Olle Pridiuksson

Question to #communitybuilders: Do all communities have a "Benevolent Dictator for Life"? ie a central charismatic personality that community coalesces around(typical in open source) For ex., at @IndieHackers it would be @ChanningAllen at first, with @rosiesherry sharing role

let me tell about a community I built in 2003, I think. It was an IRC channel =] the op (admin) was a... bot called miss_jane and everyone identifying as woman was getting a moderator status. I wrote lots of conversations script for the bot to engage with the community, but /1

also some people could speak from her name. So actual community driving people were changing over time, but it was perceived as miss_jane was the leader (although it was obvious she was a bot and somebody was controlling her) and people loved her. The bit with women-only /2

moderating team also worked well, since back in the days it were mostly young dudes in the chats and there were no codes of conducts yet. And the channel was generic-purpose, no special interest. /3 - end