I had the great fortune to have coffee with someone I really admire this morning: John Coate.
If you are into the ‘Community’ discussion at all and you haven’t heard his name, you are really missing out. I came across John’s canonical essay, Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community, originally written in 1992 and revised in 1998, while I was at Riya, but somehow lost the bookmark until just recently. Lucky that, though, because when I re-found it and re-bookmarked it with Ma.gnolia, my friend Marnie Webb noticed I had bookmarked the non-updated version and also indicated that she knows John, who now works with her as the Director of Techsoup. Even before I had the chance to ask her for an introduction, John, himself, dropped me an email tell me that he enjoys my blog and suggested we meet sometime. (to which I jumped up and down yelling OMG OMG OMG)
We finally got to have that meeting this morning.
I was a little nervous that we would talk and I would say ridiculously inane things. I mean, the guy built the community behind THE WELL, which launched the EFF, co-founded the SFGate and was on the original advisory board for Techsoup. However, having a conversation with John was like catching up with an old friend. I found our ideas flowing back and forth easily and we had many laughs exchanging crazy stories about virtual communities.
At one point, John said to me, “Tara, we are in the relationship business, there is no rushing here.” which made me want to stand on my chair and yell, Hallelujah!. He hadn’t even read my recent entry on Trained Seals. After 20 years of experience in virtual communities, John has seen it all and will tell you that there have been no two experiences that are the same. He acknowledges that his Innkeeping essay was full of ‘tips’ but said, “There are no guarantees. I just advise people to get involved and see what happens.”
Hearing John talk about his beginnings at The Well was my personal highlight [and I am paraphrasing here from rough notes]:
I don’t know how much you know about my personal history, but when I was hired at The Well as the Marketing Director [he pauses and kind of laughs], my previous work experience was that I was an auto mechanic. I was, basically, hired because we were both part of the same commune and they recognized my ability to build relationships with people. When we started out, there was no marketing budget, so our “plan” was to build something meaningful for people. On the commune, it was not only about what we said to one another, it was how you said it. How you made people feel. As The Well grew, I was floored to see that this same goodwill could happen via this machine. That it could be recreated virtually.
In reflection of ‘new marketing’:
The first time I heard the word ‘viral marketing’, I asked, “what’s that?” When it was explained to me, I replied, “Oh yeah, we did that. That’s all there was, really. This is what the web was built on…people forming groups around ideas.”
Throughout the conversation, he expressed his concerns about the current landscape of ‘Community Marketing’:
Self-forming groups is where it’s at. These are communities. You can’t ‘make’ a community. In the early web days, the page metaphor was a trap. Companies had it all wrong wanting to drive ‘eyeballs’. Now everyone wants their own social network and a community on their own site.
Remember that I’m terribly paraphrasing here, but I think I’ve caught the essence, at least. The hour and a half we sat there seemed like 5 minutes and both of us had to run off, but John agreed to continue talking in various different forms. I’m hoping he’ll be part of the upcoming community roundtables I’m planning as well as even coming to Citizen Space to tell his story…I’m also dying to hear more about his 13 years of commune living.
Definitely check out John’s work and stop in at The Well (which was around before web browsers). You’ll definitely hear more from him if I have my way. 
View Tara Hunt's profile
5 Comments
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing this.
I just love how everything he speaks about is very simple and to the point. In other words, there isn’t some “gimmick” or “trick” to making communities. It’s about people forming around something meaningful that they care about and working the best they can, one day at a time.
I also laughed when he said “Now everyone wants their own social network”. It’s true. That’s something we need to start thinking about as a group. I mean everyone wants their own site and they expect everyone to be a part of it. Yet by doing this, we’re separating ourselves instead of gathering into a community around the things we care about within a “shared space”. I mean imagine everyone sitting in their own homes, expecting people to come to them because they don’t want to go to them.
I mean I’ve often considered just dumping my own site in lieu of becoming a community member on a few select sites. As I’ve noted before on one of my posts, I honestly believe people can contribute to the web in meaningful ways without needing their own site. As some people have told me, they just don’t have the time. Yet by commenting, they are still contributing greatly to the Web.
Do you know what…of all the BS that currently surrounds “community marketing”, “web 2.0 marketing” or whatever the “cool” people decide to call it on any given day…all a good business leader needs to do is create an area where like-minded people can mix online and talk about things they have in common.
The brands are faciltiators, there is nothing fancy or clever…the good ones just do things that encourage people to get involved talking and looking at what they love most.
Where is the BS in that?
Unfortunately, in Manchester (UK) there don’t seem to be an awful lot of people like John and Tara around and MD’s in Manchester which allow you to create communities instead of bringing home the bacon are like rocking horse sh!t so we may have to wait a while!
With great communities comes great responsibility.
I wonder if the people building these communities realise how attached/dependent people can become on them. I’m curious to know how John feels about the current state of “The Well”? I work for the company that runs the UK equivalent (CIX) both are fantastic communities, both pre-dating the WWW, but both dieing in today’s Internet climate.
I think Nollind Whachell’s comment touches on the reason that these communities are no longer growing. When the Internet world was so much smaller communities had to be more diverse and discuss pretty much every topic, just to reach critical mass. These days there are so many people online you can get amazingly niche and create a moderately successful community around hamster breeding if you wish.
This is great, but what is lost is the strength of community that builds when you come across the same user in multiple topics spanning diverse subjects.
I personally suspect that the current trend will come full circle, and someone will come up with a way of aggregating all the niche communities into larger groups. Maybe technology like OpenID will help with this… since it can never happen whilst we all have dozens of usernames.
Charlie Brook,
I see what you mean, and I think that the direction of evolution is definitely towards tying together, and also opening-up, and making it easier to connect across networks.
OpenID and open standards like Microformats are starting to emerge. Microformats will end up being incorporated into the next major version of Firefox. And, this will allow people to network across social networks, via xfn, hCard, hCalendar, etc. This will likley slow down the explosion of social networking sites, because people will be able to social network from any website, blog, etc, eventually. (I think that creative people are also going to be looking for providers who offer user control over content, too. Instead of people who claim full rights to use anything you put on their site).
I don’t see the nicheing as a bad thing, but as a natural progression, and I’m sure that this is what John Coate observed with The Well over time. That people started breaking off into smaller groups, and that communities started spinning off (like Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds, which spun off of The Well) What I am thinking about is “How can these niche groups team up to do really cool things that their participants will be excited to participate in?”
I think one growing area is enabling is inter-community cooperation. Many small niche communities can work together and pool their knowledge, and have fun doing it. This is something we’re working on with http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/CollectiveProblemSolving/OrganizedInquiry
(site down for the moment, but check back in about an hour and it will be up).
OrganizedInquiry is an evolving process, and we are going to experiment with extending it to communites like tagging communities, mailing lists, forums, blogs, wiki communities, Second Life, etc. The cool thing about it will be that it won’t really take any special software to do it (although certain web applications software might make it easier, but they are all open source), just some knowledge gained from trial and error.
I agree that expansion of social networking sites will slow down from the enabling of networking from any site. It will be interesting to see if there are various backlashes against inclusive communities, and if so will those end up being counter-productive - an incarnation of the “tragedy of the commons”.
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