Are You on Craig's List?

So the way to build a community is to give people information.

Actually, the most poignant use of Web community is when you give people a voice. And if you provide the right kind of forum, anyone can have a voice. In any large organization, whether it's a company or a part of the government, the people on the front lines know how to do things well. But the nature of large organizations is that they stifle those people. Over time, these people give up trying to be heard because they have the sense that no one is listening.

In that sense, community is about connecting people who need a break with people who might be able to give them one. It's all about people helping one another. This idea is not new. For a long time, people in technology have been helping others online. You ask a question, you get an answer. It's a pretty good deal. When you go to a technical conference and read someone's name tag, you may realize that you're meeting someone who may have helped you a year ago, or someone whom you've helped.

What are some pitfalls as you try to create a community?

Scale is one. Web sites that attempt to build community quickly on a grand scale will not succeed. People in different areas and in different cultures know what's right for their areas and cultures. It is possible to create a big community site, but it has to be a network of affinity groups -- a community of communities.

Some big "communities" are basically collections of free home pages. But these sites aren't communities if people aren't interacting with one another. I don't hear about anyone who is passionate about these big sites. It may be because people perceive big sites as merely a way to sell ads. I have nothing against commercialism; everyone should get rich on the Web. But people will accept commercialism in a community only if they think they're getting a fair exchange of value in return.

What are some other challenges?

One is the "tragedy of the commons." It's a term that describes what happens when you have a limited resource, but there's no controlled access to that resource -- like a field that has a common grazing area for sheep. If too many ranchers use that field, then it becomes overgrazed and doesn't work for anyone. To some extent, that's what has happened to Usenet, the early newsgroups on the Internet. Take one of the 50,000 groups, like "Bay Area Jobs Offered." Recruiters just dump in listings to collect résumés. It's impossible to distinguish real jobs from headhunters' come-ons.

This is one of the hazards of not having moderation -- there's no quality control. Also, most communities need to be moderators to keep the momentum going. The discussion needs to be encouraged and directed in some way. At craigslist, we avoid the tragedy of the commons through very light moderation. Between light moderation and self-policing, the quality of what's on the list remains very high, and it doesn't get overrun. And when a category does become overrun, such as engineering, we'll split it off into different categories -- for example, Web-building jobs and system-administration jobs.

What other advice can you give aspiring Web organizers?

You've got to keep it real. That means being down-to-earth and open. And it means no hidden agendas. In our case, that means not using the community stuff as a way of selling ads, or selling anything else.

I spend lots of time maintaining the trusted relationship we have with everyone who uses craigslist. We don't even know how many visitors come to our site, because we don't use "cookies." We never sell any of our mailing lists or anything personal about visitors to our site. That's because the foundation of the community is that trust.

Another way we keep it real is with the name. I was embarrassed to call it craigslist, and I still am, but people want something personal. They want something that feels real.

What can traditional companies learn from the community that you have created?

They can learn how to improve their customer service. At craigslist, we do customer service, which, to the best of my knowledge, far exceeds the vast majority of for-profit businesses. We tell the community about the changes that we're going to make on the site before we make them. And we solicit feedback from all our customers -- subscribers and people who just visit our site. Once a month, we ask them how we're doing. We actually change our site in response to what members of the community request. We ask people all the time if we're doing our job right, and if we're not, we change.

For example, we'd thought about adding chat, but our community told us that there are already lots of places to chat on the Net, so we didn't do it. That's not what they wanted. Sponsorships are another great example. People are telling us that the very lightest of sponsorships or underwriting is cool, but it has to be very light. So we may do our first real example of that soon.