simplify as many things as possible to get to what truly makes your community unique and beneficial.

An example of where projects sometimes fail in this area is by creating too many options for member communication. Don’t implement every communication technology you can find as that will only make it harder for your members to find and participate in conversations. Communication tools should help your members to communicate, not distract them with choices. You should ask a single question when analyzing your community’s tool choices: “Will this technology facilitate human interactions?”. Always remember that communities are about people, not technology, and that simpler communication strategies are usually better.

Blog, Baby, Blog

With the move to social networking sites like Facebook.com and Twitter.com, the buzz around maintaining a blog has diminished. However, blogging is still one of the easiest and best ways to reach an audience with a message. Twitter and Facebook are important tools to help connect your project with a larger audience, but blogging is still the best way to create thought leadership around a project’s mission and vision of the future. When blogging, show your passion for your subject.

Blogging about what you are doing is only the first step as you still have to attract people to the blog. Fortunately, blogs rank high in Google’s PageRank algorithm. The key with Google is not to go after the first page of results for a generic term like “collaboration” or even “collaboration software”, but to find a search term that still gets a decent amount of traction. In the case of collaboration software, it is far easier to reach the first page of Google results for “collaboration community of practice” or “collaboration success” than for just “collaboration”. When you title your blog, use the search terms you want to be found under, such as “Creating Communities of Practice Through Collaboration”.

Don’t just focus your outbound marketing on Google. Start investing in Twitter and Facebook to grow an audience for your message. These tools may not be the best for articulating your project’s value proposition and mission, but they are great for helping you find pockets of users who share your passion. Make sure that you are following and joining groups that have users who are attracted to the same problems and passions as your project and make sure you let these groups know when you’ve posted something on your blog. The key to using social networks is that you have to add value to your network by helping them solve their problems without becoming a marketing drone for your project.

Work With Other Projects

Being an active and productive citizen of other projects is a great way to introduce users to your project or solution. If you have a reputation for helping others and contributing to projects, people will be happy to lend a hand when you need it. You may even already have some followers if you are actively participating in other communities. I recently heard the founders of GitHub.com talk about their startup experiences at the Open Source Bridge conference. They specifically mentioned their involvement with the Ruby on Rails community as one of the reasons GitHub had a successful beginning. If that’s not a testament to playing well in the sandbox, nothing is.

Wrap Up

Building a community of passionate users is no small task. If you manage to do it, you will have worked harder than you ever have in your life because community building is a process that never stops. That is why it is so important to tap into a passion–not only the passion of a large set of users, but also your passion. The work is long and hard and often doesn’t seem fruitful, but if you stick with it and let your passion for the project and the problem you are solving shine through, you’ll do just fine.

After a brief look at a few open source platforms and hosting providers I’ve settled on Slicehost and Wordpress MU.  I decided to host the Wordpress installation at Slicehost because I’m a bit of a techie and will undoubtedly find myself wanting to do more than allowed at Wordpress.com.  I also used MU instead on the regular Wordpress install because I wanted a little more flexibility in the future to host multiple blogs if necessary.

SliceHost doesn’t offer my preferred Linux distro of openSUSE so I had my choice between Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian Lenny.  I’ve always been a fan of the stability of the Debian platform so I opted to use Lenny as my platform.  I went with the smallest slice I could rent which is 256MB 10G and 100G of bandwidth which should be plenty if I’m careful.  I also checked with Slicehost on upgrading if necessary and they assured me upgrades where only a click away.

Anyhoo, due to the smallish nature of my slice I wanted to run lighttpd instead of Apache and because I will probably host multiple blogs over time I went ahead and decided to configure Wordpress MU for multiple domains from the very get-go.  What I found was that even with Google and the awesome Wordpress installation tutorial there was still some “head scratching” I had to do to get things up and going.  Thus this tutorial was born to help others who may be doing a similar thing.

After getting my brand new Slicehost VM and configuring it for ssh key access only I went about configuring Wordpress Mu and lighttpd.

