Is Being A Community Organizer Like…
…running a sleepover camp?
Ever since reading Seth Godin’s Jobs of the Future #1: Online Community Organizer I have been pondering this job title. Seth drew a parallel, in terms of skill set, to union organizer, and that comparison flowed naturally into his description of the qualities such as passion and persistence that the two occupations would share. His post did make Community Organizer sound like a dream job. It also indirectly highlighted an aspect of the commercial internet that we would do well, I believe, to have a lot more understanding and discussion of.
Up until now, there’s been plenty of public conversation about aggregating information for the ‘common good’, but the conversation about aggregating people has been mostly about profit incentive, and therefore primarily in the province of media, marketers, and pr folks.
Now, I do not believe that profit incentive is evil, otherwise how to understand each of our need, right, and desire to be compensated for our work product? I am, though, seriously pained watching millions of people wandering about the web asking each other how to make money while enjoying their ‘right’ to all the ‘free’ toys, whether they are reading about the fortunes made by the developers of the toys or not. Free on the web, is, so far, mostly more about playing craps than about any sound economics.
So what does a Community Organizer do?
If I define community in the context of a web based destination, my broad definitions are:
- A group of like minded people gathered online to share in a common activity. A group of like minded people gathered online to enjoy a common interest.
An existing offline community bringing activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.
An existing offline community creating new activity related to a pre-existing common interest online.
These definitions represent vastly different constituencies, with the biggest contrast being between common activity and common interest. Activity is traffic is the name of the game for web startups, but traffic is not community in RL any more than it is on the web. A million users can move around Times Square or Mall of the Americas on a given day. Some may be friends, regulars, know one another, but their whole is not a community, any more than the daily traffic on Digg is.
A Community Planner, however, sounds to be far more than a traffic planner.
I should clarify the big assumption that I’m making here, based on something that is indirectly implied but not specifically stated in the post that started this train of thought. That assumption is that a Community Organizer is expected to build and grow a new or expanded community. I read the description of this person’s optimal value as a proactive one.
The Community Organizer, therefore, would be someone who already has a leadership role in an existing community, online or off. That kind of role is something that usually is built and developed over years of interaction, where trust and reputation have been widely established over time. The union organizer analogy, however, is a very good one, in that a strong populist orator can walk into a strange community and collect a following almost immediately by displaying understanding of the constituents and pushing all the right buttons. Historically, people like this are often either egotists or idealists, they can be profit driven or altruistic, but, regardless of the exact makeup, they invariably have pretty strong motivations and agendas. They don’t become dutiful employees, unless, of course, they have a stake in the agenda and rewards of their employer, or vice versa. (Yes, there are actors who can straddle this either or fence, but you usually wouldn’t leave your entire community to their making.)
There are many community roles within organizations, such as in public relations, marketing, customer service, etc., which are already well defined and well filled, so I am further assuming that none of these match the definition of Community Organizer.
Going back to my definitions of community, above, existing communities can be further classed into either online or offline. The definition of offline communities is clear, so my focus narrows to online communities.
Online can be divided into commercial and recreational. I’m leaving the world of online charities and fundraising aside, as they are adjunctal in nature, and deferring the important and underdeveloped area of community projects and the public trust to future discussion.
The only example of a new online commercial activity I can think of that truly formed some new communities is eBay, where specific groups of collectors ‘found’ one another and developed communities that did and could not exist previously. Some members of those communities derive their entire income there and simultaneously interact socially.
Pretty much all other commercial web activity is strictly transactional on an individual (or corporate entity) basis. A substantial amount of recreational activity of any scale at all, is actually also profit driven, ie. many people on Linked In and now Facebook are there to network, to make, renew, and maintain connections, all of which, directly or indirectly, benefits their careers.
So online communities which are truly recreational are traditionally very small and limited. I personally don’t believe that this needs to be the case, but do believe that it will continue to be as long as we each go on our merry way and never gather to discuss and consider the reasons. The best online means of public discussion about this, to date, is what I’m doing now. Blogging.
Does it sound as though I’ve deliberately left the original core tech internet communities out of this overview? I have. They have become a small group within the population explosion here, and also seem to fall into two primary groups. (Why are we always cleaving everything down the middle?) That division can be very roughly described as falling between the open source believers in free and the enterprise aligned who believe that it takes a lot of money, which equates to ownership and rights, to build a lot of things. That is as apolitical a description as I can make. This ‘cleavage’ is a great misfortune for us all, as that core community has the valuable ability to create for everyone’s, rather than only their own, benefit. They should also be speaking more directly with us. Those with idealistic beliefs have abilities to enable and empower many, and those with capitalistic beliefs can only benefit from a bigger and happier constituency.
What about offline communities that aren’t here yet, despite many efforts. Is this the intended role of a Community Organizer? To lead those people in? Perhaps they aren’t here yet because there is nothing here they want enough, and maybe their needs and desires differ somewhat from those of the population that is here. So bringing them here means making them the right offerings, and, it seems to me that this is primarily the role of a developer. The conundrum, of course, is that most developers are like everyone already here, thereby making most new development automatically exclusionary.
In my lifetime experience with urban real estate development, every great destination has a critical collaborative component. Most developers build homes (condos, etc.) for individuals, or offices for companies, or special purpose facilities for industry. That can be accomplished profitably with tools such location and in depth market information. No one, however, builds a destination this way. In retail, you need at least one good anchor, a big draw that is already a traffic destination in itself and will therefore also draw other, smaller, concerns of the same caliber. For public spaces much more collaboration is usually needed. Great opera houses are built for great opera companies and their subscribers, and so on. In the physical world, mixing uses together and creating vibrant neighborhoods (the urban seat of community) is extremely complex. Over the internet it should be remarkably easy in comparison. The single thing that I believe we don’t have enough of here, outside of tech and on the people side, is collaboration.
It would appear, without new and innovative thinking, that a Community Manager is most likely to be a charismatic leader type whose community experience is mostly with others who are already motivated to be involved online, whether they be newbies or old hands. Sounds rather like either a former or budding entrepreneur to me. I’d suggest giving them shares. 
