Laura’s Winning Ideas

This is a letter to Suzanne, and the entire listserve of Herdomain, one of the oldest listserves in existence. The list suffered tribulations during the presidential election campaigns of 2004, and members were dismayed and considering options for moderating the list, or spliting the community into several lists. My goal was to help them see this as a natural part of our community and accept the bothersome posts just as we all accept that strange cousin at Thanksgiving who no one understands. Examples of client work are often too revealing for publication, so this example is safe ground to demonstrate the principles I use.

Dear Suzanne,

You may now appreciate the synergies necessary to create and sustain a listserv such as Herdomain over these many years.

IMHO, the trick is engagement. How do you find topics that engage the members to join the conversation and/or read the posts?

In the beginning, Herdomain was very much an underground place to get technical help without exposing yourself to the ridicule of the technical establishment. That was a different time. Technical changes were happening rapidly, and the establishment was intimidated by the possibility that they were losing their edge to newcomers. Women needed a safe place to get technical coaching.

Today, Herdomain occassionally rescues an emerging technologist, and more usually exchanges tidbits and aids between the more expert and the amateur. The exchanges today vary from the mundane (Vet recommendation needed) to small business help (contract advice needed) to work postings (Need work, graphic artist needed) to inspirational (I still have a copy of Gillespie Girls Christmas Cheesecake Recipe here).

Engagement is accomplished by conversations that get and keep some portion of the list posting, with the rest hopefully interested enough to read the posts.

The POL: discussion underway is a nuisance, and of a type that recurrs every few years. I think of it as an initiation ritual. Newcomers go through the cycle of learning the boundaries of free speech do not extend to trampling others rights. The oldtimers just wait out the storm, knowing that we learned the lesson ourselves on some other issue earlier.

Judith Weiss was a primary poster in a diatribe against folks posting pet information on Herdomain. It annoyed her to have to read PET posts and she played the same role in that storm that some of the folks are now playing in complaining about Judith’s POL posts. Judith, I hope you can smile at the similarity between events.

I’m on several listservs, and manage two other listservs. The two I manage, I started in hopes of emulating Herdomain. For one, I thought I might be able to get engagement by posting items I thought might get others engaged to contribute, but it only resulted in my getting thank you notes for my postings. That list is just a bulletin board today. For the other list, members met in person a couple of times, but the listserv never attracted many posts, and I grew tired of trying to seed discussion by finding things to talk about.

One list I watch (these are all hobby sociology experiments for me) is moderated (obstensibly to prevent the kind of storm we are now suffering on POL posts, but I suspect more to preserve a pristine environment for advertisers). The idea was a good one, but the moderators employ their own agenda. Posts from “unapproved” members are never posted, and they seem to be testing the percentage of advertorial they can post before folks abandon the list. I only read their digests occassionally to take the temperature and note the migration from information to pap.

One list with engagement is actually a newsletter. The May Report is written primarily by one gadfly to the technology industry in Chicago and read and engaged in by thousands of readers. Ron May includes queries, objections, clarifications and gossip from the readers who are definitely engaged in the newsletter and the conversation. They vere off into Ron’s healthcare issues, Chicago cultural issues, and lots of gossipy conjecture, as well as who is doing what to whom in the industry.

We have a pretty good community here. I hope we get through this together!

Good luck!
Laura Ricci