I used to write a year-in-review every single year. In 2016, I decided to stop (my last one was in 2015). These reviews, written mainly to remind myself of my progress, felt self-indulgent and repetitive. This year, though, my approach shifted.

I realized that many of the talented women in my life do not share their triumphs. They get downplayed. In community-speak, I might call this non-bragging behavior being relational: holding back on tooting our own horn means we value relationships over one-upmanship or competition. It means we value security and connection.

Communication and linguistic researchers have suggested this type of behavior makes us appear less powerful, which is why it is so helpful in establishing real relationships. You don’t want a friend with power over you (that’s not a friend).

Yet the more insidious truth beneath why we silence our triumphs is that we fear repercussions for standing out. We fear the loss of relationships. We fear our triumphs may make others feel envious, distant, or trigger their insecurities. We understand how it feels to be jealous of others’ success; it’s only natural. Yet being on the receiving end of this kind of treatment hurts (both sides hurt, let’s be real).

But, in choosing to bow to the fear of others’ reactions, you close off to life. You don’t celebrate others’ wins, and they don’t get to celebrate yours. Staying silent means we are feeding the hunger of judgemental and insecure voices. Our triumphs are not someone else’s loss.

I share this year’s reflection on community lessons-learned in the hopes that these lessons help you — that my triumphs may build a bridge to yours, and we can celebrate together. Instead of listing accomplishments (boring), I share 7 of the biggest lessons learned through my work since 2015.

On Leadership versus Strategy

In 2019, after five years apart, my first community management boss texted to ask if we could meet for lunch. He was passing through Seattle and wanted to catch up. We sat sipping lattes, reminiscing about the early startup days. Then he told me that, when I left the job abruptly, he had checked my work inbox to tie up loose ends (I took medical leave to heal from partner abuse in 2014). Scrolling through my inbox, he found personal notes, virtual hugs, and even pictures of some of our community members’ grandkids. He said to me: “I couldn’t believe you could care about that many people at once,” laughing. It solidified to me that asking about people’s lives, caring for them beyond their transactional relationship with our community, was the key to success. This level of care makes you irreplaceable.

As anyone who builds community professionally will tell you, your first few years of work will focus on tactics, relationship-building, and operations. You will experiment and learn by doing. Then, if you decide to advance your community work, you’ll focus on strategy. But what comes after strategy? For years, I assumed strategy sat at the top of a pyramid of community-building skills. It does not. There is work beyond creating strategy, so much more.

When I stepped into consulting and research, particularly in 2019, a new opportunity for growth emerged. It existed in a rarefied air I had not breathed because I’d often been suffocating unknowingly in rigid organizational structures. What I discovered was that leadership trumped strategy, every time. Leadership is the embodiment of strategy. You can have an incredible strategy and be a jackass, and your community will fail. You can have a loose plan but care, try new things and stay in touch with your community, and I will put my money on your success (and with some foundational work, we could supercharge your efforts!). The leader you are determines the community you build.

Further, in this era of #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of countless other activist efforts with no top-down leadership, a new leadership model must emerge to align with technological shifts, breaking boundaries, hypervigilance, and constant distractions. A community builder’s job must be to energize, train, care, and embody values.

Follow Your Gut Back to Your Integrity

For a few years before 2019, I could not shake the feeling that I was out of integrity. I would write that I valued connection and intimacy but then choose to throw myself into work over friendships. I would complete a significant project for a client and feel accomplished but completely drained. I would not celebrate. I kept going without asking why.

A few years ago, I got very still and tried to figure out why I could not get off the hamster wheel. I went to the forest with my dad and sat in a tent and wrote a lot. I rationalized my past choices by reminding myself of the incredible leaders I’d had the chance to work with (you all are amazing). Still, underneath it all, I knew my purpose mismatched my daily choices. I wanted to prepare for a better future for building community, rather than working with the lackluster state of things today. So I decided to apply to graduate school.

When I arrived in Milwaukee to visit UWM, I got chills stepping into the research library. I could have ignored the chills, but, instead, I let them linger. Countless others I have met this year have told me something similar about following their guts, their dharma, their intuition. Listen to your body. It often knows before your brain.

