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Monday, 28 July 2008

Here Comes Everybody - Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen

Bob Garfield's de haut en bas attack on web commenters upset two very skilled conversational catalysts, Ira Glass, and Derek Powazek. The false dichotomy of 'we choose who you get to hear' and 'total anarchic mob noise' was dismissed by Jack Lail too. At the same time, Ben Laurie explained how the IETF's open-to-all mailing lists can be hijacked by time-rich fools, talking about the Open Web Foundation.

At Supernova last month, listening to Clay Shirky talk about the problems of collective action reminded me of a small nit I have with his excellent book Here Comes Everybody (which you should all read). He talks about the deep changes that ridiculously easy group forming online has wrought, but he also explains that most of these groups fail, in various ways.

The key to this is finding people who play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community. Clay referred to Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, who is a great example of this, and I have had the privilege to discuss this with Teresa, Amy Muller,Christy Canida and others at the Troll Whispering session at Web2Open, and heard very similar stories from Gina Trapini, Annalee Newitz, Jessamyn West and Jeska Dzwigalski at The Users Are Revolting at SXSW.

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. The big problem with have is that we don't have a English name for this role; they get called 'Moderators' (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or 'Community Managers', and because when they're doing it right you see everyone's conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

In other languages there are words closer to this role - Suw and I thought of geisha a while back, whereas Teresa suggested the Yiddish Tummler - both Deb Schultz and Heather Gold liked that one. In French animateur has the broader connotations of discussion, leadership and guidance needed, but in English we are stuck with enervated latinate words like facilitator. Even an eloquent and charismatic presidential candidatehad a difficult time explaining what a 'Community Organizer' does, around the same time that Bartlett was resorting to card tricks.

Which brings me back to Clay's book - in it he gives an account of the #joiito chatroom that completely misses the rôle that JeannieCool played there, making her sound like a n00b. The software tool, jibot, that has helped keep that conversation going for 5 years, was built to support Jeannie's role as conversational catalyst. I do hope he gets a chance to correct this in the next edition.

The broader issue is one that we are still working on - building rules for who gets to speak where and when, re-imagining the historic model of a single hegemonic public record that print Journalism still aspires to, from its roots in the coffeeshops of London into the many parallel publics we see on the web, and how legal precedents designed for a monopoly of speech make no sense here.

In the meantime, if your newspaper, social media initiative or website isn't working right, you need to find your tummler, geisha, animateur or conversational catalyst, but you should consider giving them a big name title like 'Chief Conversation Officer'.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 18:08
Labels: animateur, Chief Conversation Officer, Christy Canida, Clay Shirky, conversational catalyst, geisha, moderation, Obama, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, Tom Coates, tummler

26 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post! The role is more than a catalyst - it is a curator, connector, hostess - this person needs to connect the dots and connect people to each other - thos who do it well do it seemlessly..

July 28, 2008 7:59 pm
Scott Rosenberg said...

Nice summation of a long thread of Net history. This role was also dubbed "host" on the Well, whose management understood its importance early on. (Derek wrote a whole book on this topic!)

Flickr's founders,
Caterina and Stewart, took on this task in the early days of Flickr. It's so important to *any* attempt to build Web community/conversation that their approach -- don't hire someone to fill the "host" slot, but rather show your first-adopter users that they have a direct relationship with the folks in charge -- may well be the best, in the earliest stages at least, before it scales unmanageably... And of course assuming that your founders are in fact adroit at their hostly roles.

July 28, 2008 9:49 pm
Unknown said...

Great post Kevin.

This is a role women have played for many years, sometimes seen as Salon hosts (like Gertude Stein) most often uncredited.

Ah yes, what to call it?
I've been calling my live version of it interactive comedy, DJing people and interactive performance as well as "theatre as commons." But that's coming from a performance rather than business point of view.

More on how it works here:

http://subvert.com/media/interactive%20performance2.cwk.pdf

In a business context I've also used the phrase Open Source Management

more here (which includes a conversation with Flickr conversatriss George Oates)

http://subvert.com/blog/opensourcemanagement/

"Creating the space" is everything. This is a place where artists and performers have a great deal to teach the business world.

It is an odd mix of being "in charge" but serving the conversation rather than yourself..thus often leading to names and titles that don't sound "important" in traditional business realms. You make an important point here.

For me, I have a lot that comes with doing a "show" or treating a business meeting as one that helps escape this issue a bit.

The people who wish the be at "the top" of an organization need to reorient themselves to the centre of a conversation they need to serve. Scott makes a solid point about Stewart and Caterina's priorities making all the difference.

July 29, 2008 1:36 am
Unknown said...

What about "salonnière" from the 16th century intellectual French Salons?

Very much the same role and it is not as dry and lifeless as moderator and facilitator.

July 29, 2008 6:00 am
Anonymous said...

A community 'owned' by a charismatic leader can also thrive, for example the Whitechapel forum of Warren Ellis.

He's not really a moderator, but it seems that everyone respects the space out of fear of displeasing him.

July 30, 2008 10:03 am
Phil Whitehouse said...

We've been trying to come up with a suitable title for this role at Osmosoft, where the project we're working with is open source. Obviously 'Manager' isn't appropriate in this context. In the end we settled for 'Community Advocate', partly because it's an inward facing role (where we help other people in BT understand how the community dynamics works). But it's not perfect!

July 30, 2008 11:36 am
Jack O'Sullivan said...

Great post. the role is more that a catalyst.....I love that comment by debs as well. she gets it.

Jack O'Sullivan
Bedroom Furniture Sets
Men's Dress Shoes

April 08, 2009 11:08 pm
Unknown said...

I love this Kevin..why do you think I call myself a " Cloud Hostess " ? It is about creating a beautiful environment, inviting the right people to create a dialogue and then supporting the conversation in a safe way. I was raised to be a corporate wife with the skills to enable a partner amd myself to build relationships for business and social. I see this now happening in a digital salon and it is very exciting and should be even more so to advertisers who can track and interact their brand in a more interactive and emotional way.

May 05, 2009 11:48 am
Unknown said...

Excellent post. It is telling that there isn't a good English word for this role. I like Simon Cast's salonniere suggestion, but I wish even more that there was a human manifestation of the native talking stick
http://tinyurl.com/99y5rl because of the universal understanding of the sacredness of listening and advancing the conversation for all to benefit.

May 22, 2009 3:01 pm
jay said...

Anyone else remember the early days of AOL, when Steve Case coaxed the conversation along every evening? By the way, the book Digital Habitats (Nancy White, John Smith, Etienne Wenger) describes a similar role but adds tech facilitation and other things to the job description.

February 01, 2010 6:15 pm
Tony Comstock said...

Guru, Evangelist, Wizard, Master; these words offer some clues?

December 04, 2010 9:51 am
Karl Long said...

Great post, this is an important role in community and I think about building culture and what you describe here is someone who can help shape that culture. I think many cultures fail when the mechanics that shape the community outweigh the cultural stewards. I wrote a bit more about this here:
http://experiencecurve.com/archives/community-leadership

December 04, 2010 4:48 pm
e-Patient Dave said...

Coming much later to this party, courtesy of @Gumption, who linked it on e-patients.net. I've been LOOKING for this kind of discussion - can't believe it's taken 5 years to find it!

February 12, 2013 2:17 pm
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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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