Community Management

Keyword Essay

Community literacy often engages with literacy practices—written, oral, visual, technological, social, and so forth—that occur and are scaffolded outside of traditional educational institutions. The writing done in community literacy projects, according to Peck, Flower, and Higgins, works to promote action and reflection while enabling people to work collaboratively and productively. In recognition of the multiple forms of literate practices and the types of community support that are needed and developed, a number of universities in the US have created community literacy programs. Carnegie Mellon University’s Community Literacy Center, a notable example of this type of program, organizes the purposes and structural collaboration thusly: “At the Community Literacy Center (CLC) urban teens and adults, with the support of their Carnegie Mellon student mentors, use writing and public dialogue to take action and to address the dreams and problems of our urban neighborhoods. CLC writers produce powerful texts—petitions, plans, proposals, and newsletters” (“Hands On”). The benefit to both university students and community members is a collaborative workgroup dedicated to place-specific social action. Non-profit organizations have also formed, providing literacy support to particular communities, from Community Literacy Centers, Inc, which teaches adults to read, to Chicago’s Open Books, which runs a volunteer bookstore and provides reading and writing programs.

In the above examples, the underpinning definition of community is spatially defined; thus, community literacy programs belong to a particular city, neighborhood, or group of people. The challenge is attending to opt-in communities that are not geographically defined—communities that form in large part because of Internet access and continuous involvement in online, virtual spaces rather than material locations. Centers, then, are replaced by forums, wikis, and avatar-mediated conversations, and in this environment, community center teachers and organizers are replaced by community managers, those people who work at the intersection between IP holders and players, mediating literate practices, mentoring new people, and working with players to effect changes to the system.

Community managers, as the title indicates, emerge from the business world in attempt to build and maintain brand loyalty through cultivating a dedicated community through social media and live social events. In discussing the evolution of the community manager, Michlmayr writes, “The benefits of communities and the need to facilitate and manage them have given rise to the community manager position. [… The community manager] ensures that there is a healthy community around the project, interacts with users, developers and other stakeholders, and facilitates organizational aspects of the project” (23). This suggests that community managers are shills for the business world; however, as Bacon explains in The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation, “community managers may well need to step outside the traditional boundaries of the business world. For a community manager to really build a rapport with the community, he needs to fundamentally be a member of that community and exhibit the culture of that community” (471). And in her Forbes article, Jennifer Grayeb defines the four pillars of community management as growth, engagement, listening, and improvement. The growth of the community is the growth of the brand, but aside from that, the latter three pillars are familiar to us in community literacy, for they are concerned with the sustainability of an engaged community.

In Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) communities, in particular, community managers have a prominent role because the number of members makes the environment potentially too large and alienating. According to Humphreys, the community manager position answers the particular challenges of online community sustainability. He writes: “The creation of subscription based virtual game worlds has generated the creation of communities. How are these communities to be managed? Do game participants hold all the rights of an ordinary offline citizen—the right to the same protections and freedoms? Is a publisher under any obligation to treat the game world community fairly?” (14). World of Warcraft, for example, is often cited as a community-building game, which accounts for its financial success and longevity. This is evidenced in numerous places: In “An Online Community as a New Tribalism: The World of Warcraft,” Brignall and Van Valey argue, “Online communities offer individuals...