Can’t seem to access your intuition? Try stepping outside at night. Take a deep breath. Listen. Just listen. Do nothing. What does your body feel when you take in all the sounds and lights and sensations of the world? What does it need? Do this daily, and your entire life will change.

Valid Objections Versus Energy Vampires

Deciding whose feedback to take seriously is a delicate art. Take feedback seriously, except when it comes from an energy vampire.

Often, people who give us feedback have legitimate reasons for doing so. Other times, their insecurity, narrow perspective, or jealousy drives their criticism. To decide if you should take feedback seriously, ask: What does the feedback-giver make you feel? Who do they remind you of? Is that a voice that will lead you somewhere you want to go?

One of my mentors told me this year: if you want to know what you stand for, look at those who do not like you. Your haters say a lot more about your lived values than your friends do. Figure out who you’re okay pissing off. For me, I’m okay pissing off people who value profit over all else, people who manipulate others, and those who live as though opportunities are scarce and must be hoarded. I have a level of empathy for those people, but their feedback rarely registers.

The other big question that has come up for me these last few years is: Do you need to confront people who disagree with you or who are rude to you? To figure it out, figure out what outcome you wish to receive. Dig deeper into that outcome. Can that person give you that? Are they available (emotionally or otherwise) to give you that? Or do you need something only you can give yourself, like rest or self-acceptance?

A Practice: Family and Friends First

These last four years, I have been on the move a lot. I’ve flown between cities and client engagements and, as a result, have missed birthday parties and holiday gatherings, and I’ve taken less time off. That is my choice. But it also is a choice I will make less often. In the summer, I started to see that I was writing a book about connection while isolated and disconnected. Again, the lack of integrity twisted my stomach in knots. I knew I had to make other choices.

Luckily, life got real in 2019 and forced these choices upon me. A friend’s mother was diagnosed with stage three cancer (which she later recovered from!), and I flew to SF to comfort her, I struggled with depression, I moved across the country with my partner, who is now amid career reinvention.

During this time, I realized I could halt all the work and focus on friends and family when needed. But I had to draw a thick boundary line and stick to it. And, even still, I failed. It is a practice. It just is. In a culture that values output, it will continue to be a practice of resistance to put more into my friends and family every passing year. And that is what I intend to do.

Define Your Terms

People throw around words like “community” without defining their terms (I define my terms here). As a result, we’re all having different conversations. One of my client offerings is helping teams create consensus for what community means and how it gets built, and every time I do this work, I ask how groups define “community.” I do this one-on-one, and I get a wild array of answers. Almost always, they share feelings of warmth and friendship and giving. But they cannot tell me why these feelings matter, and people rarely agree across the organization why they should bother investing.

The Future of Loneliness

Hypervigilance is one of the enemies of our time. Loneliness is a byproduct of hypervigilance. As a survivor of domestic abuse, I know the hypervigilance that trauma causes; I see shadows of it everywhere I turn and in people I love and admire. I see it in myself.

Trauma can arise from myriad sources: childhood experiences, generational violence, workplace culture, assault, or even the vague trauma of being surveilled constantly until you begin to internalize the gaze of surveillance and live in a prison of your own consciousness (OK OK I read a lot of Foucault this year).

I see the fierceness, fear, and defensiveness of others, perpetuated and worsened by trauma because I so intimately know it within myself. It is my deepest desire to help the world look right into those shadows, to let their eyes adjust, and to love those shadows as much as the light. Reconciling the dark and light is not easy work, but it is work we must do in community.

Surrender

I walked outside this morning at my parents’ house into the East Tennesee crisp mountain air, and I heard at least three different kinds of bird calls, a lawnmower, the water lapping at the shore of the lake, and a car driving by. All of this noise and movement creates endless unpredictability, yet so much beauty to witness. In listening and surrendering to the complex intertwining systems around me, I see I am just one small part of all of this beautiful chaos.

