I recently had occasion to go to CollabNet headquarters in Brisbane, CA.  My flight from Chicago to San Francisco was on a totally full Boeing 777.  As the plane was loading in Chicago,  I witnessed from my choice vantage point in seat 22E (yes, that’s the middle seat in coach of a 2-5-2 configuration) a dynamic that I couldn’t help find analogous to a smoothly running community site in action. 

The cattle call that is the boarding process of the economy section of a wide bodied airplane is always good for some entertainment value if you get there early enough and are willing to look for it.  My favorite part comes as the overhead space starts to get tight and people decide that the laws of physics are for chumps and decide that their 3 cubic feet piece of luggage will indeed fit into the 1 cubic foot of space available to them.  I certainly wasn’t disappointed on this flight.  The entertainment factor for me comes when the owner of the luggage just starts wailing away on it trying to make it fit as if it’s going to magically turn into some sort of blow in foam instead of the hard sided luggage that they brought with them.  Of course the entertainment value diminishes quickly when my bag is already in the compartment being asked to accept the extra piece, but I’ll leave that for another time.

This situation usually results in one of many solutions, all of which I witnessed on this recent flight:

1. The owner will finally realize they he can’t defy the laws of physics and take the bag elsewhere on the plane
2. Perhaps a more experienced (or just plan brighter) passenger will offer some help, such as rotating the piece 90 degrees, that will actually make it fit
3. A refactoring of the current distribution of bags in the immediate area occurs to free up the required space for the later arriving bag resulting in room for everything to fit harmoniously
4. The owner will just leave the bag there in the hopes that the flight attendant will make the problem go away, which will definitely happen with the flight attendant:
   • Employing one of the strategies mentioned above
   • Putting the bag in some location only known to the crew as a possibility for storing passenger luggage
   • Removing the bag form the passenger area altogether and checking it much to the chagrin of the bag’s owner who probably should have done that in the first place

So what’s all this fun have to do with community sites?  Well, like most flights, community sites give a diverse population a vehicle for reaching a common goal.  The common goal on my flight was to get to San Francisco.  As the repeated announcements stated, however, we couldn’t get there until all the overhead storage compartments were closed.  This brought into action the collaboration of the folks on board to make the goal possible with 3 distinct roles emerging:

1. The Active Contributor:  While all the passengers had a stake in what was going on with the overhead space (it needed to be sorted before we could go anywhere), not everyone was actively involved in getting things sorted out.  Perhaps some of the passengers who were involved didn’t have anything to store in the overheads, but were nonetheless active in helping others who did either through offering their experience or just a brand new observation on the situation.  Thriving community sites see this all the time.
2. The Observer:  This is the role I was playing as I had nothing to put into the overheads and, from my center seat, wasn’t really close enough to the action to offer any physical assistance and didn’t observe anything that I felt needed my commentary.  Nonetheless, I somehow know what the options are for a bag that won’t fit.  This knowledge has come to me more from observations I’ve made on other flights than from personal experience.  In other words, my observer role on other flights has benefited me even though I wasn’t necessarily an active contributor on those flights.  At any given moment, community sites certainly have plenty of members just soaking in the action and becoming more knowledgeable as they do so.
3. The Community Manager:  This is the role the flight attendants were filling. In the early going when the storage space was plentiful, people were able to fend for themselves quite easily within the confines of the limited space available.  That’s not to say that they didn’t plan for the future by storing their luggage in the most optimal way they could, but even if they didn’t things fit pretty easily.  As the plane filled, the situations and reactions described above took hold.  Most of the problems were mitigated by other passengers helping out before the flight attendant was needed.  This isn’t to say that the flight attendants weren’t monitoring the loading process as it was happening and offering assistance where needed, but on rare occasions were they needed to be arbiters of the situation.  When they were, they had the authority and knowledge to act in that role.  On community sites, this role is handled by the Community Manager.  Note that the flight attendants didn’t dictate what luggage was brought on board, but knew what to do with it when the other passengers couldn’t make it fit.  Likewise, Community Managers need to guide the evolution of their sites with proper oversight of the site’s activity. 

While this analogy doesn’t rank with splitting the atom for the first time, I do find examples of community and community management in the “natural world” to be interesting.  If “community” can just happen on its own, should we be able to create highly optimized communities with a little intervention?