Lessons learned

You don’t organise online live Twitter discussions almost every month for ten years without learning something about how to run a small group of volunteers effectively.  Since practical know-how and experience are hard won and often harder still to come by, everyone on the uklibchat organising committee decided to share our learning and understanding of leading and managing community spaces.

This article brings together all that we learned over the years about setting up and managing a community space and facilitating online collaboration, made as practical, generalisable and transferrable as possible for the benefit of anyone thinking about making a splash in this broad arena. As post author, I have tried to generalise the advice as much as possible and focus on the human side of organisational and community management that is comparatively slow to change, in the hope that the advice we offer here will remain useful long after the technologies that mediate human relations have changed beyond all recognition.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

Nicholas Bentley

Conceptualisation and strategy

• Be very clear about what it is you are setting out to do, what value it brings and to which audience.  All other activity flows from this clarity or lack of it.  
• Capture the essence of what you are about in a concise mission statement.  Recent research suggests effective mission statements should be less than 35 words long to help ensure they are focused and don’t drift into describing a vision.  Less is more.  Be clear and precise.  Spend the time at this inaugural moment and get this right because it is the shared values and purpose that attracts volunteers, bonds a team together and ‘makes the magic happen’.
• Expand on your mission and demonstrate your values clearly in a short vision statement – what you want your organisation to look like and why everyone is going to love it when it is all grown up.  The important words here are short and clear. 

Understanding clearly what impact you want to have is the first step in achieving it.

Organisation

• Remain focused on your core activities – what you can always ensure you are able to do each month.  Better to reliably deliver with a known, if modest, offering, than to promise the world and deliver different bits of it at different times.
• Make clear all roles, responsibilities, and (if your group is truly huge) lines of reporting.  This is fundamental to accountability and ensuring everyone knows what is expected of them.  
• Role clarity is a vital hygiene factor that reduces stress caused by role ambiguity.  People do more and feel better about it when they know precisely what they need to do, when and with what support.  This is achieved by induction, socialisation, clear pragmatic documentation, and a culture of accountability (e.g.shared record keeping).
• Include overviews of project life cycles (what needs to be done and by when/how far in advance of the live event) for all cyclical events, linking to shared recording spreadsheets in your documentation.
• Make clear how to ask for help and encourage everyone to voice concerns and to ask for help early!
• Make your expectations clear, including that all members have a duty of self-care and should always feel able to step back, take time out and ask for help, including asking others to take over tasks, as necessary.  
• Empathy, compassion, self-compassion and collective assertiveness are always necessary to keep everyone safe and well are essential to the sustainable functioning of any group.  Always keep these in the forefront of your mind.
• Stay in touch informally, meet as and when required – this is often better than fixed meeting schedules because it allows meetings to be arranged for when they are needed and the info for them is available, although semi-regular meetings may still be needed to agree on future schedules, rotas, etc. 
• Plan your topics far ahead.  They come around fast.  Also, feature article writers, guest speakers and special events require many more weeks/months for planning than you might expect, and you should always expect the unexpected.
• Always have a fallback in case your best-laid plans fall through, particularly if you are working with others.
• Remain transparent in all your dealings.  If you decide it is necessary to censor or cancel something, agree among yourselves, then publish your decision and give your reasons.  For example, if a question for a uklibchat was deemed inappropriate, we would move it to the end of the respective agenda document, mark it as deemed inappropriate for discussion and outline the reason(s) why.  It was not discussed but anyone could see why it was not raised.  
• If a decision was hotly debated and won by a majority rather than being a unanimous decision, make this clear and outline the major arguments of both sides and what tipped the balance in favour of the decision taken.  
• We would ordinarily reproduce the offending content alongside the reasoning for not including it in a discussion for context but only if the offending material did not threaten anyone’s safety or dignity.  People respect the bravery of such complete honesty, perhaps because it is so rarely seen.

