When we launched the Mozilla Creative Collective last August, our goal was to give artistically-inclined members of the Mozilla community a place to share their work. Since then, our artists have uploaded nearly 800 pieces, including some very unique and unexpected stuff…as always, seeing the community in action is a very awesome and inspiring thing.

One of my favorite Creative Collective artists is Hamu, who lives in Beijing and has posted 29 Firefox-inspired illustrations so far. His work is an interesting blend of and modern cartoons and traditional Chinese styles, so I decided to get in touch and find out more about his inspirations and process. He gave some great answers, so be sure to read the interview below and then check out his full gallery at the MCC.

Thanks Hamu!

When you start working on a new piece, what’s your artistic process like? Specifically, what about Firefox inspires you?

Well, as same as other artists, before painting I need some inspiration. Inspiration in my perspective means some human feeling from one’s daily life. When the inspiration is clear and definite in my mind, I will do some imagination to decide the overall composition and construction, then I will start painting.

Firefox comes from a worldwide community. I started my Internet browsing in 1997 and witnessed “The 1st Internet Browser War” between Internet Explore and Netscape. After that, this virtual world lost the balance – IE grew bigger and bigger, but it became worse and worse.

The rise of Firefox was like new blood giving this virtual world a rebirth. It has stimulated people’s creativity. The success of Firefox is a story happening in front of eyes. In the story, Firefox experienced failure, reflection, rebirth and eventually won. It encouraged me to keep creating something new.

One of my favorite pieces you’ve done is “Traditional Chinese Style” (annotated version shown above). What was the process like as you were creating that one? What do the various symbols and characters mean?

At the very beginning of my Mozilla Creative Collective life, I tried to do something different than others. I didn’t focus on the group of keywords like “5″, “birthday” and “anniversary” – instead, I tried to express the feeling from my daily life with Firefox during this five years. With “Traditional Chinese Style” I wanted to express that with Firefox we could freely do anything on the Internet, that there were no longer any restrictions on browsing.

I have heard that, 201 years ago, an American man named Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky – afterwards he proposed “The Emancipation Proclamation”, which gave hope to those black slaves and eventually he won the American Civil War. I have also heard that, 92 years ago, a Japanese man named Matsushita Konosuke used only 100 Japanese yuan and built the world famous corporation Panasonic. 16 years ago, a black African whose name is Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela ended the apartheid in South Africa and won in a fully representative democratic election. With a dream, a mortal will become a hero.

When I saw the notice of Firefox’s 5th anniversary, a Chinese proverb flashed in my mind: “海阔凭鱼跃，天空任鸟飞”. The direct translation is “the sea is wide enough that fish could swim to everywhere, the sky is wide enough that bird could fly to everywhere.” It comes from a Buddhist named 元览 (Yuan Lan) who lived in the 唐 (Tang) dynasty in China. He wrote “大海从鱼跃，长空任鸟飞” on a piece of bamboo to express his feeling. I translate this poetry as “With a dream, you could sail to everywhere you want; with a dream, you could fly to everywhere you like.” It’s a metaphor that one can be fully free to act, or freely demonstrate one’s abilities without constraints.

(editor’s note: here’s a larger version of the annotated image shown above)

Another one of my favorites is “Creative Pioneer: Protector“, which is very different from “Traditional Chinese Style”. What was your process and inspiration for that one?

All of my paintings are about my feelings. When I reviewed the past 10 years, I remembered some terrible experience at that chaos time – pop-up advertisements, unauthorized redirection, cookie tracking, malware…I think the role as a protector is the best way to represent Firefox, which has made your Internet browsing more safe, simple and secure.

If you have religious beliefs, in front of a huge statue you will find a piece of calm. So I decided to draw the Firefox as the sphinx – a huge protector who protects the tomb of the pharaoh. The feedback from visitors shows that people like the pictures with a intuitive meaning better than others, so I added some words for the major characters to help people understand it.

