The Art of Hosting Good Online Conversations

What online host wishes to achieve:

• provide a place of civil discourse for all people
• authentic conversation
• group creativity, experimentation, exploration, and good will
• shared commitment to achieve better communication
• a system where people figure out where the conversation is going, and settle conflicts on their own
• everyone builds social capital individually by improving each other's knowledge capital collaboratively.

Good online discussions:

• enables all to entertain themselves and not be passive consumers
• enables people to create a gift economy for knowledge sharing
• ongoing collaboration
• allows people to get to know each other beyond usual mask
• makes newcomers feel welcomed, contributors valued, hasslers ignored

A host is:

• inviting of interesting people, make introductions, start conversations, encourage people to be themselves and ultimately share their ideas
• an authority, enforces rules
• a model, emulate what they want others to be like:
• a cybrarian, assisting new members, providing relative links, hunting down resources, adding to the collective pool of knowledge

What a host does, what a host tries to grow:

• communities must be gardened, correct tools and conditions
• positive effort required
• clear rules, sparsely enforced, expectation of community, the norm will emerge later; those who don't like it will leave
• rules establish the crowd/audience, early crowd affects later arrivals
• making/changing rules later is a mistake
• rules must be few and simple, based on ordinary human respect and courtesy
• within months, community will want to make own rules
• natural hosts emerge in each community, existing hosts should mentor them
• communities can learn to create their own rules and social contract and choose their own form of governance, based on widely agreed, explicitly described, simple statements of purpose and principle, however, it won't be easy

Host behavior:

• both civility and nastiness are contagious
• patience, delay any emotional responses before making any public post
• be cautious about learning through trial and error, build trust at the beginning
• Have fun! its okay to experiment and not be all serious
• hosts present authority, be ready to be challenged
• Force will backfire, one must persuade and pull, not push
• conflict tests the boundaries of the community
• don't freeze a topic to make a point
• hosts get to know people from the start- introduce yourself, let people know you, be good natured but not characterless, egoless or colorless
• welcome new people, encourage old timers to welcome newcomers
• people's first reactions are important
• names have power, praise newcomers, it will amplify their behavior forever
• communicate via email- newcomers and troublemakers
• discourage snitching
• encourage people to talk among themselves
• hosts catalyze, facilitate, nurture- get outta the way
• let the community co-create
• revive old topics from time to time; retire old and obsolete topics, when in doubt, ask the community
• pose questions for the group to answer
• act as fair witness, point people to the classics of Netiquette (internet etiquette)

Original Article: http://www.rheingold.com/texts/artonlinehost.html