• Install the following using apt-get

1. Install mysql-server
2. Install lighttpd
3. Install php5, php5-cgi, php5-mysql, php5-gd (this installed apache2 which I promptly removed)

• Download Wordpress Mu
• Install wordpress-mu into /var/www/ and copy the contents of the unarchived directory to /var/www.  You could also rename the directory to something like wpmu if you want but these directions assume you’ve copied everything into the webserver’s root
• Create /etc/lighthttpd/wpmu-rewrite.conf with

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php”
url.rewrite-once = (
“^/(.*/)?files/$” => “/index.php”,
“^/(.*/)?files/(.*)” => “/wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2″,
“^(/wp-admin/.*)” => “$1″,
“^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*)” => “/$2″,
“^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$” => “/$2″,
)

• Modify /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and add the following making sure to change domain.com to your domain…

$HTTP["host"] =~ “domain\.com” {
simple-vhost.default-host = “domain.com”
include “wpmu-rewrite.conf”
}

• Copy /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf to /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled and restart lighttpd
• Create MySQL database called ‘wpmu’
• Change the permissions of a couple of directories before the next step withchmod 777 /var/www and /var/www/wp-content
• Open a browser at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php and configure the database.  Alternatively you could copy /var/www/wp-config-sample.php to /var/www/wp-config.php and make the necessary changes manually using the Famous 5 Minute Install Guide
• You’ll need to change permissions on a couple of directories if you run install.php (but remember to change them back to 755)

chmod 777 /var/www and /var/www/wp-content

• You’ll also have to use subdomains in your configuration if you want to host multiple domains via the installation
• Restart lighttpd and login at http://domain.com/

At this point you should have main Wordpress Mu running and accessible, however the next thing on my list was getting the multi domain stuff working.   For this do the following…

• Install the multi-site plugin

1. Download from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/
2. Extract the archive
3. Copy sunrise.php into wp-content/. If there is a sunrise.php there already, you’ll just have to merge them as best you can.
4. Copy domain_mapping.php into wp-content/mu-plugins/.
5. Edit wp-config.php and uncomment the SUNRISE definition line: define( ‘SUNRISE’, ‘on’ );
6. As a “site admin”, visit Manage->Domain Mapping to create the domain mapping database table and set the server IP address.
7. Ensure the plugin is activated from Domain Mapping plugin under “Plugins” in the Site Admin site
8. Make sure the default Apache virtual host points at your WordPress MU site so it will handle unknown domains correctly. Do this by ensuring that you have a “*” record pointing to your installation’s IP address at your domain registrar.

The same holds true for communities, especially now with so many companies trying to engage with their customers.  Just a couple of years ago communities were never discussed… ever (unless you were talking about open source).  Now I’ll wager a bet that nearly ever marketing meeting has some component of community discussed, dissected, and regurgitated (is that what a Purple Cow would do?) on a daily basis.  Community has gone from the unknown servant to the Belle of the Ball, a true Cinderella story , in only a few short years.  But are companies really distinguishing themselves with their community efforts?  Are they creating Purple Communities or just another Facebook Fan page?

Purple Communities are communities that embrace their customers and make them part of the decision making process for their company and brand.  Imagine how much more valuable your company’s offerings would be if product management, sales, marketing, engineering, and support where all interacting with your company’s users on a daily basis in an ongoing dialog.  Customers would be more passionate, products would be better designed, and user’s needs would be more adequately addressed.

The benefits of embracing community and pushing it into all parts of your organization are many, but to do it effectively requires a good deal of work.  There is no Silver Community Bullet.  I recently posted some community building tips that describe at a high level what you should be focused on when designing your community strategy, but in this post I hope to give some actionable advice for creating a truly Purple Community.

What’s Your Community’s Niceness Factor?

I wish there was a way to measure and publish a Niceness Factor for communities.  You wouldn’t have to wonder if your community was helpful and friendly.  Unfortunately there is no such thing so you need to constantly look for ways to be more welcoming and friendly.  Some communities  (you know who you are) can be downright inhospitable places for newcomers.  Usually these communities are filled with members who have vast amounts of knowledge… and know it.  They want newcomers to learn the ropes and come up through the ranks “the old fashioned” way.  There is little time for newcomers because the work at hand is just too important.  They can’t possibility take time out of their busy day to help get people off to a running start. If you want your community to grow you’ll need to lighten up on the harshness and sprinkle some friendliness in your interactions.  You know the old saying “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”.

