This past week I've reflected on who I want to service with Adagia. From the title you can probably guess that it's leaders.
Back at 200WAD many regular users were leaders in one way or another even though the site's design offered no leadership hierarchy*. Writers like keni, therealbrandonwilson, jasonleow were the landmarks of the site. Kind of like New York's Statue of Liberty or Paris' Eiffel Tower, they were the figures that others first noticed when arriving and the ones you could count on to still be around when returning after a break.
What I've theorized after experimenting with Tribes is that although the global feed has higher engagement than the local Tribes right now, this engagement is less sustainable. BillStockham just wrote for the first time yesterday and I just remember how many people arrived to 200WAD only to stop because what they were wrote wasn't the norm on the one and only global feed.
So what does this have to do with leaders? With Tribes, I now know that the user interaction has to be designed with a leadership hierarchy in mind. Just like how project management tools like Basecamp have owners of projects and invited team members of varying investment levels, I find that the future usefulness of Tribes is dependent on designing for the tribe leaders.
Who are tribe leaders? They are the ones who show up regularly no matter what. The members can go on breaks and arrive later knowing that there will be some activity because of the leader. I observed that on 200WAD there was already a sort of invisible tribing going on. There just wasn't an explicit user interaction for it. My aim is to service writers who want to service small writing groups. If you think that's self serving because that's the kind of person I am then you're right!
*You might consider the streak a leadership hierarchy but in the scope of this post leader is used as indication of community binding rather than writing metric. There were others like Valentino and Arcticloon and hilariously Baz himself who were on top of the streak leaderboard but mostly stuck to themselves. Likewise for a long time Lucjah was a leader even though she wasn't good at maintaining a streak.
PS by the way. Does anyone have contact with Lucjah? If you do could you let her know that I would love for her to contact me if she's open to it.
therealbrandonwilson I'll reach out to you regularly over the next six weeks to see if there's anything I can learn from you. I would like to see what you would want out of a small community of writers that you would run if you could run it your way.
keni leadership comes in many forms and I'd say that you were definitely a leader almost always on there... except for when you were posting privately lol.
btw no more double comment notifications when someone @'s you. Now we can @ each other all day!
Truth be told, never felt I was leading anything back at 200wad, nor did anyone share to me anything to the effect you mentioned. So am surprised really..but agree with your insight on leadership in tribes. The streak is just one tiny aspect...
therealbrandonwilson haha yeah on the old 200wad, the streak was the dominant metric, true. But I rem it faded out of prominence in my writing after about 1 year. So it was tiny... to me. Though I do recognise it as huge for folks starting out on a writing habit.
keni
therealbrandonwilson
jasonleow
BillStockham
Arcticloon
btw no more double comment notifications when someone @'s you. Now we can @ each other all day!