|
Howard Rheingold (2000) speaks in-depth on the subject of The
WELL's (http://www.well.org) sale in 1994 to new
owner Bruce Katz, and the resulting chaos that ensued, largely because, as Rheingold
says "Katz lacks good listening skills and didn't seem to understand that he needed to
communicate with the WELL community himself, in our medium, in a way that showed some
basic understanding of our norms" (331). If you are the community's leader, it is
important to keep your community as happy as you can. It should go without saying
that not everyone will be happy with everything you do, but you should strive to not
make anyone unnecessarily upset at your actions, and this is usually accomplished
through good communication. A good current example of poor communication in a
community is the March 2000 example where all Major League Baseball web sites,
which had up until then been under the control of each club, were taken over by Major
League Baseball and dramatically redesigned, and in many instances content was
standardized or removed, particularly from sites which had innovative content such as
the Seattle Mariners. One only has to look in the Fan Forum link on the Mariner's web
site (http://mariners.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/sea/homepage/sea_homepage.jsp) to find
out how unpopular this move was, and I would argue that this poor reaction was also due to
a lack of communication. A current example where there is good communication going on within
a community about design changes can be seen off Salon's (http://www.salon.com) home page "Premium: The first seven days," found
directly at http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2001/05/02/premium_progress/. This is a continuing discussion of Salon's decision to start charging money for a premium service.
|
