OGDC: The Importance of Community (a new hope)

The inaugural OGDC conference in Seattle last week was a great success:  well attended, but small enough to enable a sense of common identity and purpose, a feeling that we were all in it together.  The industry participants were from a number of studios and technology companies, and the panels and presentations were very strong and informative and, amazingly enough, several voices called out for recognition of the role of community and community managers.   

I mean, this is the sort of message that community managers have been trying to get out there forever?  We know that interacting with our communities has hugely positive effects, and that a successful MMO means building long-term relationships with our participants.  Customer feedback provides critical information for the evolution of an MMO, and a good community manager can not only manage the relationship with the users/customers/participants to encourage positive social interactions, s/he can also provide hugely valuable information about the character of the community, the culture, preferences, input etc.

And the good news is that those years of being voices crying out in the wilderness seem to be finally ending - several of the speakers at the conference made strong points, from different perspectives, about the importance of community and recognizing the role of community managers.  Erik Bethke, Founder of Gopets*, spoke of the need for strong community management, Constance Steinkeuhler and David Simkins did a presentation on social networking and the online social space as the "Third Place" (which I did not attend, alas - conflicts with Xeodesign's Nicole Lazzaro's talk on emotion and fun - more on that tomorrow), Lisa Galarneau spoke of the importance of including ethnography in design (her research is as a participant observer in City of Heroes) - a view of the cultural aspects of online community which I very much agreed with and enjoyed - there were two community panels led by Kaneva's Rich Weil, always good stuff, and Brett Close of 38 Studios spoke of how closely his development team worked with their community managers from the beginning of the design process.  He even looked surprized when I mentioned that other teams often didn't integrate so thoroughly with their community folks (losing lots of good input in the process).

All in all it was really exciting- some really good presentations... and some really consistent indications that the importance of good community management is being understood, and that we are coming around to exploring online community in terms of culture.

* rather than put in all the individual links, you can follow up on the participants at OGDC at http://www.ogdc2007.com/