Four years ago, on a hot summer day, I was bored and decided to start a new website. This particular website was intended to be a community space and publishing venue for writers. I gathered up a few friends to help me sculpt it and get the word out, and together, we named it The Writ.
The Writ had massive ambitions and zero budget. For the first four months, it survived entirely on coffee, cigarettes, insomnia, optimism, and keg party marketing. When its membership jumped from 4 to 100, we were beside ourselves with shock. When we secured a $1200 grant to help with the web programming, we felt like we’d won the lottery. When we found a guy in Romania who promised to build us every web feature we ever dreamed of for $1200, we were certain that literary world domination was well within reach.
And then, when we all burned out from volunteer hours and discovered that Mr. Romania wasn’t the programmer of our dreams, we quietly admitted failure, gave up on the project, and moved on. It would die, we figured, without us — but hey, it was fun while it lasted.
So when the damned thing refused to die, we didn’t quite know what to do about it. There it was, living on without leadership or maintenance, with broken features and mysterious glitches, with ugly designs and spam-bloated forums, and with a passion and force that made absolutely no sense to us at all. New members were signing up. People were posting writing. People were commenting on each others’ work. People were creating community.
And that’s how I know I didn’t get it. In all my pride and ambition, I had missed the point entirely. It wasn’t about making things bigger and better. It wasn’t about creating a sustainable revenue model, or establishing a fancy brand, or extending deeper into the community. And it most certainly wasn’t about us.
The Writ now has over 5,500 members. People post new writing every day, and most pieces receive constructive feedback from readers. Over the last four years, several people have stepped up to take the leadership reigns and in doing so sparked new life into the community. But that role is too taxing to sustain long-term as a volunteer without a programming staff, and its presence is usually short-lived.
Does that matter? Not as much as we thought it would. The community members don’t really care if they have a leader or not. All they care about is being able to show up, share their stuff, and connect.
That’s it.
Posted in Community, My Projects, Webmaster Stuff | 
4 Comments » | December 17th, 2007