How does your virtual garden grow?

(OOC alert; this is a meta-issue post) This post is not about manners or civility, an issue that is increasingly becoming a chimera. That discussion, however, has prompted me to ponder on the nature of successful communities in a virtual world. My primary virtual experience for this post is Second Life, where I have been active since late 2006-- I may use "SL", Second Life and "Virtual Worlds" interchangeably.

I recently recalled a snippet of conversation that was relayed to me by a fellow Second Lifer about a year ago. She was greatly amused at a discussion she had just had with a serious fellow in her virtual enclave.

"This community, you see.. it's broken down into tiers. There's the Tier A folk, they make things: scripting, building, and such. They contribute to the community. Naturally, I'm a Tier A person. And then there's a Tier B layer, they make their contribution felt in the form of societal structure-- creating events and a society for us all to live in. You're a B Tier person, of course. Then there's the Tier C folk, who just consume everything-- they buy what we Tier A people make, and attend the events, and contribute nothing else."

We both shared a laugh at the author's hubris, and I mentally filed that one away under 'amusing stories about virtual eccentrics.'

Perhaps time has proven him wise, however. This fellow was certainly on to something in terms of categories-- though he might have just had a problem with semantics and valuation of "tiers". Change the terms, change the idea of ranks around, and there's almost a model for how things really work in a virtual world.

I've been involved virtual worlds for over two years now, which is hardly a lifetime, although it seems a lifetime in virtual time. In a broader sense, I've been involved in many organizations in the real world-- clubs, hobby organizations, academic organizations, lodges, professional organizations, recreational groups, church groups, charity groups. Much like the rest of us have. I've seen what seems to keep groups thriving and what does not work as well. As virtual worlds are really just real societies with a computer graphics overlay, as it were, I'm not at all surprised to see that the organizational patterns that tend to succeed in RL also tend to succeed in SL, and the reverse is true as well. People are people, after all, and they interact in similar ways in virtuality as they do in reality.

First of all, one has to make the fundamental assumption that virtual citizens desire to band together into a community in the first place. Many don't. This is not an earth-shaking revelation-- for every community out there, there are exponentially more collections of empty sims, some of the gorgeous builds, that are rarely if ever visited by active citizens in Second Life. Themed communities are more than an organized way of pursuing common values and goals in a setting that is acceptable to a group of individuals. In a mercantile mindset, a themed community is the "hook", the marketing discriminator that makes this collection of sims more attractive to a target group than THAT collection of sims. In a customer mindset, a themed community is the attractor, a chance to mingle with people of like minds and ideas. Not ever sim owner bothers with the trappings of community, for various reasons.

So what makes one work and others not? The answer lies within classic organizational behavior and psychology. Virtual Communities need a simple concept that is easily communicated for marketing purposes, the leadership to execute plans, the tenacity to be a caretaker once the community is launched, and innovation to keep it fresh.

Why a simple concept? Because you need to communicate the value of your idea in terms that are instantly recognizable to potential community members. Terms like "Gorean", "Steampunk", "historical", "adult" work well because people already have preconceived notions of the kind of community they are getting involved with. Terms like "The Watchmaker's Guild", "Ambrosia Palace", or "Stairway of Delight" require some thought and further investigation.

Easy communication walks hand in hand with a simple concept. If you can't describe your community in simple phrases, perhaps you need to reexamine your conceptual tag line. I was attracted to (at one point) the phrase "Caledon: 19th Century Steampunk!". It's short, it works. A community leader also has to easily communicate with his clients once he has them-- that could mean clear channels of communication that everyone agrees on-- a community chat channel, announcements, email lists, even an external forum somewhere on the internet. Blogging and journaling are to be encouraged because that, too, draws in new interest from outside and spreads the word internal to the community.

Leadership seems an obvious feature of success, but seems to be taken for granted constantly by the customers. It takes guts to start a virtual community, and obviously, capital. It is no small step to proceed with a virtual community and take the steps that are needed to succeed. It's hard work, money spent and hours lost; if a sim owner isn't driven to lead in this situation then he or she needs to find someone that can. I know of one community where the owner is seen rarely, but the managers do all the heavy lifting and public decisions for the community-- a system that works swimmingly.

