The Last Word

Tomorrow afternoon, we get to pick up my engagement ring. The jewellers also put up a blog post about every ring, so I will let you know when it's up! And I'm sure I'll post when I've actually got the ring, and can take a photo myself!

Now I just need to get through the next 20 hours or so without bouncing off the walls - it's like Christmas!

From time to time, as we all do, I get into a new subject or hobby. So into it, infact, that I want to get involved; especially when it's a community run offering or a relatively unknown hobby. 'Involvement' for me means more than just playing the game (Arcane Legions), running the software (Slackware) or theorycrafting the class (Warlocks in WoW) - it means sharing what I know with others and spreading the word impartially. If it's a good product, I like to vote with my mouth as well as my money, and often the fastest way of getting this kind of involvement is getting into the community and steeping myself in the product.

What do I mean by community?

com·mu·ni·ty
   /kəˈmyunɪti/
–noun,plural-ties.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the): the business community; the community of scholars.

For me, it's the drawing together of individuals who share a common interest. Like the real world, online communities need resources - tools and spaces and places to interact. In the online space, communication methods are more important than ever. These resources are monetarily much cheaper online than their real-life counterparts: buildings, computers, tennis courts …

What these resources aren't cheap on, is energy. You need an immense amount of energy to start off a community - energy to build the tools; energy to shape the space; energy to elicit the communications. More on energy later.

Now, I'm no Jono Bacon, but I have been working with online communities for in excess of a decade, and there are a few things that I've learned over that time which put me ahead of the curve of your average forum-peruser. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard for me to actually get involved in communities, because I'm used to a certain amount of respect for this knowledge, aside from any domain-specific knowledge I have.

When moving into different sub-communities within the same domain - such as moving guild in an MMO - you can fall back on your domain knowledge to get you through, but breaking into a new community, as a total unknown, is hard. Reputation is everything, and it's sudden loss (when moving or joining a new community) is enough to make anyone scream in frustration. More so when your reasonable questions go unanswered, or (my personal pet peeve) you find yourself being patronised.

I got started with Linux many years ago, and spent a long while utilising the resources provided by LinuxQuestions. One day I offered up a resource of my own, and started answering some questions. Fast-forward to today and I have some respect from that community. Am I a big player there? Not by a long shot, but equally, I have a reasonable post count and a tendancy to answer the more exotic types of question that aren't the usual “How to make the scroll wheel work in X” affairs.

It took 2 years of reading that forum and probably a further 3 years of contributing before I was ever quoted (a reasonable indicator that you're an authority on a topic), and I'm not your average poster.

Most recently, I've been playing Arcane Legions, and I'm interested enough to want to get involved. The official forum is a bit of a nightmare to navigate, so a bright spark spawned off a community forum & wiki to act as a fansite and secondary resource. It got a lot of use, but the admin disappeared and the site got hacked. Poof, no more community.

Fast-forward a week and someone else steps up, asking for help and suggestions. I fish out the pieces that I had pulled before the site went down, upload them to pesartain.com, and direct the organisers to Google's cache as a way to pull out the old material. And then everything goes quiet …

At this point in the story I want to head off on a bit of a tangent. There are a few key rules that apply to ANY forum, regardless of the domain:

1. When you ask for help, take the time to respond to those answering the call.

For any given domain, an energetic newbie is worth 10 times as much as any lazy veteran when it comes to community building - and you need all the energy you can get in the early days of the site. Take the time to weed out those with staying power and those who are just caught up in the moment. It's especially worth evaluating helpers' domain knowledges, so you can start to assign the right jobs to the right people - no sense giving a graphic designers' task to a rules lawyer.

1. Start small, but with the possibility of growing.

Before the forum is even given a name, it's imperative that the starting point (category layout, permissions, etc) is at least considered. Hew some rough chunks out of the forum-rock that will act as big catch-all areas (like Forum Information, Programming Questions, Game Rules, etc), and add some broad stroke rules and directions on what each area is supposed to contain in appropriately placed (and easy to see) sticky posts. The precise titles of the starting areas will depend on your domain, and you'll invariably get a ton of questions that needed a starting area of it's own that you didn't foresee. Don't panic, adding areas early on based on real feedback is perfectly acceptable.

3 categories with 30 posts looks like a busy and inviting, compared to 30 categories with 1 post each. Until you have those hundred thousand, don't pretend your community is bigger than it is. You can always grow things later.