Lastly, what led you to become involved with Mozilla? And how did you find out about the Creative Collective?

The biggest attraction for me is the various communities of Mozilla. Here, I found many people who have the same hobbies with me. We communicate with our designs and share these to the others. It opened my eyes and let me learn a lot things which I didn’t know before. The Creative Collective is one of the web sites which I visit frequently. I heard about it when I looked for some news about Mozilla on mozilla.org and found a link about the 5th anniversary design challenge. As I said before, when I saw these words at a glance inspiration flashed in my mind. I signed up for an account immediately and started my Creative Collective life then.

Tell us about what your role is at Digg. What do you do there, and what’s a typical day like?

Sure – the community manager role at Digg encompasses (at least) three different areas: product management & strategy, product marketing & outreach, and finally representing the community. My typical day involves a quick scan through Google reader, checking in with my team to see what’s been up on the site or in emails and several meetings. I work closely with product management, QA and dev as most pushes are forward facing so it’s important that my team and I are aware of any changes coming down. The Digg community will definitely let us know how they feel about feature releases so I want to be prepared.

Obviously the entire Digg site is one big community interaction point, but what are the primary ways you engage with your community? Both in terms of hearing incoming feedback as well as communicating outwardly to them, that is.

We use several different vehicles to communicate: Twitter.com/digg for product, feature or event announcements, Twitter.com/digg_community to respond to people who have mentioned troubles or bugs on Twitter, Facebook.com/digg – mostly as an awareness vehicle by highlighting popular stories on Digg & through our blog – blog.digg.com. I tend to communicate with the community in comments on Digg stories to help educate or soothe swells.

We (my team) and I keep up with Digg mentions on Twitter as well as blog posts (larger media outlets are handled via our PR team) and we certainly keep an eye out for submissions on Digg about Digg. I’m starting to mess around with Facebook’s new status update search, but haven’t quite found value in it yet – I know it’s there, though.

How much of a role does your community play in setting your agenda when you work on product updates, new features and things like that?

We have the benefit of playing a decent-sized role – my team collects user feedback and presents to product once a week – because we represent the community inside Digg different groups here look to us for guidance – everyone from Ad Sales to R&D. Because I have a background in product management, I can’t seem to keep my hands out of that function so I often end up butting in to their realm on a regular basis.

When you spoke at the Good Ideas Salon, you talked a bit about Digg’s mission…could you share that here? And how does the community help shape and promote your mission?

Our mission is to be the place where people share and discover content online – the community is the backbone of that mission – I see the community as Digg’s chief product. So, the mission is designed to give the masses voice where with traditional media, they (we) had none. Digg has changed the way information is shared online in a broad sense & in a narrower sense, has allowed individuals to impact what is “news” or simply just worth sharing with millions. it’s an incredible feeling to have a story hit the homepage of Digg.

Yeah, we definitely get excited when we make your homepage…it’s amazing to watch that momentum kick in.

Totally.

Going back a bit, when Digg first started you were doing something really new…this was before the whole community model was as prevalent as it is now. How did you guys start to build up the community and get that momentum going?

The community at Digg truly grew organically (back in the day, Kevin wore the community manager hat). Digg was a niche site focused mostly on tech industry news so the community members already had something in common, but were fewer in number. As awareness grew (word of mouth – we’ve never had a traditional marketing campaign) the tech nature was diluted a bit and we added categories like World & Business and Entertainment. By branching out we’re able to better serve a broader community which has resulted in larger numbers for sure.

We’ve since added the Digg Dialogg program which has driven a lot of awareness for us. For example, we’re currently accepting questions for a Dialogg with US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in conjunction with the WSJ – my dad received notice of the Dialogg via a WSJ marketing email and ended up signing up for Digg (I don’t think he’d ever been to the site before then).

Regarding your growth, what are the challenges you face having a bigger community? I know that people can be unruly…is it hard to keep them focused or active in the ways that you’d like?