Artist’s representation of a team meeting – most meetings feel like this but are actually held online with all the members hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

Building a team

• You cannot have too many volunteers.  While everyone needs to do things regularly in order to keep their functional memory of how things work fresh, good documentation that describes stepwise how to do everything can guide the most clueless volunteer through the processes required each month – and such documentation is mandatory and must be kept completely up to date.  What you cannot afford is to not have anyone available to step up in a particular month.  
• Volunteers are rare.  Treasure them and look after them. Accept that they are likely to disappear for periods with mental ill health or other life difficulties.  Keep in touch and make them feel valued and missed but let them come back in their own good time.  Pressing them for work before they are ready to give may well drive them to resigning just to escape the pressure.
• On-boarding new members is like taking on a new employee.  They need induction, socialisation, to shadow existing members, coaching, supervision and support.  
• Redundancy is life – Build in slack, establish redundancy, and never assume that because you have not checked in on folk that everything is going to plan.  Always have a backup chair, speaker, etc. and (in the nicest possible way), hold everyone accountable to the rest of the committee – if folk have stopped coping, the rest of the group need to know asap so they can step in or alter plans.  People are fallible and prone to illness, disaster, etc.
• Bureaucratic efficiency is vital – keep rolling schedules of when people are available, when they are doing things, what external people/organisations are to be involved, and to have standard checklists of actions that get ticked off by certain deadlines prior to an event.  All docs should be evidence-based (i.e. informed by exp.) and shared with the whole group – this is vital for accountability and letting others step in and take over, as necessary.
• Collaboration is king – wider audience and networking across organisations; synergies abound, and it is often inspiring to hear from energised people leading their fields.

No team was ever built like this. Creating a tightknit community of purpose requires vision, effort, sensitivity, compassion and creativity.

Creating a stir around events

• Give yourself more time than you think you need.
• Advertise heavily in advance.
• Advertise the next event at the end of the previous one.  
• Promote the event and include a link to further details in the bio of your Twitter/Instagram feed.  Pinned posts also work well to spread the word on many platforms.
• Advertise widely – cross-posting (with appropriate apologies) to selected JiscMail accounts is often surprisingly successful at raising awareness within library circles.
• Schedule your promotional social media posts in advance.  
• Give your audience more time and more reminders than they could reasonably want to ensure they remember where to turn up, when, and why.
• Maintain a consistent schedule so that it is harder for people to forget or confuse the time.  Remember that this is a double-edged sword because not everyone will be able to make the particular time you choose.  For online events, this is a perennial compromise.

As people become busier, competing for their finite attention, energy and memory gets ever harder.

Tips for running a great discussion forum or event

• You do you.  Different forums have different normative values, expectations, cultures and memberships.  Keep things informal but be clear about what the group is about and what is expected of attendees.  
• Topics chosen need to seize the zeitgeist and energise debate long ahead of the event. There is little point in discussing something of importance if no one holds an informed opinion on it and is hoping for others to tell them what is happening or what to think.  
• Few people have time to engage in extensive pre-reading – in my experience, even academics sometimes arrive at discussion forums unprepared!- so while supplying links to interesting short blog posts and lay articles to seed discussions leading up to the chat is useful, choosing a topic where people have things to share from experience or which divide opinion are usually more fruitful.
• Experts are golden. Invite them in to share their wisdom, comment, share resources and contribute.  Just don’t expect them all to be vocal.  Some experts are introverted and turn into retreating wallflowers on finding themselves in a busy discussion forum.
• Have a method that enforces structure but is flexible enough for cross-question/transtheoretical answers because these are often the most useful.
• Expect discussions to start slowly and gather momentum.
• Embrace the chaos as people reflect on earlier topics.
• The facilitator/group account should be used only for facilitation and remain completely neutral in discussions.  
• If the facilitator has something to add to the discussion, that’s fine but they should add it using their own personal account, as just another participant, without lending their views the authority of the facilitator account and threatening to compromise its perceived neutrality.
• Be compassionate but assertive as a facilitator, and maintain clear boundaries.  If someone is upset by something that takes place inside your mediated forum, act on it.  If a fight has clearly been taken outside, advise that this is outside your held space and that the offended party should report the alleged abuse directly to the platform provider.  

There are many good reasons that most people in any online community are lurkers rather than active contributors, such as that the live discussion is habitually scheduled during dinner.

