Re: Perfectly Kim...

[Jim Goodin <jimgoodinmusic@gmail.com>]

Charles I just saw this after the fact.  That's wonderful and amazing and his legacy speaks on as it did in that note.  I will post this on the ImprovFriday blog that I just posted a note about his death on.  Thanks for posting this...

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Charles Zwicky <cazwicky@earthlink.net> wrote:

Dear Violet, and everyone else...

We have all gained much from knowing Kim through Loopers-Delight.. I've been here since the mid 1990s and have experienced some great conversations.

Here is an example of how great Kim was, his ideas about forming community are wonderful.  I was moved by his words  in this post (see below) from 2006 so I saved it...

Chuck Zwicky

At 08:06 AM 4/24/2006, Matthew.Quinn@sunlife.com wrote:

Just wondering- is there any reason why there is no LD Message Board?

Yes, there is a reason. It has nothing to do with personal preferences. Neither mine, nor yours, nor anybody else's. It also has nothing to do with technology.

It has everything to do with community. How communities form, how people interact with each other, how communities sustain or fade out.

I started using online networked environments in the 80's. I was fascinated by the possibilities they offered to allow new communities to form, and the possibilities for new methods of communication.

Over many years of using these environments, I observed that the interface and method for the communication had a huge effect on how people interacted, and the type of communities they did or did not form. Bulletin boards, group chat, instant messaging, mailing lists, video conferencing, newsgroups, etc., all turn out differently. Even subtle things can have a significant impact. With mailing lists, for example, factors like bounce/digest, moderation, posting rules, even whether the "reply-to" field is set to the list address or the poster's address, all affect the way people communicate in different ways. Some formats turn out ugly, and result if a lot of flaming, or trolls, or whatever. But some turn out wonderfully, when applied the right way.

So, the reason for choosing one interface or another should really depend on the application and the type of communication desired. Is the goal more of a friendly community, where people are a little chatty and get to know each other over a long time? Is it just for posting announcements or ads? Technical question and answers with a minimum of nonsense? Customer support? A good place to chat people up and try to get a date? A different format will work better in each case. Choosing the wrong format usually results in failure.

When I wanted to start a community around looping, my goal was to form a community. I hoped people would spend extended time there, and get to know one another. I wanted people to share information and collaborate on projects together. I wanted people to spend time to teach one another about looping. I wanted people to have serious, thoughtful, and respectful discussions. I wanted it to last. I wanted a community of interested people to build the whole idea of looping into something much bigger than it was.

I had long observed that mailing lists work very well in forming strong communities, and that is what I wanted to do.

So the fundamental format I chose for this nascent looping community is the mailing list. I set up LD as a bounce list, with the reply-to set to the list address. There is no moderation, but you can't post unless you are a subscriber. There are no explicit rules about what can be posted. There is a web archive that saves all discussion, and makes it freely available to the world. (there is also a digest, which I wasn't too thrilled to create and still think was a somewhat bad idea.)

All of these choices were made with a lot of thought. Mailing lists have continuity. People mostly don't drop in and disappear, they usually stick around for a while. Email lists appeal to people's natural inertia. If people do nothing, the messages still go to them. So people get to know one another. Email encourages more thoughtful discussion. Bounce lists are more active. Lack of moderation encourages more individual sense of ownership and responsibility for the community. Reply-to set to the list makes things a little more chatty and fun. None of these choices were accidents, or made without purpose. I thought about each one and made the choice in order to form the kind of community I envisioned.

And so in 1996 I started Looper's Delight, and a whole bunch of interested people showed up and started communicating in a new way, and we all built this remarkable community. Looper's Delight is almost 10 years old. We've made good friends, we've had numerous great festivals, we've recorded many amazing albums, we shared a lot of knowledge, we shared a lot of music, we've gone to see one another perform, we guided manufacturers to make products for us, we created a huge archive of knowledge, sometimes we've argued and disagreed, mostly we've supported each other in all manner of ways, and most important, we've developed looping far beyond what any of us ever thought it could be.

I'm really proud of all that. And I'm really convinced, now more than ever, that the choices I made in forming this community were correct. In my world, there is no better proof than success.

So no, I'm not at all interested in converting LD into a message board. I think that idea is destructive to our community. I also think it is hurtful to the group when people try to create some separate forum. It always feels like an attempt to split our community up. That's why the reactions from so many people in the community to these ideas are usually so hostile. People like the community we have here. The don't want to see it broken up or damaged.

And by the way, the idea that message boards are somehow more "modern" is laughably wrong. As someone else noted, even in the 80's bulletin board systems following that approach were very sophisticated. Email was relatively primitive at that time, and was little better than a command line or unix shell interface. There is not really anything new about message boards today other than slicker graphics and php code. Most of them seem to be actually worse in user interface than the average BBS you could have joined 15-20 years ago.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com

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