Now, here is to 2020, to shades of gray, and to being the ones we’ve been waiting for. 🥂

A special thank you to the many healers, coaches, mentors, fellow community builders, and researchers who have guided me in 2019. I won’t name you all here, but know that if I have reached out to you in gratitude, you are part of this special thanks.

I want to cultivate relationships where we celebrate each other, not downplay our fantastic feats and fun times. If you want the same, comment on this post and tell me one thing you’re proud of from the last four years. Then we can celebrate together!

Lessons from Four Years of Community Building was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By 2018, the world’s largest technology platforms faced scrutiny over their trust and safety policies. It’s no surprise: in the last few years, these platforms have been home to widespread misinformation campaigns, hate speech, data breaches, and beyond.

This 2018 alone, Mark Zuckerberg stood trial before US Senators to discuss Facebook’s data privacy and safety policies, Twitter still has a Nazi problem, and Twitch proactively revamped their Community Guidelines.

Platforms of any size require a complicated mix of human and automated moderation, escalation processes, and enforcement partnerships, and they must be created proactively. Any platform focused on bringing people together must pay close attention to the state of trust and safety today.

So what do the trust and safety standards of major platforms currently have in common?

I’ve been seeking to understand this question deeply over the last four months. Earlier this year, alongside a platform client with over 100M monthly active users that is revamping its policies, I started digging into dozens of tech platforms’ Trust & Safety (T&S) policies. I sifted through and analyzed the public policies of 15 companies: Airbnb, Amazon, DIY.org, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Kickstarter, Lyft, OfferUp, Quora, Rover, StackExchange, Twitch, and Yahoo! Answers. My criteria were that the platforms needed to exist for more than six years (so they were mature enough to learn some hard lessons); have at least 500,000 users; contain either a set of Community Guidelines or clearly labeled “Trust & Safety” policies. Together, I wanted to ensure that I looked at platforms that served a diverse array of ages (from age 6 upwards), industries, and use cases.

Once I’d finished analyzing the common components and approaches of these platforms’ policies, I started to see clear patterns for today’s T&S policies. I wanted to open-source this knowledge for others for three reasons:

1. Give community builders a proven framework for their own policies.
2. Allow anyone to see how platform companies are presenting their T&S policies as a whole.
3. Encourage anyone to rally for more proactive trust-building and safety policies by the platforms that define so much of modern online life.

Key Terms

Before we dive into the nature of today’s largest platforms’ T&S policies, let’s define the key components and terms. The most common building blocks of today’s Trust & Safety policies are missions or purpose statements, values, guiding principles, guidelines, and rules.

• Mission or Purpose: The formal statement of the goals or aims of a platform.
• Values: The standards of behavior that guide all actions on the platform and decisions made by the platform company. These can also be called Guiding Principles, which tend to illuminate further how values should be interpreted on the platform.
• Community Guidelines: The norms that define proper conduct on a platform.
• Rules: A listing of what is not allowed on a platform (unique from guidelines, these are typically written in the negative, rather than the affirmative to ensure clear guardrails are in place for moderation)

Structure of Standards Overall

Today, most platforms include all of the above components, in this general structure:

1. Overview of Mission or Purpose of Platform: I’ve discussed this concept in depth before and won’t delve in further here.
2. Values or Ideal Behaviors: These form the foundation of the rest of the standards.
3. Some Combination of Community Guidelines and Rules: The best practice for how to write these seems to be the least agreed-upon component of T&S standards today. Sometimes T&S Standards are limited to standalone Community Guidelines, but often, Community Guidelines are just this one single part of more complex T&S policies.
4. Resources and Tools: Some transparency into how the platform keeps its users safe.

Values or Ideal Behaviors

Today, most platforms include overarching values of their communities, which form the backbone of all the other decisions they make about what they allow and what they do not allow on their platforms.

When these platforms do include explicit values or behaviors, they to limit them to between four and seven values or ideal behaviors, with an average of 4.8.

To use Airbnb as an example again: Airbnb’s values are safety, security, fairness, authenticity, and reliability. They nest their rules inside of these values, rather than separating them out. Here is their “safety” value and the corresponding rules that fall under upholding this value:

These are best in class examples above. Platforms like Instagram and Amazon nestle their values inside of other rules, in a way that covers their bases but doesn’t have a clear organizational structure.