Learn your forum software.

Learn when to use sticky posts and when to spawn off new forums and sub-forums. A deeply nested forum structure might satisfy your inner megalomaniac, but doesn't help the newbies - either to the hobby or the forum. It also pays to understand the usergroup mechanisms, and double check what is visible to whom (including when someone is logged out). Perhaps define some tags in place of using different forums - like [Question] or [Rules] as part of the title instead of segregating them. You'll also need to know who has what permissions and how they work if you intend to share responsibility for maintenance and administration. The next people to step over the threshold of your shiny new forum should be your Lieutenants and other trusted “beta-testers”.

1. Provide trusted people with mod/admin status – but make sure they understand the vision.

Being a one-man-band is great for your ego, because you get to be the big hero and provider. You get the recognition and a lot of “Thank you”s. What it's not great for is your health - you'll stress over each and every decision and when there's contention as you grow the forum (or even just make changes to the layout), you'll lose sleep. Well, I do anyway. Which is why it's good to share the responsibility with others to make sure things are ticking over steadily. Until it's a massive community, all you need are some broad strokes to cover the general gist of what you want the mods to handle. Provide the mods a private area to discuss potentially sensitive topics that might need attention (you've ended up with a religious zealot in a computing forum, for example) - this can also be used to share your ideas and feelings going forward with the community and most importantly, it's a place to share your vision with those you trust, and make sure everyone is ready for when you open the doors and advertise the link.

1. Share the link only when it's ready.

There are many ways to set up a forum, but relying on the “community” to do it for you, is a recipe for a disaster. “Build it and they will come,” is true for forums, but the corollary is “see it is empty and leave.”

My preferred method is to put in the energy (time, effort) myself by adding some starting content, direction in the shape of readme/sticky posts, and descriptive forum titles. Regardless of whether you do this alone or with help, you need to get the basics down before opening the doors, and revealing the grand plan to the great unwashed masses.

1. Have a vision.

If you don't know why you're doing this, what service it provides, then don't bother. You need to know what you want to achieve, and having a cohesive vision that you can share with others - eventually everyone - goes a long way toward knowing what risks to take and when to hold back on changes for changes' sake. In the case of fansites you are almost certainly in competition with other fansites and possibly even the official site, so you need to provide some added value over and above the other sites. Equally, is it worth starting something new when it could be better to help another community?

The best litmus test for this is to imagine the forum with no one on it. What would you do with it? Do you have enough ideas and enough drive to populate it with useful content? If the answer is no, then you may have ideas that are bigger than your energy reserves - so scale it back until you think you can make it work, or get enough help to make it work, but whatever the decision: you can always grow it later.

So I'd offered my services, and got nothing in return. No appreciation, no acknowledgement. I post a few pieces on the newly ressurrected forum and keep my fingers crossed that the clean layout will remain, as it's a good indicator at least some of the rules above are being followed.

Unfortunately it doesn't, and the new forum is a lot of deeply nested empty space between the 6 posts that are up.

A few days later I do get acknowledgement, and although I might not agree with the way the new administrator is going about this rebuild, I do know that I will be contributing to this community again. Despite the potential laundry list of changes I would make, I believe in the reason the forum was created and the service that (I think) it's trying to provide, and probably most importantly: I don't have the energy to do it myself, or another community to choose instead.

So finally, if you're thinking of starting a forum: make sure you have the energy to carry through; and if you're thinking of joining a forum: don't be afraid to vote with your feet (or cursor) if you find your entry to one community hard work. It's worth scouting around to find the right place to focus your efforts on building and maintaining a reputation.

Because on the interwebs, no-one can hear you scream.

Exactly two weeks ago, Piete and I were at the jewellers designing my engagement ring, and late on Thursday just gone, Rebecca contacted Piete to tell him that they've found the stone for my ring!

The ring on the left is one that I tried on whilst we were discussing ideas, and the stone is 7mm on each side. My stone is 5mm on each side as the 7mm one looked pretty over the top when I tried it on.

It's been pointed out that I've not given links to some of the bits I was talking about for my ring, so I'll describe it again, with links!

It's going to be in palladium, which is a white/silver metal, with a green tourmaline trillium (the stone is cut so that it looks like a triangle, as you can see in the picture!). The stone is going to be set in tension style, which is apparently safer than an actualtension set ring, and so I won't loose the stone!

There's also going to be along the lines of this ring, which you might be able to see from the pencil design, but there's going to be a couple of diamonds on there as well.

