How Not To Do Community
I’ve seen this linked around a few forums and blogs that I read. I’ll give the props to Quarter to Three because that’s where I saw it first.
Now what we have here is a policy initiative by the Republican party in the US to collect policy suggestions. They launched the America Speaking Out website where anyone can suggest policy ideas over a wide range of different topics including energy, defence, American values and so forth. Before I go on, I’m going to say that this isn’t a political blog and I have no intention of making it one. I do have deeply held political views but they aren’t relevant here. This is me critiquing the concept as a community guy.
On the surface it appears to be a good idea – engage with the greater public in a big open forum to let people bring forwards ideas for consideration. No arguments there from me. The more that voters are challenged to think through the consequences of their opinions the less likely they are to hold bad ones. Additionally, the more that legislators engage with their electorate the more they should be in tune with their concerns and issues. When it comes to democracy and giving your target audience a stake in the larger process I’m all for that whether we are talking about the players of a game or the voters in a country.
The issue is in the execution (as it so often is). What we have here is basically a huge noise machine. You know that 500 page thread on the main forums that started with a blue response and now players use it as a ‘Will the devs ever do X?’ thread? This is that thread. What the GOP are finding (and as anyone who has ever been a part of any online community ever could have told them) is that there are a whole lot more bored people on the internet who will ride your idea down into terminal, blazing hilarity than there are earnest and conscientious posters who once had a good idea about something and would like you to consider it. Naturally in this case given the target and the visibility, the site has become a magnet for either actual loons who want to deport the President, go back to using gold for currency and start enslaving black people again, bored trolls who are posting parody worthy of The Onion, or idealogues who want to tell the GOP how much they disagree with their platform and who somehow think that their incisive comment is going to shame the party into a 180º policy reversal.
As a community manager I know that feedback is only as useful as the filters you apply to it. If all you want is static, then this is a great way to generate that. If you want an actual debate and to have honest conversations on various topics then you need to set things up to produce that result. You must frame the question in advance, lay out all the relevant information and then ask your community to participate in that conversation. When it takes off you need to stay with it, keep it on track, prune out derails, unconstructive posts and actual misinformation so that the people who are involved get a higher quality of discourse and you get a higher quality of feedback. It’s like tending a garden – you won’t get much of anything unless you prepare the ground properly and care for your plants as they grow. A big online suggestion box basically fulfils the same purpose as an open field that you can yell in for a bit whenever you feel like yelling. This is why games often run focus tests in the mid beta period and why the best games are often the ones with the most closely managed beta programs. If you only rarely see your community manager on the beta forums and there’s no serious attempt to solicit specific feedback on critical topics then I’d be suspicious of the importance of the beta to the final launch.
I suspect that this will continue to be a theme as we move on.