Combination of Community Guidelines & Rules

Many (but not most) of today’s large platforms have Community Guidelines written in the affirmative, nested inside of larger Trust & Safety policies. Many two-sided marketplaces split these Guidelines into two separate sets of standards, one for the supply-side and one for the demand-side.

Thus, a trend emerges for large two-sided platforms — either create one set of standards for a community where crossover of member needs from supply into demand is high or create two separate sets of standards if there is little crossover in your membership. The decision about which way to go will depend on the dynamics of your particular platform.

Two-Sided Example: Etsy

Etsy separates out their rules by buyers and sellers.

Comprehensive Example: DIY.org

DIY.org’s purpose is to gather young makers together, and there is no two-sided marketplace inherent in this community. One complete set of policies suffices.

Rules: A Necessary Nuisance

Most platforms today include rules as well as overarching guidelines, or instead of guidelines. As a community builder, my preference has always been toward guidelines, supplementing with clear rules where necessary. Yet as annoying as it may be to write and read formal rules on a platform, they’re essential because they provide clarity for users and moderators.

Almost all platforms have at least some section that includes rules for what is NOT allowed (see Etsy, above). These rules are sometimes cascaded into help documentation, as is the case of YouTube’s documentation or Quizlet’s Guidelines as a whole. They can also sometimes be included in Terms of Service rather than elsewhere, though this is not a best practice (though it’s not a bad idea to add them in TOS in addition to other locations).

Most Common Rules

I drilled down into all the rules of these 15 platforms, and found that the most common included rules to regulate the following types of actions:

• Copyright or intellectual property violations (most common of all)
• Illegal activity
• Any harassment or hateful conduct, including discrimination, hate speech, bullying, or targeted attacks
• Impersonating other users (less of an overt problem on pseudonymous platforms, but common due to the number of real-identity platforms included in my analysis)
• Spam and scams
• Sexual content or nudity
• Any violent conduct: extreme violence, graphic violence, threats, gore, obscenities
• Harming others or acting maliciously
• Sharing of private information (a.k.a doxing)

Tools & Resources

Most platforms are not public about the escalation processes that they use internally to maintain strong trust and safety standards. However, they may provide some general information about how they make decisions. That has become more popular for large platforms like Facebook, which exposed its guidelines this year after they were leaked and criticized.

This is also the case for YouTube:

Also, some platforms also expose the resources and tools that they refer to in their work — again, the example of YouTube is helpful here:

Making these resources public provides useful help for all, both users and non-users of the platform. Instagram does this as well.

In addition, while most internal escalation processes are not public, Taringa! platform founder Gino Cingolani shared theirs, which provides a useful example of a moderation process at work:

If starting a community from scratch, keep in mind that you will need to create these escalation processes sooner rather than later in your journey, and you may also be helped by planning for automation and computer-assisted moderation processes.

We Can Do Better

Trust & Safety Standards are becoming more robust and well-defined, but platform creators, trust and safety specialists and community builders need to take what already exists and build it to be even safer, more inclusive, and responsive to conflict. Data science and automated moderation can aid us in our work, but it will not solve everything. As I’ve advocated before, the road to better trust and safety is not in overarching standards, but in fostering smaller communities.

And, of course, our work isn’t done by copy-catting the work of others, but rather by looking at the needs of our community members, designing for the inclusion of all who share our community’s values (and ensuring our leadership reflects that inclusion), and fighting to make digital communities safer, more transparent, and more accessible to all.

Further Reading and Recommendations:

1. For details on how platforms moderation teams make decisions and the political implications of these decisions, check out Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet
2. Make it human — include images of humans if possible, as Airbnb does
3. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is one of the most popular tools referred to in these T&S standards
4. The Trevor Project specializes in suicide prevention for LGBT youth and offers a lifeline that people in the US can refer to (many other country-specific resources exist for marginalized communities as well — check out Instagram and YouTube’s T&S pages for a good starting point to learn more)
5. Proactive community conflict management — a talk I gave at Facebook’s Communities Summit in 2017
6. Law enforcement and local organizations: partnering with local law enforcement and other partner organizations is a best practice among platforms internally
7. I didn’t even get into the politics of enforcing these rules and moderation (and the lack of consistency in how platforms interpret them). There is an entire field of academic discipline studying this right now. I highly recommend following the work of Casey Fiesler and her researchers at CU Boulder as well as Kat Lo at UC Irvine.

