Running a community-oriented web service is much more like being a caretaker, guardian or steward then it is being a CEO or management team. Ask Craig of Craigslist or Stewart and Caterina of Flickr, Kevin and Jay of Digg, or come by our office anytime you want. Since the community itself is about 99% of all that you have created, without them, you’re just left with a bunch of fancy server code doing nothing at all.

Managing a web community is nothing unique to the web2.0 mindset. Online community began years (or rather decades ago) in forums, chat rooms, groups, email lists, usenet, irc, etc. One only has as much control over a community as the community feels like accepting. The role of a good community caretaker then is finding the amount of control a community wants (most all online communities desire at a minimum of civility standards) and using that as the baseline for acceptable behavior for all. Oftentimes a community desires civility and etiquette that goes way beyond what you find in real life (Dogster and Catster fall into this category where it’s more like the civility of a dinner party), other times it’s just ensuring that no laws are broken of the countries and states the community is in.

However, no matter how hard you try and specify exactly what the community civility guidelines are and how they will be enforced, there are always gray areas - there are always community terms that cannot be considered in advance, that have to be determined in real-time, sometime under great duress between the caretakers and the community.

Yesterday on Digg.com just such an event happened. Trying to stay on the right side of the law, the MPAA (and perhaps a sponsor) Digg moderators deleted entries with a well known key sequence used to crack DVD encryptions. This key has been at the heart of years of legal battles and I could understand why they would decide on not wanting to get caught up in a very expensive law suit. From the Digg users’ perspective it was a silly legal adherence to a well documented crack that is already all over the internet.

The Digg army (i.e. their most ardent members) took over the site. Every single item on the first three pages included the key sequence. Most site functions were rendered useless and Digg.com could hardly stop it without risking making matters much worse.

Now, think about what your company would do if your customers started vandalizing your stores and interfering with your business. I suspect very few would have done the right thing as Kevin and Digg did and say “We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code.” Confronted with losing a sizable number of the community (aka their customers) or facing a legal battle, they chose the possible legal battle.

They key here is they bent, not broke, when they encountered a gray area in the terms that did not have an obvious resolution that met the expectations of community and caretaker. And most importantly, even after the inmates, so to speak, completely ran amok, the caretakers did not blame or fight them, but listened and eventually accepted their position. I’m sure behind the scenes some other resolutions were considered, but they made the right decision in a short enough time period that saves the face of the community and the community’s respect for them. Both parties will be tighter for it. As Kevin implied “if we lose this legal issue, at least we’ll lose together.”

A caretaker without a community is left with nothing to care.

[Photo/shop by Jack Cheng]