Sure I’ll Check it Out

Another thing that many well intentioned communities do is establish a TODO list for easy to perform tasks that community newcomers can perform.  Some even have veterans that sign up as mentors for certain tasks in order to help newcomers come up to speed.  I applaud communities who go to the trouble of establishing a process that identifies tasks like this, but unfortunately TODO lists are just too daunting   in most cases.  The typical exchange goes something like this….

newcomer:	“Hey, I love your community (product, project, etc) and would like to help out in some way.  What kinds of things do you need work done on?”.
community veteran:	“Welcome, glad you like our community (product, project, etc.).  We’ve created a TODO list that has lots of easy tasks for beginners.  Go check it out.”
newcomer:	“Okay, thanks.  I will”

The newcomer then browses the list but because they’re not familiar with the project or community they’ll often become confused and lose interest.  This is the worst kind of loss, the one that got away, however unlike fishing stories you don’t want to tell many of these.

The fix for these kinds of misses is simple.  Instead of pointing a user to a long list of tasks, you engage with the user and discover what it is they like and dislike.  What are they good at?  And above all, what do they want to do?  Armed with this info you can help get the user started on the RIGHT task that gets them involved.

The simple act of opening a dialog with someone helps tremendously with whether or not you actually get them involved.  When you’ve taken the time to really discuss with someone how they can help and give them personal attention you’re helping create a sense of responsibility for accomplishing a task.

Never a Dull Thread (aka. how to get rid of the toe dippers?)

One of the easiest ways to NOT be “Purple” and to rid yourself of all those pesky Community Lurkers, is to let their questions go unanswered (BTW, I hope that came across as a joke:).  Most community members are lurkers.  They watch and listen without participating in any of your community conversations.  This is usually because of fear of criticism (see the Inhospitable Place above).  Fear of criticism drives much of your community’s behavior, especially for newcomers.

People tend to lurk and not get involved because they’re afraid of criticism. Criticism that they’ve asked the wrong question. Criticism that their question sounds stupid.  There are probably dozens of reasons people are afraid to participate and they almost all relate to being afraid of something.

When they finally do get up the nerve to ask a question in your forum and they are either A) abused in some way for not “getting it” or B) the question goes unanswered, you have just made sure that your lurker will always be just that, a lurker.  If its your job to support a community, make sure that there is never a thread that goes unanswered.  Get in there and open a dialog.  If you don’t know the answer, find someone who does and pull them into the discussion.  Whatever you do make sure someone is answering your lurker’s questions in a friendly manner.

Recognize and promote

I’ve talked about the need to recognize and promote users before but this one can really make a difference in creating a Purple Community.  This is the opposite to the fear of criticism your newcomers have.  If you are constantly praising your community users and helping them feel good about the work they are doing you’ll find your members will have a greater sense of responsibility towards your community efforts.  Great responsibility = Greater action = More productive community.  If gas is the stuff cars run on, recognition is the stuff that communities run on.

This doesn’t mean you need a user rating system or a User of the Month classification.  Don’t get me wrong, these are great and valuable systems, you just don’t NEED them in order to give recognition.  You simply need to express your honest gratitude publicly for what your community members are doing.  Try it and see.  You’ll notice a remarkable difference in how your community starts behaving.

The Purple Community

I don’t know if you noticed the trend while reading this article but it’s pretty simple… ENGAGE.  If you want to build a community that stands out and gets users excited, it all starts with conversation.  Having a conversation (aka. LISTEN FIRST then talk) with your users is the single most effective way to build a Purple Community.

Related Posts

Nearly 35 years ago Fred Brooks wrote his seminal book Mythical Man Month detailing his experiences managing a large team of developers.  He observed that adding resources to a project could actually impede progress due to communication overhead between increasing numbers of project members.  Everyone needed to keep apprised of what everyone elese was doing.  This communication overhead actually slowed progress.

Brooks looked specifically at software development projects, but I believe his conclusion holds true across all projects.  With the proliferation of matrix style organizations and the lack of strategically focused planning, we’ve created a corporate culture that reacts to every crisis by sending lots of email and having lots of meetings in the hope that something positive must happen due to all this communication.  The secret is, it won’t.  Lots of communication only exacerbates the problem.  What we need to do is remember that communication does not solve business problems; strategic planning and productive action solves problems.

