![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jjhunter posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetreeHello all! I’m J.J., the founder of poetree and one of our two current admins. Today I’m going to give a brief overview of POETREE’s history, and then open up the conversation in regards to a topic of importance to both this community and any online community seeking to increase participation.
In a post earlier this week, Plunge magazine founderailelie mentioned the importance of defining any idea, or really any organization, in three to five words. Six months in, I define POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’. The community was originally envisioned as a supplement to the higher volume poetry, another Dreamwidth community that specializes in published poetry not the poster’s own, but quickly began to morph into something more interesting than that: a place where poets amateur and professional and poetry enthusiasts could share and discuss poems and poetry culture. Rather than being just another poetry mailing list, POETREE could take advantage of its host platform to facilitate conversation and and build up an archive of resources available free to anyone interested.
That dream is very much a work in progress, and the journey to realizing it has been alternatively humbling and exhilarating. For the first six months, I focused primarily on recruiting people to write content, and assumed that the audience for that content would materialize over time. The community has certainly grown a great deal -- we’re now at triple the number of members and subscribers that we had in December -- but the amount of discussion going on in the comments has been much more variable. This in turn makes it more difficult for the Hosts to gauge how many people are reading their posts, and (I worry) makes it less rewarding than it might otherwise be for people to Host in the first place.
This is not a guilt manifesto, but rather a place to begin. Earlier I defined POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’; it’s worth asking ourselves, what makes us a community? Is participation a requirement for being part of the community? Where does that leave the lurkers, those who might be reading avidly but by preference or default tend not to comment on posts or have time to Host? In the recent anonymous feedback poll, over half of the respondents identified themselves as default lurkers; over a third wished for more participation in the comments, and a clear majority felt like they should comment but don’t know what to say or feel like they don’t have anything meaningful to contribute, with those marking time as an issue just under a majority. There must overlap between all of these groups, given the numbers and the option for poll takers to mark more than box per question, but I still find that clear majority for the default lurkers very telling.
There are structural things my co-adminalee_grrl and I can do to do a better job of facilitating conversation: encouraging Hosts to include concluding questions for discussion on every post; modeling commenting by commenting more frequently ourselves and making a point of introducing new points for discussion; providing alternate ways for people to participate besides commenting, such as kudos polls; and so on. We’ve already begun implementing some of that, and tomorrow will see two new weekly features that we think will help further in terms of building community and increasing participation.
I also wonder whether it’s time to introduce a minor cultural shift: what about the kudos comment? By ‘kudos’, I mean both kudos in terms of the AO3 fannish practice and kudos in terms of ‘+1’, ‘I like this’, ‘Amen’, ‘<3’ and so on. When you don’t have the time to leave a detailed comment or you feel like you don’t have the spoons to think of something profound, there is still room betweenthe heartbreaking work of staggering genius comment a multi-line comment and not leaving any indication of the fact that you read a particular post & thought it was worth the read. I’m not advocating replacing more detailed comments with kudos comments, but rather writing kudos comments instead of writing nothing at all. Commenting is ultimately a habit, and the practice usually starts small.
Some further resources about feedback from a different context.
==
What do you think? If you left the occasional ‘kudos’ comment, what format would it take? Do you have ideas beyond those already mentioned? What would you like to see in the comments?
poetree and one of our two current admins. Today I’m going to give a brief overview of POETREE’s history, and then open up the conversation in regards to a topic of importance to both this community and any online community seeking to increase participation.In a post earlier this week, Plunge magazine founder
ailelie mentioned the importance of defining any idea, or really any organization, in three to five words. Six months in, I define POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’. The community was originally envisioned as a supplement to the higher volume poetry, another Dreamwidth community that specializes in published poetry not the poster’s own, but quickly began to morph into something more interesting than that: a place where poets amateur and professional and poetry enthusiasts could share and discuss poems and poetry culture. Rather than being just another poetry mailing list, POETREE could take advantage of its host platform to facilitate conversation and and build up an archive of resources available free to anyone interested.That dream is very much a work in progress, and the journey to realizing it has been alternatively humbling and exhilarating. For the first six months, I focused primarily on recruiting people to write content, and assumed that the audience for that content would materialize over time. The community has certainly grown a great deal -- we’re now at triple the number of members and subscribers that we had in December -- but the amount of discussion going on in the comments has been much more variable. This in turn makes it more difficult for the Hosts to gauge how many people are reading their posts, and (I worry) makes it less rewarding than it might otherwise be for people to Host in the first place.
This is not a guilt manifesto, but rather a place to begin. Earlier I defined POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’; it’s worth asking ourselves, what makes us a community? Is participation a requirement for being part of the community? Where does that leave the lurkers, those who might be reading avidly but by preference or default tend not to comment on posts or have time to Host? In the recent anonymous feedback poll, over half of the respondents identified themselves as default lurkers; over a third wished for more participation in the comments, and a clear majority felt like they should comment but don’t know what to say or feel like they don’t have anything meaningful to contribute, with those marking time as an issue just under a majority. There must overlap between all of these groups, given the numbers and the option for poll takers to mark more than box per question, but I still find that clear majority for the default lurkers very telling.
There are structural things my co-admin
alee_grrl and I can do to do a better job of facilitating conversation: encouraging Hosts to include concluding questions for discussion on every post; modeling commenting by commenting more frequently ourselves and making a point of introducing new points for discussion; providing alternate ways for people to participate besides commenting, such as kudos polls; and so on. We’ve already begun implementing some of that, and tomorrow will see two new weekly features that we think will help further in terms of building community and increasing participation.I also wonder whether it’s time to introduce a minor cultural shift: what about the kudos comment? By ‘kudos’, I mean both kudos in terms of the AO3 fannish practice and kudos in terms of ‘+1’, ‘I like this’, ‘Amen’, ‘<3’ and so on. When you don’t have the time to leave a detailed comment or you feel like you don’t have the spoons to think of something profound, there is still room between
Some further resources about feedback from a different context.
==
What do you think? If you left the occasional ‘kudos’ comment, what format would it take? Do you have ideas beyond those already mentioned? What would you like to see in the comments?
