Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind.  Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building.  This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.

The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community.  In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t.  (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)

The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct.  I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not completely convinced that I’m actually doing that much in the way of direct building.  A big part of this has been good timing combined with grabbing onto something big and powerful and hanging on (ala Jim Butcher’s career in its earlier stages, or the preexisting Fudge community when we started running our yaps about Fate).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little.  Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.

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