Should all Communities be Gated?

Should all Communities be Gated?

Should some members be Culled?

This is the first of three posts that covers a controversial, but I believe absolutely necessary responsibility of any community leader: be clear about why and who you accept-reject-eject. And act on it with resolution.

The last thing you think about when you start an online or offline community is turning people away and throwing people out. You’re in an expansive mode. You want to recruit, recruit, recruit! Everyone’s welcome. Please join…and stay!
But within a few months almost every organizer realizes that gating and culling is a necessary, albeit unpleasant part of the job.

It’s one of the first things that Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr and Hunch) mentioned when I asked her what characterized high-functioning communities. They need rules of behavior, and they need oversight:

“They [a socially toxic member] can actually destroy a community. For example, I belonged to a flourishing book club, and everybody was very engaged and enjoyed the group. It was a great book group.

And at one point, somebody had invited a friend of theirs to join, and this person became this sort of obnoxious know-it-all. He started jumping in when other people were talking and correcting them and basically just being very offensive.

And within two meetings, the book club, which had flourished for two years previously, within two meetings of the introduction of this guy, who nobody stepped forward to get rid of – completely disbanded.
It was tragic because nobody had the cojones to say, “Thank you. Please don’t come again.”

You need to be the watchdog, the guardian, the den mother. For the sake of the rest of the community, you have to be cruel to be kind (actually, you don’t have to be cruel, but we’ll cover that later.)

So, should every community demand a sort of 'contract' for entry: 'you can join if you commit to our purpose, our values and you promise to contribute'?
Should every community have an 'airlock', where new members have to prove their value? Sort of a probation period during which new recruits prove that they’re not disruptive?

I’ve found that this is (not surprisingly) a contentious subject. But it’s one that has inevitably arisen in my conversations with community organizers:
“And it’s difficult, but that’s the reality of being a community leader. It’s not just the fun of bringing people together. You have to be the HR manager and be prepared to correct, scold or fire people.” (Julia: Meetup Organizer).

So,

Why should you do this?

Who should you reject and eject?

What specific behavior demands correction?

How do you do it?


Why should you do this?

Because it goes to the very heart of what a community is and how it functions.

Beyond a collection of people who hold things in common (the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘community’), people join communities to share and fight for beliefs, to further a cause, or to fight for rights. They join because they need support to face a crisis. Or to learn how to become an entrepreneur. They join to pursue a hobby, find a passion or find more friends. They join to belong and believe and find meaning.

All of this demands fellow members that have the same needs, the same hopes, passions, beliefs and interests and values. Members of strong communities share an identity. Without alignment with each other on these such of basic criteria, the community will lack integrity.

People won’t join and they won’t stay if its purpose and values are not clearly defined, and if its membership doesn’t live them. If a diffuse membership compromises the goals or values of the group, then why join or stay?

Community Boundaries

In other words, boundaries need to be drawn. Who belongs and who doesn’t’ needs to be clear. Behavior that is consistent with achieving the goals of the group needs to be declared and rewarded, as should behavior that’s contrary be outlawed.

The second key reason why there should be discrimination about membership and its behavior is that the wrong kind of member and the wrong kind of behavior can badly affect the day to day functioning of the community. They can suck time, upset people, betray trust and generally be a drag on the community’s progress.

At the end of the day there are right members and wrong members. These posts will focus on identifying the latter and proposes some ideas about how to deal with them.

In the next two posts on this subject we’ll cover:

Who should you reject and eject?

What do they do that’s so bad?

How do you do it?