All in all, I'm counting down the days until it's finished, and I'll let you know when I know more!

During the Big Snow of '10, I drove in to work from Colchester at about 5am on Monday morning. It was such a roaring success that I tried it again. Unfortunately for me, everyone else thought so too, turning what should have been a 3 hour trip into a 5 hour one.

This means it's entirely possible that I'm hallucinating due to sleep deprivation …

Regardless, I came back to mum's tonight to find a photo album open on my bed with a ring box¹⁾ on top - it's my fathers signet ring, bought for him by his father.

With the engagement and all, it got me to thinking about heirlooms and what we owned as a family. Turns out not a whole lot. Jewellry is typically handed down from mother to daughter, so my aunt got most of that on my father's side, and there just was never very much on my mother's side. She still has her wedding band, and had kept this signet ring.

I've seen the photos, many times, but never felt like I did when I looked through it tonight. It was strange, seeing my parents at age 19, getting married. Suddenly I could relate to them in those photos, and I longed to be able to go back to that time and visit them.

History has never been a passion of mine, and while I love a good story, a lot of my family history was hard to relate to. I could see the value in it, but I had no real interest. I've often wondered if this would ever change, or if I'd live my life rarely looking back.

Tonight, looking into the album and seeing my father's face beaming back at me, I realised that the small heirlooms we have, and the small traditions we have are part of our family, and the family name may not mean very much to anyone, but it's important to me. Sooner or later (later, I think) I'll be passing these traditions and heirlooms on to my children, and they to theirs. I could have written the words at any time, but only now do I really feel how much that means and how excited I am by the discoveries to be made.

It would be nice to have some of these stories recorded for posterity, especially as time marches on relentlessly. My plate is rather full at the moment, however. Next year, I'm sure I can make room for one more massive project.

Yes, next year I think I'll try my hand at annals.

This post should've been written and finished and posted somewhere around the 1st of January, as a sort of introduction to the new year. It seems to be a common trope that bloggers put up a list of what they will do in the coming year, and then review the list 12 months later. In a GTD kinda way, I can see the benefit, and as human beings it definitely helps to have hopes and dreams to provide a little direction to ones life.

The thing that's always made me pause over bullet pointed plans for the longer term has been that hopes and dreams were attached to educational success, career success and financial success, and therefore weren't long term at all. My formal education is over, I have a “permanent” job that I love and I'm comfortable with my bank balance.

So, now what?²⁾

Skipping over the first chapters and heading straight for the whodunnit-page: I really hope my new job stays every bit as exciting as I find it now. It's really given me a lot of energy that I wasn't ever sure I'd get back. Being in the wrong job really does affect you that much.

2009 was the Year of Music; which got off to a slow start, but has made me sort out a lot of things that I would otherwise have just not done. 2010 (that's twenty-ten: welcome to the future!) is to be the Year of Gaming. Video games, board games, card games, roleplaying games, and whatever kinky games I can get Pam to play now that she's got the promise of a ring! Although, forgive me if I don't write about those …

Specifically I'd like to start working on some chronicling of what I've played, and really examine what I like about a game, and what I don't like. I'm thinking about a new site to dump some of these critical ideas, and I think I may have found a use for Twitter, even! Coupled with this self-examination, I've been threatening to write a game or parts of a game for a while, but never quite gotten around to it. My programming skills are the best they've ever been, so this will be an excellent stretch for me, and could lead to some interesting discoveries.

I think originally, the Year of Music was intended to produce an album that I could be proud of - in reality what got kicked off and set up was much much bigger than I really planned for, and has paved the way for far more than just a handful of well recorded songs. Already plans are in the works for a digital pop act, song remixes, and alternative versions of our own songs.

So that's how you should view the Year of Gaming - a focal point for me to get my shit together and do all those things that have been bubbling away for too many years. I'm not going to list the specific things I want to get done, because that would mean knowing it all up front, so instead look out for more bits and pieces to come.

The crux of all of this, however, is ensuring that I'm not dropping one focus for another, but rather adding to that focus. Less specific to 2010, but specific to me, is that I see myself adding to the number of concurrent tasks I have, instead of trying to get them all “finished”. I'm testing myself to see how much I can make progress with at the same time before I'm overwhelmed. By increasing the number of focal points slowly, I'm hoping to not only get a lot of different things done but also stretch and train myself to be able to do more.

Game on.