John Coate
Dieser englische Gastbeitrag ist Teil des Buches: Community.
The WELL: Pioneer work in community building of the 1980s
My online management career began in early 1986 when I was hired as the Marketing Director for a fledgling online conferencing service called The WELL (which stands for Whole Earth ‘Electronic Link). It was less than a year old, had just a few hundred subscribers and was managed by one person, Matthew McClure, who happened to be my close friend.
I wasn’t hired for my marketing expertise or my computer skills, since I had neither. In fact, the day I came to work there was the first time I ever sat in front of a computer. I had spent the previous three years working as an auto mechanic at an auto dealership. I knew what computers were, but that was about all I knew about them.
Matthew recruited me at a party after listening to me lament what an under-achiever I was, as I was about to accept a job at a different car dealer. He said, “I need help. Why don’t you come work for me?” I confessed I didn’t know anything about computers and he said, “you learned to fix sophisticated European cars. You can learn computers. And you can learn marketing. I need help growing the service. You’ll figure it out.”
His confidence in me came from the twelve years we had spent living together as part of what was once the largest collective living enterprise in the USA, known simply as The Farm. We had started as a group that met weekly at one of the rock and roll dance halls in San Francisco in the late 1960’s. In 1970, while the Viet Nam War was still raging, about 250 of us moved into converted school buses and toured the country advocating for peace and a lifestyle based on modest consumption, “right livelihood,” and the belief that people can learn to live and work together nonviolently. The Farm saga is long and complex, but after the bus “Caravan” we settled in rural Tennessee and began building our own community. We were completely collective. In those years I didn’t even have my own money. During the years I lived there, four as a single man, and eight married with kids, I lived in numerous households, both large and small. I estimate that I lived with more than two hundred different people in those years. I worked as a farmer, mechanic, truck driver, carpenter and painter always on crews with several other people. In addition, The Farm received lots of visitors every year, so we mingled closely with them as well as with each other.
The real reason Matthew hired me was this experience I had learning to live with, work with, laugh with, raise kids with, converse with, enjoyably hang out with, and often sort through problems with, a lot of other people. That experience involved a lot of meetings, confrontations, long sessions trying to get to the heart of a problem, and also silence, when that was the right thing to do.
The WELL was founded in 1985 by two men who were seminal figures in the 1960s “counterculture.” Stewart Brand was the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogs that were immensely popular back then as well as a quarterly magazine, the “Whole Earth Review.” Larry Brilliant had been a member of the Hog Farm, a highly influential counterculture commune. Larry was a doctor who, later in the 1970’s, had been instrumental in eradicating smallpox from India. These guys cooked up The WELL as a way for people to engage with the contents of the Whole Earth Catalogs and to interact with each other. “Put them together and see what happens” was about as structured as the social philosophy was at first. They hired Matthew to run it because he had the tech skills, the business acumen and the social know-how to get it off the ground.
And then Matthew hired me to grow it.
The WELL was already about ten months old when I got there. There were already a number of very smart and accomplished people using it. It was a mix of tech people, writers, teachers, artists, consultants and computer enthusiasts.
The world of computer technology in the mid-1980’s would today seem unbearably primitive and slow. To do anything “online” you had to have a personal computer and a modem which connected your computer via a phone line to the service’s server. The modem acted like a garden hose, moving data slowly through a narrow pipeline regardless of how big the supply was. And modems were governed by their “baud rate” which in those days was slow enough that at 1200 baud you would watch the letters scroll by horizontally as they formed words. Later the rates got faster to the point that you could get a whole screen at the same time. But this was all text. Any service that also had graphics, primitive as they were, was even slower.
So you had to know how to work this process and you had to be quite motivated to endure its many chokepoints. Almost all of the people using The WELL were professionals for whom computer use was part of how they did their work. Many of them worked alone. Most of the people didn’t know each other and were feeling each other out as to how they could get value out of this very new experience where the communicating is all written. Many-to-many communications are ubiquitous now, but back then it was new and revolutionary.
The WELL was organized as a general interest gathering place. It was structured “bulletin board” style, based around asynchronous conversations grouped according to subjects such as Macs, PCs, printers, politics, health, legal, women, men, religion, cars, boats, parenting, consulting, etc. Wide subject matter. In a way it was like a big picnic area with lots of tables, some of which had a lot of people sitting and talking, some with just a few and a lot with one or none.
