You'll have to explain how your community works again and again and again…

(this post is adapted from the book Building an Open Community, chapter From Many to Massive.)

People tend to apply organizational patterns they have seen working before.

That’s why they will first try to find the hierarchy and the leaders in your community using a traditional approach.

For Museomix, we work with museums. They are organized as traditional organizations, and in France they are also used to a very centralized national integration, including a top-down chain of command.

Most of us have no position at all in this chain of commands. We are outsiders. The rest of us is mostly at the middle or at the bottom of the pyramid.

So when we organize Museomix, it sometimes leads to cultural gaps like this exchange reported by Samuel Bausson:

The lady (curator) ask me for a #museomix contact at the “national level” or at “the ministry” (I’m quoting) #howtosayit ^source

What happens here is that a high placed museum curator is asking Samuel, one of the core founder of Museomix for… his boss, in essence. But there is no boss on top of Samuel, at least for everything that concerns Museomix.

But of course that doesn’t mean he is the boss either. Confusing, isn’t it?

That’s why you have to explain how your community work. Go and talk in conferences. Talk to people. Write a blog post – “How your-community-name works” is a good start for the title ;-)

Never assume that people understand how your community is organized. Most of the time, from outside, they will see your community as a traditional organization.

Relentlessly building (cultural) bridges

Adrienne Alix is a Wikimédia France team member, and she goes everywhere to talk about how Wikipedia works.

As far as I know, she never refuses an invitation to talk about Wikimedia and Wikipedia projects. She focuses her work on cultural and knowledge oriented institutions, because they are seen as an under-exploited source for new contributors.

Each time, she has to tell people the basics. For example that yes, everybody can edit, and that yes, contributors are volunteers. And of course, that no, Wikimédia France or the Wikimedia Foundation have no special rights in term of editing, that they are not the editor-in-chief of Wikipedia.

Believe it or not, even today, many people in academia, including social science, have no idea of the basic working principles of Wikipedia.

If members of the most well known open community in the world, Wikipedia, have to explain how their community work, be prepared to do it for your own community.