Social engineering, Web-style

How do online communities work? One veteran -- Salon's Cliff Figallo -- writes a book with some answers.

By Mary Eisenhart

Oct 19, 1998 | People love using computers to socialize; that's been evident since the days of the Commodore 64 BBS two decades ago. The lure of what's now going by the name of online community -- whether to discuss a common interest, sling scurrilous insults or battle aliens -- has long been sufficiently compelling that people would brave downright hostile technology for the pleasure of hanging out with each other.

Few have spent as much time in the trenches of community, online and off, as Cliff Figallo, Salon's director of community development and author of the new "Hosting Web Communities." After spending the early '70s living on the Farm, a Tennessee commune, he worked for two years directing nutrition and potable water projects in Guatemalan villages. The resulting experience came in handy in the mid-'80s when he helped set up the Well, a particularly active and long-lived online community, and served as its director.

After six years in that hot seat, Figallo helped develop AOL's first Web chat interface, Virtual Places, then co-designed and managed online discussion for IBM's Deep Blue vs. Kasparov chess event.

Drawn from this experience and providing a wealth of real-life examples, Figallo's book offers useful guidance for managing the human side of the online experience. Acknowledging that the word "community" is impossibly overbroad, ranging from "barn-raising Amish" to "identifiable demographic at which ads can be pitched," Figallo stresses the importance of matching the setup to the needs of the people a site is trying to serve -- whether the ultimate goal is selling product, tending online bar or running the best darn Elvis shrine this side of Graceland.

As Figallo has learned over the last couple of decades, this is easier said than done. We talked recently about the joys and sorrows of technology's human side -- and some survival tips for the innkeepers of cyberspace.

Some people say online communities go through similar phases as the Wild West, in terms of a civilization process: You start with the hardy pioneers, and then along come the missionaries and merchants and teachers, and pretty soon you've got cities and towns. You've been involved in online community well over a decade -- have you seen this sort of change?

I'll tell you, I see the same dynamics today in 1998 in a group interaction in a Table Talk discussion that I was seeing on the Well in its first years. There are always going to be people who see themselves as pioneers, and who are leaders. There are always going to be people who feel at the mercy of the veterans -- "we're the newbies, we're just learning." There are the people who are self-styled authorities. And other people who are friendly and just want to arrive in these communities and make friends and have productive conversations.

I see the same sorts of dynamics of people identifying who they agree with, who they don't agree with, who they like, who they don't like, and then sort of freezing into those conflicts. Those conflicts become the tension within the community that is always there. After just reading the discussions for a couple hours, you can tell who hates who, who likes who, who will probably never agree about anything.

Having seen you dealing with the fallout of some of these conflicts for some time, I'd think you'd be well within your rights to be pretty burned out on online community. What keeps you coming back?

Well, I have taken a couple of breaks -- I was in the midst of taking a break from managing community when I wrote this book.

The book was a seven-month writing project, and at the end of the fifth month, I took this position here at Salon to manage Table Talk. As soon as I dropped back into the role of managing an online community, I had to reconsider everything I had written in the previous months, because I'd started to view it through sort of an idealist matrix, and write about all of the best possible scenarios. And when I got back online I realized, once again, that it's not typical to have the best possible scenarios.

If you're managing a community where you allow people to be themselves, explore and be creative, there are a lot of things that you really cannot control. You want people to be creative; you want the creative people to stick around, because they are really the core of these online communities. They create the discussions -- the conflicts are interesting.

People love train wrecks.

And people love to watch other people behave. Human behavior is so predictable and unpredictable at the same time that it really is entertaining.

Next Page: Striking a balance between the bullies and the bland

• View blog reactions