What Should The Behaviour Be?

Last week, I wrote a guest post for Patrick O'Keefe's terrific blog. It explained how to shape the behaviour of members in a community. 

It didn’t cover what the behaviour should be.

Too often, we begin writing rules with a pre-determined idea of what the behaviour in the community should be. Instead we should look to see what behaviour members want in a community and where that behavior is conducive to a successful community. 

For example, should members be allowed to talk about their pets? Communities for teenagers might be fine with it, but communities for accounting professionals might be less keen. However, accounting professions might be happier to discuss anything career-related whereas a community of parents might not.

Yet, members might want to talk about issues which are not great for community building. They're either too dull or are likely to result in ongoing fights (e.g. reviewing/critiquing each other's work). Your role is to understand this and stop it. 

Creating the behaviour for a community is much less about the act of writing out your expectations of members and far more about determining what behaviour is acceptable by community members and influencing members to undertake that behaviour (whilst avoiding the real bad behaviour). 

Comments

[Jacko]

The best way to shape the behavior of any community is by setting an example that members willingly follow.

Lead from the front.

The problem is this takes time.

So, people try to rush the process with RULES and REGULATIONS and PROCEDURES, you know like the elected officials do to the citizens.

The result is a community that reacts like the movie office space.

They learn to do just enough to get a little credit and not get in trouble.

[Patrick O'Keefe]

Thanks for the kind words. Glad to have you. :)

Patrick

[Tommy T]

When starting my community I wasn't too sure what the rules should be. I wanted a clean & friendly community.. ie: no perverts or abuse

But I also wanted a creative & fun community.. ie: people free to joke, banter, wind up, tongue in cheek naughty comments.

So instead of writing the rules myself, I just asked my 6 founding members to write a set of rules each and send them me.

The rules that came up the most in their submissions became the site's guidelines and it was stressed that banter, jokes, off-handed jovial mocking etc was fine.

It's too early to say whether it worked or had any impact yet - inception stage.

But my members certainly appreciated how important their input was regarding the behaviour of the community.

Now that I know what behaviour my members are more geared towards, it makes it a lot easier for me to 'nudge' topics and posts in that direction.

One thing I can't stand in online communities, is when people are having fun, enjoying themselves, then someone comes along and starts going on and on and on about how depressing and crap their life is.

"Yes mate, we live under the same government, all our lives are crap - but we're here to forget the real world and have a bit of fun !!"