Changing the culture in your community

• How do you keep people engaged to continue & finish projects?
  • When there is initial ideas - how do you keep them on task to complete these
    • Get in touch with users as they start to make sure they know how much work they are proposing
    • Ideas are useless you can execute them - how can you make sure users are aware this before they start spending time on it?
    • Maybe direct users to start on a smaller project
• What is the culture we want to change?
  • technical communities aren't always welcoming
• People only change when there is an incentive to change - what is there incentive?
  • competing project can be a good incentive - "the other site is doing this - why aren't we?"
• Introduce specific structure
• What about power struggle?
• Have the smaller or new community you can have them work on defining the culture
  • setting up tests
  • as a manager you can lead them in this culture definition - lead them in setting best practices
  • show by example - write up posts on why and how its important
• Being consistent is important - community will model after you
• Identify influential people - can be your "changers"
  • will help to move the community
• Remember change takes time
• How do you get older more technical users to welcome newer less technical people
  • People like being elite, early adopters - as more come they use a bit of this status
  • Can have those willing to help mentor new users
  • Remind elite that "we were all newbies once"
• Can you redefine elitism?
  • Is there a way to flip the coin, and push elite users into specific constructive tasks
  • Focus them into a specific area
• If you do need to kick someone out make sure its clear so the rest of the community doesn't react badly
  • being clear is important
  • setting a process
• how do you prevent abuse that may be occuring?
  • set out rules
  • pick your battles