Want to push platforms to do more? It starts with you. What is one change you can make to your Trust & Safety policy at your organization to make your platform safer for members and proactive in its work to make the world a safer, more ethical place? What is one change you can advocate for on a platform where you spend your time online?

The 2018 State of Platform Trust & Safety Standards was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth Gather Community Newsletter. Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to get future issues.

The end of August has historically been a crazy time of year for me and many of the community professionals I know. Summer (in the northern hemisphere) beckons us not to waste a single moment of sunshine and warmth, but there’s still work to be done. And if you run an education community as I used to, this is also the time of year when work kicks into high gear for back-to-school.

This week, I don’t want to invite you to ponder anything or do anything extra. I just want to invite you to breathe deeply.

I’m writing this as a reminder for myself too.

About five years ago at this time of year, I was running a global education community, managing several employees, and weathering a crisis in my personal life. I didn’t know that I could step back and take a break — no one I knew personally had ever done that. Instead, I pushed forward day after day, until my body couldn’t anymore. That’s when I experienced my first panic attack. Having never experienced one before, I had no clue how to manage them or prevent them in the future. They persisted until I got professional help.

I learned many lessons from that time (delegate, foster leaders, say no, take a real vacation!), but most important among those lessons was how to breathe in a way that calmed my nervous system. My doctor specifically taught me “box breathing”, which I began to practice in moments of intense pressure at work and home. I still use the box breathing technique even today when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

I invite you to take a moment to yourself and practice it too.

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Exhale slowly through your mouth, letting all of the air out of your chest and stomach.
Step 2: Inhale slowly through your nose for four slow counts. Fill your stomach first, then your chest.
Step 3: Hold your breath for 4 counts.
Step 4: Exhale through your mouth for 4 counts.
Step 5: Hold your breath for 4 counts again. Repeat.

You can imagine forming a square (or box) with your breath while you do this exercise. If this feels like too much, you can also simply breathe slowly and exhale for longer than you inhale, which calms the body too.

I hope you feel just a little more grounded.

(Please know that if you are having a tough time, there are many wonderful sources of support. For starters, I highly recommend 7 Cups, a community of listeners and counselors who can chat with you 1–1, anonymously, 24/7 for free. I’m not a mental health professional, so I can only offer my own personal experience.)

Take care out there!

How do you stay calm while building community? Share your tips + tricks in the comments.

It’s okay to fall apart. You’ll come back together more beautifully.

Your friendly neighborhood community builder
- Carrie

Missed the last newsletter on credit and credentials in community? Read it here.

An Invitation to Breathe in August was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few weeks ago, I stood on the floor of a Las Vegas trade show, when a mentor of mine called me out of the blue. I rushed outside the crowded conference center and stood under a palm tree in the desert sun to call him back. He called to invite me to collaborate on a large project, he said.

This mentor is an accomplished man, a published author, and a former university lecturer. I was deeply honored and flattered he asked but, frankly, I was scared to accept. I started sweating, and it wasn’t just because of the 103-degree heat.

My mentor sensed my hesitation at his first offer and gave me time to think. I walked back into the air-conditioned trade show planning to get back to work but couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation.

Why would anyone hesitate to collaborate with someone they admire?

I realized my worry had some foundation. Repeated studies and stories have shown that people tend to disregard women’s contributions on projects, papers, and in communities when they work alongside men (and the impact is more severe for underrepresented women). The denial of equal credit for women’s work doesn’t need to be intentional to harm their careers. It just does, and that truth is painful and complicated.