Tenacity and Innovation are both related to the long term care and maintenance of a sim communities. You have to be awfully stubborn to keep your community alive, especially in adverse times. Burnout factor is high when you have a stack of instant messages and emails awaiting you whenever you turn on your computer are is turned on. Innovation keeps the community alive for the residents AND the manager/owners of the community, so the deadly same-old, same-old complex doesn't creep in.

All these thing together create a center of mass for a virtual community that allows it to grow and perpetuate itself. That center of mass cannot be taken for granted; it is not just the land, not just the people, not just the builds.. it's the active participation and collusion of a significant percentage of the population in everyday affairs, both internal and external to community itself.

Most of all, a successful community requires Mules. That's right, Mules. What do I mean by that? Am I being insulting? Not in the slightest. A mule is a noble animal-- patient, strong, a hard worker, and possessing a fine singing voice and a savage hind-kick. In case you haven't noticed, I have finally made it back to the hapless eccentric fellow's notion of classification of citizens. In every organization (and predictably, demonstrably so in a hobby based organization like a virtual world), there really ARE two (possibly three or four) kinds of people critical to success or failure.



MULES: these are people that come up with ideas for events and activities that the community may use to give it a certain character, and not only plan them out, but delight in doing it, to the point of burnout. With a critical mass of mules in position, coordinating away at events and promoting them and crosschecking calendars and managing things, a Sim OWNER's life becomes so much easier. I am blessed to have come from a community that had a significant amount of Mules in Second Life, and I have moved to another.

CONSUMERS: I liked our anonymous commentator's term for this sort of person, but I got the sense that he meant it in a pejorative sense. Good Lord, NOTHING could be farther from the truth. There is absolutely no point in holding events without consumers. The entire object of effort is to get consumers there to 'consume' your events and activities-- they are what gives an event its essential character, and really, they are the gauge of an event's success or failure. Don't disparage those 'consumers' in Tier C, eccentric guy! Love them! Looooove them!

MANAGERS: Those citizens (often owners) that take it upon themselves to conduct the day to day work of the sim. Of course it is in their interests to do so-- but there is much more to it than maintaining infrastructure, booting griefers, and cleaning up primtrash. To quote a very well respected ex-boss of mine, "in business, Presence is EVERYTHING". Managers are seen. Managers are the outward symbol of the community at large, the final authority, the human suggestion box. It's not enough for them to do their job, they have to manage expectations and keep people happy, too. Sometimes they have to deliver unpleasant news. If a manager can't put forth the effort of "being seen", the community will rapidly lose faith in the management. Lose faith in management, you lose faith in the community as a whole. A very cogent lesson, recently underscored by events in Second Life.

To this mix, I might add IDEA GUY.. which is a class of citizen that can be quite imaginative in its own right, but often fails in the follow through. I consider them a subset of MULES, since inevitably it takes a MULE to carry out an IDEA GUY's premise to completion. We have all seen IDEA GUYS come and go.

You'll note that I don't add MAKERS into this mix at all (The eccentric fellow's Tier A), because frankly that is an entire skill set that has VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH WHAT I'm talking about. Sure, we love a clever build or a neat gadget. Virtual worlds are littered with clever builds and neat gadgets. Myself, I love virtual representations of naval vessels in Second Life. I own, literally, dozens of them. I learned early on that owning the ships, clever as they are, is relatively worthless in a vacuum. What am I going to do all day, sail around in water and fire at Linden trees? No, I had to find other people who were interested in the same things I was, and maybe form an organization that fosters this activity (Which I did (twice), and I joined others). I also help the process along by giving ships away as presents (the affordable ones at least). So the clever objects (ships) certainly helped foster a community, but it needs MULES and CONSUMERS to put them to use.

In conclusion, it is no easy task creating the center of mass for a virtual community, no matter what the theme, objectives or goals of that community might be. The task requires an intricate mix of wild talent and boundless enthusiasm, as well as patient, plodding mules. It also requires a mass of people to participate in the effort and spread the word. ALL are important to the mix, not just the managers, not just the mules. That's my two cents, worth what you paid for it.

Hee Haw,

Hotspur