This was all going on before I got there. In those first few weeks I was trying to get my bearings, trying to grasp what it was I was supposed to be doing. Marketing to me meant making brochures and advertisements and other approaches. But I had no training in that and The WELL had almost no money for such things anyway.
But before long it came into better focus for me. My revelation was, “this isn’t the computer business. This is the relationship business.” I didn’t know much of anything about computers, but I knew a lot about how to help people get along with each other. I had already experienced a group of people who didn’t much know each other transform themselves into a community that would endure. I believed that the people on The WELL who really wanted it, could experience their version of it. What I needed to do was find ways to help the WELL experience be so valuable and meaningful to the people using it that they will then go out and get their friends to join them and build the community.
From that point on, everything I did was in service to that vision. I looked in on all the conversations, participated in many, and tried wherever I could to introduce people to each other. With such a wide variety of personalities and viewpoints converging for ongoing conversation, one technique I used – which I highly recommend – was to find something to like in each person and start with that as a basis for developing some sort of empathetic relationship with each person I encountered. That practice helps a lot when conflicts arise, which they do quite often.
Also, since the WELL was kind of hard to use, and there were just two of us working there, I handled all of the many customer service calls we received. That gave me a way to draw them in socially as I was helping them sort out their modem problem.
A few months after I was hired, still in early 1986, we rented booth space at a big computer fair in San Francisco, the West Coast Computer Faire. For that booth I made a big poster that said “The WELL: The Bay Area’s Online Community.” This was the first public use of the phrase “online community.” I needed a phrase or a label that would describe us and what we were moving toward.
The user base was self-selecting as computer using professionals, but it was not self-selecting for personalities. Soon enough of a wide variety of social skills was on display as people tried to navigate the tricky challenges of saying precisely what you mean and on the other side not being overly affronted by what another person says. Some were unpleasantly argumentative. At times we had to step in to referee a conflict and sometimes cancel someone’s subscription and send them away.
After I was at The WELL for about six months, Matthew moved on to start another company and hired Cliff Figallo as his replacement as WELL General Manager. Cliff was another close friend from The Farm. We worked together for more than five years building The WELL into what Wired! Magazine in 1997 called “the world’s most influential online community.” We weren’t the first online group, and we didn’t invent anything. What made us – meaning all of The WELL – influential was that we learned, though our own collective online experience, that people could develop deep and lasting relationships with other people as individuals and in groups primarily using networked computers. That meant there was no real limit to what was possible. This is what inspired people to make the community for themselves.
The label “online community” gets applied to a huge variety of projects and enterprises. What I mean by online community is a collection of people, joined together mainly through an networked computer platform, in which the participants develop various individual and group relationships in ways that make sense to them, either personally, professionally or both. It achieves its community status through the weaving of those relationships, and its sense of community is held in common by the will of the participants themselves. A true measure of it being a real community is if the people using it consider themselves to part of a real community, even if most interactions take place in a virtual space.
At its heart, an online community is all about relationships. It is now well proven that it is possible for people to experience authentic depth in these relationships, even when chiefly communicating via networked computers.
Now it is forty years later and online communities of every size and description are abundantly available to anyone with a smart phone, tablet or computer. Businesses use it as a kind of crowd-sourced product support. Groups of hobbyists and professionals share massive amounts of practical knowledge. Support groups abound.
What I have seen is that the tech constantly changes and moves forward but human nature not so much. As common as it is now, it is still unusual in the long arc of history for humans to convene in groups connected only by an electronic device. Despite how sophisticated the display and audio, it still isn’t “in person.” The differences in time and space between communicating online and communicating physically in the same space means that it is easier to fall into conflict and harder to get out of it. We humans seem calibrated to misunderstand each other in some primal way to protect ourselves. Combine that with how difficult it is to quickly write something that is exactly how you mean it, and very often conflicts arise. Without someone to help move conflicts into at least partial resolution, polarization is much more likely. I always advise people to oversupply understanding.
I think that what I learned about online community management still applies. You want to model the behavior you want to see in others. You want to project your real self to people. You want to gain their trust. You want to use a light touch with people but be willing to discipline or suspend someone if you have to. How much controversy that creates depends on the nature of the community. So you have to know and understand the community. You want to have authority without being authoritarian.
And if you can, be a part of it yourself.