But this doesn’t just impact women. It affects everyone who builds communities and trusts partners, team members, and leaders. The notion of “credit” and “credentials” is often more complex for us. At our most ideal, we give away credit, create distributed power structures, and serve collective needs. But many of the systems we work within idealize heroic singular leaders and undervalue all else. Credit still matters.

A few days after the initial call, my partner Dominick and I drove along the highway from Lansing to Mancelona, Michigan, and my phone rang again. My mentor was calling me back. I picked up and told him about all the study data I’d found.

When I stopped talking, he took a deep breath.

I was sure he would tell me not to worry — that he was “different” or that my fear was unfounded. I would have hung up soon after. But what he said instead changed the way I have been showing up to work every day since.

I’ll paraphrase:

“If you believe as I do that deep community heals individuals and organizations, then you know that there is an endless amount of work to be done. I cannot stop what society may do, but I appreciate your work and will do my best to boost you. People will steal your work. All of us tend to outweigh the credit we are due. But I encourage you not to erase your contributions before you make them.”

I knew then that I must step up alongside him. I said yes to the project.

After our call, I put down my phone, watched the yellow lines of the freeway blur together, and let his words sink in: If you show up and do the work, you will not get every opportunity or acknowledgment, but this is not a zero-sum game. Our triumph is shared. Scarcity is a reality, but it’s not the only reality.

You can base the work you do on the opportunity to do what matters, knowing that will create even more opportunities for all. Or you can base the work you do on the fear of not getting the promotion, job, client, contract, or credential. Both are possible paths that will likely lead to some success. You will need to live your own experiences, do the work that matters to you, and make your own choices.

Personally, I am choosing to do something that matters enough, for long enough, to help people build communities that heal and connect. As a result, we can unlock opportunities for everyone to get more credit, opportunity, and credentials.

This is, in essence, our job: To build community and tell stories about our community that leave others without the desire to know who did what. Instead, we aspire to leave others with just one burning desire: to lean in and ask, “How can I join you?”

P.S. I can’t share what the above project is yet, but I hope to be able to tell you very soon!

Be brave out there. We need you.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about how to manage intercommunity conflict. You can read that newsletter here.

In response, Robyn Jordan, co-founder of Black Girls Create and the BGNO Book Club (also a Community Builder for hire!), shared a book recommendation for you to check out: Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro. She shared that one of his characters comes to the same realization that anger can be a form of kindness. You can find Robyn on her website and you can buy Mark’s book through an indie bookstore. Enjoy!

Does Credit Matter in Communities? was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s Note: This is the third Gather Community Newsletter. Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to get future issues.

I’ve been working my way through a treasure trove of community-related academic papers over the last few weeks. Hey, you’re never too old to go back to school… or be a total nerd.

I found one study particularly relevant for the times we are in: four Stanford data scientists analyzed thousands of conflicts on Reddit using public data from 2014–2017. As a result, they were able to suggest a data-backed model for mediating intercommunity conflict (you can read all the juicy details here).

Based on their research, they found that the best response to intercommunity conflict is not to ignore it or wait for it to blow over. Instead, if your community is being attacked, the best response to intercommunity conflict is to mount an “angry defense.”

If we are nonpartisan in our approach to communities, the study’s findings may also suggest that we should not fear our communities coming into conflict with one another. Instead, we should be worried if one particular group attacks another and the defending group doesn’t have the tools or strength to self-organize a defense.

We have seen what happens when a defending group angrily defends their principles and becomes stronger as a result (the #metoo movement comes to mind, which has strengthened the women who have spoken up and made their voices heard).

The study also made me think: Anger is a tool, powerful when harnessed. It does not have to be at odds with kindness. Angrily, fiercely defending community boundaries and principles does not mean that you must be unkind. The idea of “kindness” was not mentioned in the study. That’s my addition, and I think it’s a vital one.

Verbalizing anger to enforce a boundary means you are being kind to yourself and honoring what is hurting you. Your anger can also be in service of others. Coach and activist Andrea Ranae (whom I met via Camp Souldust) proudly declares, for instance, that she is powered by “love, anger and a vision for liberation.” Anger can be part of what helps us find our place and helps others find safe harbor.

