Comments on: sometimes community sucks

By: Janet Swisher

Janet Swisher — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:48:29 +0000

My rule of thumb is: You know it’s a real community when there’s someone in it who drives you crazy but you put up with them because of the community purpose. Otherwise it’s just a social club. Most of what I see in the tech world are social clubs, with true communities being really rare and precious. But even social clubs are valuable; they exist because they meet the members’ needs more often than not.

Leadership in any case is tough. Leadership of informal, unstructured groups is especially tough, because there is no structure to confer authority. Leaders are not any less flawed than anybody else, but because they took the risk of leading, their flaws can affect more people than the flaws of those who just show up and kibbitz.

Communities suck because they’re made up of people and people suck. But communities are also awesome because people are awesome. The human race has been working on this whole getting-along-with-each-other thing for millions of years, and we’re still not very good at it, but we now have more people mostly getting along with more of each other than ever before. So I think there’s hope.

By: Ryan Corradini

Ryan Corradini — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:28:58 +0000

For what it’s worth, I appreciate rants like this, both yours and other people’s. Anything that pulls back the curtain a little for those of us on the outside, that demystifies the poisonous “rockstar” culture for the lie that it is, is of immense value. There’s no such thing as a perfect developer / entrepreneur / community organizer / whatever, just ordinary people who want to better the world in whatever way they can. Thanks for being one of those people who sets aside her fears to do the hard, worhtwhile thing, and screw the critics.

By: aa

aa — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:22:07 +0000

I can deeply sympathize with these sentiments not because I’ve ever been in a position of leadership in a technical community, but because I encountered the same motivations and frustrations as a leader in other arenas. As much as I believed in what I was doing, as much as it allowed me to act altruistically with very little recognition in comparison to criticism, there came a point when I had to step aside. It took too much. Low and behold, people who I didn’t expect to pick up the torch usually, eventually, did. It was hard to witness the places where the void I left was never reoccupied, or the places where it wasn’t filled up to my lofty standards. But over the years, I’ve seen new people feed into the communities that really mattered, with new energy and as much dedication as I ever had.
In any case, I’m not saying this to encourage you to step aside and see who steps up, but to say simply, “I understand how much it sucks.” I hope you can endure it, and ask for help where you need it. I personally appreciate your leadership hugely.