Building a no-drama community
summary
Built several user communities for Liquid Web, cpanel, Chef and alma Linux, using Twitter, video calls and one-on-one DMs to recruit and repair trust. Core claims: default to helpful, complete honesty beats everything, trust by default. Concrete results: "heroic support" stuck for a decade at Liquid Web; cpanel’s honesty produced brutal feedback and loss of trust when leadership massaged the truth; Chef required reuniting paying and open source users; alma Linux successfully absorbed CentOS users by keeping the community whole. Moderation and one-on-one conflict resolution actually reduce drama.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Introduction and jet lag
- 1:06Community building myths
- 3:13Disagreement is natural
- 5:19First community story LARPing
- 8:03Liquid Web and Twitter community
- 10:31Humanity in customer interactions
- 11:32cPanel community challenges
- 15:53Chef community rebuild
- 18:29Keep community whole
- 19:34AlmaLinux foundation start
- 20:58Community building guides
- 21:41Respect your community
- 22:46Say yes to community ideas
- 24:11Trust by default
- 25:14Hold leaders accountable
- 26:39Own up to mistakes
- 27:44Enable human connection
- 29:31Handling disruptions
- 30:14Stay the stable head
- 31:36Filter out emotion
- 32:41Moderate toxic members
- 33:45Limit growth for stability
- 34:50Summary and resources
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