Communicating Clearly

From The Art Of Community by O'Reilly (http://www.artofcommunityonline.org) by Jono Bacon

Communication is essential in community. It is the metaphorical highway that connects the many towns and people in your world. Effective communication brings together your community members in a manner that is free-flowing, productive, and accessible.

First, your community needs to build a set of resources to facilitate communication, discussion, and the sharing of ideas and best practices. In many cases these resources are online facilities, such as mailing lists, forums, and discussion channels.

Once your communication channels are in place, they can be used in all manner of ways. There will of course be some good drivers and some bad drivers; some will communicate exceptionally well, and some will irritate and agitate anyone who crosses their path. You want to inspire and encourage a baseline quality of communication. This is not about excluding people who are imperfect writers or speakers, but instead about providing a consistent example of simple approaches to communication that make the community easier to understand and more pleasurable for everyone involved.

Building Your Communication Channels

Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively.

Communication can be divided into three primary areas:

• Incoming
  • Receiving and processing feedback and viewpoints for the purpose of improvement. An example of this could include surveys to determine how well a part of your community is working.
• Outgoing
  • Sharing news, stories, and achievements from the community with the rest of the world. An example of this could be showing off something your community has created.
• Internal
  • Internal discussions and meetings in the community to discuss objectives, goals, conflict, and other issues. An example of this could include meetings that are designed to decide on how your community will work together toward its goals.

Striving For Clarity

When laying down the lines of communication for your community, our goal is to strive for clarity. Imagine if you will a world in which every communication is clear, accessible, and well understood by your community. You need to think carefully about the culture in which your community communicates and strive to build a highway and driving style that achieves that culture. You first need to lay the foundations, which can be found in clarity and transparency. Your members want to be able to hear, read, or experience each communication and understand it straightaway. When clarity is in place, contributions will begin to flow shortly afterward. When confusion, misunderstanding, and opacity set in, your members will either spend their days seeking clarification or move on, confused and frustrated.

Achieving clarity requires attention to two areas. First, a sensible choice of communication medium is required (mailing list, IRC, forum, etc.). This is relatively straightforward and actually fairly uninteresting. We will make some decisions about this over the following pages. The second, more complex part is picking communication channels that match the needs of the users while maximizing clarity. Let’s spend some time talking about that.

Choosing Your Mediums of Communication

Your community has oodles of communication channels to choose from, each with qualities that make sense in different scenarios and to different people. The goal is to match the right medium to your community and to understand the pros and cons of that medium to help the pros bubble to the surface and keep the cons well away from the kitchen.

Picking an appropriate medium is largely about understanding your contributors and their workflow. Each type of contributor will have different preferences.

Another key consideration when building effective communication channels is keeping discussion focused. This is a two-part process in avoiding communication fetishism and also keeping all your eyeballs in one place.

Communication fetishism is particularly prevalent in online and technical communities and points to the problem of new communities wanting to provide every possible communication channel under the sun. They set up mailing lists, forums, IRC channels, Second Life worlds, and more. This is the wrong thing to do. You should instead identify the key roles and personalities in your project and choose mediums that make the most sense to those roles.

When you set up a new community, you want to generate discussion quickly. You want to initiate the discussion but encourage and inspire others to participate and get involved. If you have a forum with too many subforums, you will fragment the discussion: you will get many tiny bits of discussion across the subforums, and little consistency. Keep the discussion in just a few places, and conversation will flow.

The Mediums

Mailing lists

Mailing lists are an excellent medium for discussion. They are low bandwidth, a familiar interface (email), and fairly accessible, and conversation is delivered directly to your email client. The delivery of the conversation reduces the chance of new contributors forgetting about your community: each time they check their email, they are reminded that your community exists, and they may actually read the messages and respond.

Forums

Forums are a very popular, low-barrier-to-entry medium. They manifest in the form of websites that allow you to create an identity and have a discussion using that identity.

Forums have exploded in popularity in recent years, and some huge forums have developed across the Internet.

Forums are a popular choice among less-technical users.

IRC

IRC is a real-time chat medium that has become increasingly popular for communities. There are IRC providers all over the world, and many IRC networks cater to specific purposes. As an example, the Freenode network (irc.freenode.net) is specifically aimed at providing IRC channels and conversation for open source projects. Although an entirely open and accessible medium, IRC is still very much populated by technology-related channels.

The value of IRC is in real-time discussion, and there are many benefits:

• Bonding
• Speed
• Meetings
• Logs

Blogs

With the continued growth of blogs as not only a personal publishing medium but also a community publishing medium, you may need to write articles, stories, and features about your community.

Magazine articles/web articles

Your community may get the opportunity to be featured in a magazine or website, and you will need to be able to present your thoughts well.

Documents

Your community will produce documents, guides, specifications, help, and more, and these should be clearly written and easy to read.

General Guidelines

Teaching great communication is complex, and many books have been written on the subject. Fortunately, becoming a great communicator doesn’t require an exercise in academically satisfying hand waving or an attempt to sound like a monocle-wearing intellectual, but to simply be clear, friendly, and straightforward in your communications.

• Be clear
  • Always try to communicate as clearly and transparently as possible. Speak frankly and use language familiar to your recipient. Try not to blind people with science, but don’t patronize them

either. Always try to craft your communications to your audience.

• Be concise
  • Keep to the point, and don’t weigh your communications down with babble. Don’t use 1,000 words to say what could be said in 100. With many of us receiving so many emails, messages, phone calls, and other distractions every day, don’t burden your community with unnecessary rambling. If an email takes longer than five minutes to type, you may be doing something wrong (or you are a really, really slow typist).
• Be responsive
  • You don’t have to be wedded to your computer, but try to get back to people within a few days of them getting in touch with you. If you are drowning in emails and work, just let people know you might be a little delayed, so their expectations are set correctly. This issue is applicable not just to personal communication direct to you and other community leaders, but also to mailing lists, forums, IRC, and other public channels. Put yourself in the sender’s position: it is impossible to tell the difference between “nobody is answering my question because nobody knows the answer, meaning that what I’m trying to do is impossible and I should try something else” and “nobody is answering my question even though everyone knows the answer because they’re all too busy, meaning that I should

sit and wait longer rather than abandoning this approach.” It helps to make your community seem more friendly to new members and outsiders if they can tell the difference between these two things.

• Be fun
  • One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they become well respected in a community is to hide their personality in the interests of “looking professional.” Let your personality shine through. Make jokes and witty comments, and be sarcastic. Communities are supposed to be fun, and this is an important part of leading by example.
• Be human
  • We are all human, and we all make mistakes. If you screw up, say so and apologize. People will cherish your honesty and your integrity to hold your hands up when you get it wrong. This is a critically important part of leading by example: you want your community to also accept when they get it wrong. What we want to avoid is defensiveness, because it causes people to enter into a game of rebounding defensive statements, which is frustrating and damaging. If your hands are tied in being frank and open about your mistakes (such as if your employer would be less than thrilled), identify what went wrong and try to secure confidence in your community that it won’t happen again in the future.