The Quest for the Empty INBOX

This is the time of year we think about our jobs and how our actions map to our company’s goals.  It’s objection setting time.  Year after year we define meaningful, seemingly attainable goals only to see them gradually slip away during the course of the year due primarily to one thing, too much unfocused and unproductive communication.  As crazy as that sounds, how many times have you went to work full of enthusiasm for finally knocking out that project only to find that your schedule has been hijacked and now includes 2 or 3 new meetings?  On top of that, your boss has suddenly found his “next hot thing” and sent you a dozen emails that leave you scratching your head as to (a) how they all relate to one another and (b) fit into the corporate strategy.  Adding insult to injury he also wants an action plan on how to handle those twelve seemingly unrelated emails… by EOD.  As you may have guessed, that project you wanted to finish never finds its way onto your desk and the worst part of it all is that finishing that project IS actually ON YOUR GOAL SHEET.  Go figure?

Reacting seems to be the only goal we need to define on our objective sheet for the year.  Forget getting any real work done. All that seems to matter anymore is getting through our email and meetings and making sure that everyone on the email chain knows we’re “on top of that”.  Maybe we should create an automatic outgoing email that simply replies to every message with “I’m on it”.  We’d be the company hero.  Does it really matter if we get anything done as long as people think we’re working on it?

Herein lies the problem.  Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottomline.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues.  How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

So is there any hope for reestablishing our productivity and becoming an agent of change rather than an instrument of reactionary behavior?  Here’s my list of things to do to obtain the Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.

Cleanup Your INBOX

In Get Your Productivity Groove On I discussed the problem of context switching between tasks and how it effects your overall performance.  Because the use of email is so prevalent in our society, my guess is you have lots of extraneous emails sitting in your INBOX; email from your relatives, mailing lists, newsletters, etc.  You should eliminate as many non-essential emails as you can and move them to a personal email address.   Less mail in your INBOX means less temptation to check it everytime you see your notification bar indicating “You’ve Got Mail”.  Less email checking means more focus and more focus means more real work.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  Everyone seems to hit “Reply All” and/or adds lots of people to the CC list because they think someone might be interested.  Well guess what… WE’RE NOT!  I have enough email that’s directly related to me, I don’t need email that MAY interest me.  If you think it’s important or relevant to me… send it TO: ME.  Many people I know have already resorted to filtering all CC’d email and placing them directly into archive folders.  Maybe you should too .

Train Yourself to Get Things Done  

In the book Getting Things Done by David Allen he defined a system for personal productivity that teaches people to evaluate incoming messages, make a decision and act.  It’s a great system, but may not be necessary if we just focus on a few simple steps to get back our lost productivity.

First, review your yearly objectives and establish whether they still make sense.  If you aren’t sure, schedule time with your manager so that you understand from a high level what you should be working on.  This is also a good way to review the company’s objectives and understand how your job makes “a difference”.

Secondly, create simple goals for each day that help you reach your objectives, and schedule time in your calendar to ensure you can work on those goals.  If you don’t, your schedule will undoubtedly be “hijacked” by someone else’s agenda.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”  –Paul J. Meyers

Thirdly, learn to focus again.  We’ve gotten so used to being interrupted throughout the course of the day that we’ve forgotten how to focus on the task at hand.  During your scheduled time to work on your daily goals, don’t check email, in fact turn it off, and don’t answer the phone.  These are the distractions that drain your productivity.  Focus on your work and only your work.  I’ve even heard of people who have taken to working on non-networked PCs just to minimize the chance they will be distracted by (a) email or IM or (b) distract themselves by surfing the web.  I haven’t gone this far yet, but if you find it difficult to stay on task, maybe pulling the networking cable is not such a bad idea.

Learn to Say “NO”

This one may be the hardest to actually do because noone likes to say “no”.  Probably somewhere deep in our subconscious we believe that saying “no” shows weakness.  If we say “no” our boss will think we can’t manage the load.  The contrary is probably closer to the truth.  By carefully analyzing your incoming work against your defined objectives you’ll prove to be a valuable asset in accomplishing the “important” work that implements your company’s strategy.  However, I’m not suggesting you say “no” to all incoming requests – just be careful in your analysis of what you’re being asked to do.  Is it important to the company’s objectives?  Are you the right person to accomplish the task?  Are there other time critical tasks you need to perform in order to meet your objectives?

