Bruno

Perhaps a rather touchy subject to be writing about, but let's be honest, the world is not all sunshine and rainbows. And if I am going to write about running SRP, I can hardly pretend that this subject is not a big elephant in the room that noone usually talks about. To be honest, there is a reason we don't usually talk about it.

Let's start with a simple axiom: the people that make up the membership of an online community are no different from the people that make up the actual real life community. That seems obvious, right? It has several implications, only one of which I will touch here.

Why are there multiple communities covering the same topic

All English-language shaving sites I know covering straight razor shaving were started by people who were first member of another shaving forum, and following the lineage of the various communities, I end up here, at SRP. Given that fact, we first need to look at the reason those other forums exist.

Btw, while I mention straight razor communities, and we can all related to that, the same processes exist in other communities. The various BSD Unix flavors, technical sites, Martial Arts forums, Wikipedia and Citizendium, etc. It is in the nature of communities to split and to proliferate.

Change
In my previous blog post I mentioned that the founder of the board should ask himself what people he is looking for the build a community, and what their purpose should be. If he is successful, he will gather a growing community around him. Stagnant or stable communities don't require change. Growing communities do.

For example: initially, buying and selling on this site was done in a 'Buy, Sell, Trade' forum. It had a cosy atmosphere, and there were no real rules about how business should be conducted. Everyone here knew each other, and we were all here for the passion of our hobby, not for making profit. Eventually we had to institute some rules about conducting business, because some members started using it as a personal storefront, caring only about making a quick buck. And some time after that, traffic in that forum got so huge (and intermingled with sales discussion) that it became unusable and we replaced it with the classifieds. And we instituted a vendor group for people who have a dedicated webstore, etc. Lots of change, and that is just one aspect of our site

Now, people are people, and people generally don't like change. Sometimes they understand why it is necessary, and sometimes they really don't agree with the direction in which a community is evolving. If that feeling goes deep enough, some people will leave their original community, and found their own, based on their sense of how they think a community should grow or should be organized or focused.

Conflict
A less pleasant reason for people to break away is through personal conflict or disagreement. This is something that sadly is unavoidable. Whenever you have a group of people, not everyone likes every other person the same. Some personalities are bound to collide. Strong personalities that disagree on something will either just part ways out of disenfranchisement, or because they had a falling out over some issue or other.

If the person leaving the original site feels really strongly about the site topic, he might start a new community based on his vision of how things should be done. And that will be the birth of another break away community.

Even though this separation might be accompanied by negative emotion, you cannot point to each of the individuals involved and say 'he is wrong, he is right' or 'he is good he is bad'. From what I have witnessed it is usually a case of 2 decent people with a strong personality clashing over something. That doesn't make any of them less honorable.

Where does that leave us?
There are multiple forums covering the same topic, and sometimes if people split away, this can be accompanied by negative feelings. And sometimes there remain tensions between the owners of the places where those communities reside. However, generally the membership of those sites are not really interested in the underlying politics, and there is usually a significant overlap of those communities. Many people who are member in one communities are also member of other communities.

Given that the people in the community don't really care, I think it is important for the people running the community (the owner and staff) to remain a-political and refrain from commenting on each other in public. It only works counter productive for everyone involved, and only serves to annoy the people who don't care: the members.

Apart from that, I also try not to let any of these issues guide any of the decisions we make. Our first concern should always be the community topic. I our case, straight razors. If we make decisions for any reason other than our focus (such as political reasons), then by definition we start making wrong decisions, and we end up shooting ourselves in our feet.