Advice for when discussions go sour

Inevitably some discussions are going to go sour.  The disinhibiting effect of a remote digital interface, particularly when someone cannot see live footage of the other people means that sooner or later, wherever people come together online there will be disagreements, anger, frustration and all manner of hostilities.  Swift and effective action from the facilitator is necessary at this point.

If possible, moderate questions to avoid unnecessarily offensive or off-topic questions making it into the open.  That just leaves herding cats, sidelining violence, stimulating conversation, contributing from a personal account so that the forum account can remain a neutral facilitator.   

If the group intends to be a permanent one that grows together, clear procedures for mediation, reconciliation and restorative justice.  If the discussion group is expected to change over time, feel free to warn and then exclude or silence anyone who is persistently disruptive but ensure you have a transparent and fair appeal system if you do this and try to avoid permanent bans wherever possible because everyone has the capacity to change eventually.

Like a public swimming pool, in any online community there will inevitably be moments when it feels like most of the noise is coming from the shallow end.

uklibchat conflict handling policies

The policy that was drawn up for uklibchat chairs included the following:

In case of friction between attendees

Don’t feed the fire.  Steer the discussion away from friction point as naturally and calmly as possible. Report the incident and the usernames of those involved to your colleagues and seek support.  

In case of personal attacks

Do not tolerate personal attacks or threats: warn offenders once and then report to the platform provider using their reporting mechanism.  Report serious offences immediately and make it clear to the group you have done so and why.

In case of criticism of questions or discussion topics

Stay detached and professional but assertive – remember you are not your works.

If questions/topics are generated by the community, state this and make your organisational values clear, for example, tell them if you hold that all questions have equal value.

In case of controversial questions

Feel free to preface controversial questions with a gentle lead-in warning to prepare people, such as “This next question may stimulate quite a bit of a debate.”  If necessary, provide sufficient context before introducing the question/topic.

In case of emotive, irrelevant or borderline inappropriate questions/topic suggestions

Rephrase anything emotive in a more neutral style.  Discuss and agree with colleagues whether something is appropriate or not, and whether it requires contextualisation before it can be safely introduced into a discussion.  Make it clear what content was censored and your reasons why.  Make your decision-making process transparent.

It is beyond the scope of any online community facilitator to avoid all conflicts – aim instead to mitigate their impact.

Presenting your archives

If you can capture the fruits of your labours and archive them online in an attractive and accessible format, it will help those who cannot attend live events to catch up, serves to promote the activity of your organisation, and may even be of interest to social historians in years to come!  Archiving content to a storage solution with a blog front end worked well for uklibchat.  Changing technologies are likely to present new tools and choices.  Compare solutions carefully and opt for a platform that is affordable (free is best), offers all the features you consider to be essential, and (importantly) is well supported.

People will want to be able to sift through past agendas, articles, event reports, annotated transcripts, and all the other content types you have brought together by topic, type, and by searching for specific keywords.  Consistent use of post categories, perhaps assisted by the use of recurring visual motifs that allow different post types to be recognised at a glance, extensive but authentic tagging/indexing and a powerful site search engine are therefore all important to help people looking for different types of information find what they need quickly, reliably and without frustration.

The published record of ephemeral events demonstrates that they happened, shares insights and resources more widely, and ensures that everyone who could not attend may benefit.

Over to you

Well, that’s the concept-to-archiving whistle-stop tour of what we found worked well.  I hope that all those embarking on the exciting adventure of organising collaborations, discussion forums, and other community spaces will find the following useful.  Everything changes all the time, and nothing moves faster than the technologies mediating human interaction, but I trust that the general principles of organisation and group management will remain useful and relevant for some time at least.  

Please feel free to add your own tips or links to guidance you believe to be particularly useful in the comments below.  

All the best,

David and the rest of the uklibchat team

About philoslibris

Chartered librarian, #uklibchat committee member and Web Officer for library accessibility consortium CLAUD. Interests include tabletop gaming, martial arts, graphic design, reason, humanistic philosophy, creative and critical thinking, evidence-based practice, lgbtq+ rights, accessibility, diversity, equality and inclusion, and finding simple ways to improve everyone's experience of life.

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