Related Posts

Get Your Productivity Groove On

Lost Productivity

Trust

Trust is not something you can ask for; it’s earned through actions and competence and it defines relationships between people, governments, communities, and businesses.  The text book definition of trust is “…reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or entity”.  The key word being “reliance”.  You rely on someone or something because you have a history of past experiences by which you can infer future experiences.  Without these past experiences, people have no way to place you within their trust metric. They resort to lumping you in with “the rest” or basing it on any reputation you may have.

So trust and reputation are important – you get that.  But what can you do to enhance your reputation and gain a community’s trust?  I’m glad you asked.  Here are several things to consider in your next exchange with your community.

Stand and Deliver

This may be the most important thing of all to keep in mind when building trust, and here’s why … “people trust people who get things done”. Actions always speak louder than words.  If you say you’re going to do something and never quite get around to it, your reputation will suffer and hence the community’s trust in you.  You don’t typically see the choice projects going to under-performers at work, of course not.  That’s because their managers don’t trust them to create results.  They go to the people who can “stand and deliver” results.  That needs to be you!

This is actually a “two-parter”.  Not only should you deliver results, but you need to deliver the right results and update others on your progress. This requires learning to prioritize the most important tasks in your community and making sure that action and results are being produced.  Not only will the community see that you’re working on important tasks but you’ll also gain reputation because you’re delivering on what you said you’d do.

Get Real

Don’t let your community become a billboard of marketing messages from your sponsors.  These types of one-way communications send users running for the hills.  Being genuine, open and authentic in all community dealings is what you should strive for and what you should expect from others.  Being open and honest about why decisions are made, who influences those decisions and why, and apologizing unequivocally when things go wrong will take you far in life and in community relations.

One thing that is becoming clear as we explore the uncharted waters of the Social Web is that open and honest dialogs build trust.  As I’ve mentioned before, community members want to be a part of something – let them.  Don’t expect to build a vibrant community if all you’re doing is attracting “fans” to your site.  Fans are just that – fans.  You should be thinking about how you can convert fans to contributors and you do that through openness, authenticity, and dialogue.  Embrace conversation and discussion in your community and let the community’s input guide you.  Make it clear that contribution from everyone is heard, valued and respected.  Which leads to the next thing to remember which is …

R-E-S-P-E-C-T (just a little bit)

Do you remember that song sung by Aretha Franklin (maybe I just dated myself:( )?  Well, all she wanted was a little respect and when she didn’t get it … guess what … she left.  Treat your community members with the same regard and esteem you’d like them to show you and others in your community.  Set the example.  One simple rule we all learned as kids says it all… “Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself”.  Build your community’s principals around that simple concept and you’ll do just fine.  Remember that each interaction with your community is from a human being who wants and deserves to be treated fairly and with civility (until proven otherwise ).

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

This one can sometimes get overlooked in all the hustle and bustle of today when we’re trying to keep up with email, forums, posts, action items, and meetings.  Sometimes we forget that we’re not the only ones who are working our butts off to get things done.  Make sure you take a minute everyday to give credit where it is due.  In Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps, I discussed how a fear of criticism effects collaboration project participants adversely.  The opposite also holds true.  When people are praised for their efforts and contributions, it becomes addictive.  They begin to crave it and will act accordingly to get it.  Think about it like this.  When was the last time someone gave you a genuine and authentic compliment and you didn’t want to try to please them even more.  You can’t, because its never happened.  Subconsciously we all crave praise and reward; that’s what make it such an effective tool for building trust.  If your community is quick to praise and slow to criticize, others will find it welcoming and enjoy spending time there.

These are just some of the actions you can take to build trust and reputation for your community efforts.  I’m sure there are many others.  One book I highly recommend on the subject is The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey.  It’s a remarkable book that goes into great detail about the why, when, where, and how of trust in everything we do.  Read it.

Related Reading

Community Building Success Factors
What They Don’t Teach Community Managers
What Really Matters?
Collaboration Project Success in 5 Simple Steps

Books

The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott
The Secret Language of Leadership by Stephen Denning