This is the ultimate conclusion I’m walking away with: Sometimes, we must fight to create safer communities. We must resist to create something antifragile. And we must practice that resistance, so we can be ready to exercise it when our communities need it.

This approach worked for pseudonymous communities. Do you think it would hold true for real-identity communities as well?

In the meantime, keep going. We need you.

Your friendly neighborhood community builder 💛
Carrie

In the last newsletter, I explored the lessons that Anthony Bourdain taught me about shining the light on others in community work.

In response, Paras Pundir, Founder of Community Folks in Bengaluru, India, shared: “I believe that giving back to your roots should be one of the most important lessons given to a kid so as to keep the balance in the society.” He shared that his dad taught him to value using his own resources and then giving to others, asking for help when he needs it most to avoid asking for too much too soon or taking credit for others’ work. And always ensure that you’re thinking about what others get from the exchange: “In the process of building a community, we definitely have to ask a lot of [our members]… But I always plan the values those contributors will be getting before I ask them for help.”

Thank Paras for sharing some of his and his father’s wisdom by giving him a shout on Twitter!

Stay in touch by subscribing to the Gather Community Newsletter.

How to Manage Intercommunity Conflict on the Internet was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For almost two weeks now, I’ve been thinking of Anthony Bourdain every day. I’ve been trying to work out some of the lessons he has taught me so far about community through his work. There are many, I’ve realized. But what I want to share with you today is how I think his work serves as a model for the type of creative work we do: gathering people.

The day Bourdain passed, Taiwan-born comedian and activist Jenny Yang explained, “Bourdain never treated our food like he ‘discovered’ it. He kicked it with grandma because he knew that HE was the one that needed to catch up to our brilliance.”

Yang’s thought, above all else, is what I have been pondering.

Through his particular way of traveling and telling stories of cultures and people, he showed us how to create without stealing.

Call it what we may, we “borrow” from others when we build a brand community. Most companies I work with want to know examples of other companies building brand community. They want “use cases” and case studies. They want to know what others are doing so they can take what they need, throw out what they don’t, and create from a template.

Templating is one way we borrow. Then there are those organizations that create a brand community that appears entirely new in the business world. They also borrow: they lean heavily on models from other cultures and periods in human history to create.

Typically, therefore, we owe a great debt to others in the creation of our communities. We often owe that debt to ancestry and history that is not our own. Quite often, we fail to give credit where it is due.

By examining Anthony Bourdain’s work, I am still learning how not to treat my work as if I am discovering anything for the first time. I am still learning how to incur a debt in the process of building community and offer gratitude and credit for it. I don’t create ideas in vacuums. I don’t build community without the significant contributions of many communities that came before.

Tomorrow’s leaders can learn from Bourdain’s quiet respect, spotlight-shining, deep listening, and go-with-the-flow attitude.

Being indebted to so many others, making peace with that debt, giving credit, speaking out against those who don’t: this may be the hardest work we can do in this industry, and the most necessary.

Anthony Bourdain “kicked it with grandma” and never tried to act like he was the fountain of her wisdom or her wit or genius. Instead, he shined the light on her. He laughed. He spoke about her with what can only be described as love.

He didn’t discover anything new. He didn’t create anything new.

He just showed us what it looks like to sit in awe as we receive the gifts that this messy world can give us. If only we will travel far. And listen.

Who are you sitting in awe of in your community work? How do/can you thank them and give them credit? Comment below.

Keep going. We need you.

Your friendly neighborhood community builder 💛
Carrie

In the last newsletter, I explored the idea of starting small. You can read it here.

In response, Erin Anacker, co-founder of WholeStory/dog mom/community thinker, shared with us: “I would add to your list of why starting small is a good idea the only way to go: launching is a process, not an event. This is something I’ve been learning over the last couple years. No matter if it is a community or a business, you have to pack the snow in your hands before you try and gather more snow and roll it into a big, magical, momentum.”

Think Erin is smart and poetic? I do too. Say hi to her on Twitter!

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Anthony Bourdain & How Not to Steal: Gather Community Newsletter 02 was originally published in Community Building and Strategy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.