Yea – managing communities at scale is hard – we have a human touch on things like comments and comment moderation so scaling that is difficult and sometimes means that we’re going to miss some bad comments. We don’t, though, want to move into a fully automated world where a machine is decided when a commenter has crossed the line. So that’s the first challenge.

Another challenge is that the discussions on Digg can seem truly overwhelming to newcomers. There are always going to be people who want a more intimate environment than one with 2,000+ comments. Keeping those folks (the intimate types) engaged is more difficult at scale. We’re working on some changes to the site that will help micro-communities grow & I think we’ll see increased engagement – both on the story and comments level.

How do you maintain that human touch? That’s always what I struggle with in our community activities – it’s so important, yet can be so time-consuming.

No doubt – super time consuming. One of the guys on my team is a programmer by training so he’s built some pretty cool tools for us (which is nice in a startup so we didn’t have struggle against public facing feature dev priorities) that allow us to search for keywords, we use another report that shows us all the users that have been reported by other users and evaluate situations from there.

We simply can’t get to them all, though, so we also use a tool that allows us to put commenters in “timeout” for varying lengths of time. This is super helpful when it’s obvious someone is just fired up and needs some time to cool off – we don’t want to ban them, but we want them to walk away for a bit. Works wonders.

But – everything is done by hand – comment deletions, account bans, etc. We also work 24-7 so there’s not a time when trolls or spammers have free reign on the site.

Wow! How many people are on your team? Do you literally do shifts to cover the 24-7 aspect?

Yep – and, I only have 5 people on my team.

Impressive!

Yeah, they are awesome. Super committed and hard working – Digg would be a much different place without them.

Do you have any sort of guidelines posted to help set parameters for community activity? We launched the our creative community’s beta site yesterday and one thing I’m realizing is that we need to be a lot more clear about what the expectations are.

Yep – we have a simple set at Digg.com/guidelines that I wrote with a member of my team. Of course the TOS is the ultimate set but it’s super lawyerly and hard for folks to digest.

Do you refer troublesome people there often?

We do – of course my team and I know who most of the rabble-rousers are by name and email address. I do work with both R&D and product on abuse-prevention initiatives and features so we’re pretty well-versed in common ways people cause trouble on the site. But at the end of the day, it’s important to remember that the trouble makers are a tiny percentage and that we don’t want to tailor the experience on Digg to simply prevent them from getting up to no good. Have to remember the greater good and all that.

Good point! I could probably ask you questions all afternoon, but in the interest of not taking up TOO much of your time I’ll wrap things up. What are the ways the Digg community surprises you? Or makes you happy? Or amazes you? I remember you gave some good examples at the Good Ideas Salon.

Totally – let me grab the links for you…

One good example starts with one where the community sang Bohemian Rhapsody line by line in the comments, then another user mashed that thread up with the song to create a video.

On a personal note, I was really touched by the comments on this story: http://digg.com/pets_animals/Koala_survives_Australian_fire_shares_firefighter_s_water

Ok, last question: what advice would you have to people (me, for example) building a community online?

It’s important to be a part of the community – literally participating with the members – commenting, contributing etc. People need a champion – and as a CM for a new community, you’ll be that person. Once the community ramps up it’s important to step back enough to let the community start doing the driving and talking. Remaining open to surprise will go a long way in making your job enjoyable.

What not to do: talk down to them, stop listening, leave them hanging or blame them for any failures.

One last thing – be their advocate.

Thank you so much for your time! it’s been really interesting, and I’m sure others at Mozilla will enjoy it too.

As someone who knows the ins and outs of building an online community of artists, Tim’s advice was particularly relevant to what we’re trying to do with the Mozilla Creative Collective and our conversation, held over IM a few weeks ago, is transcribed below (with my questions in bold). Read on and enjoy, and thanks very much to Tim for sharing his time and expertise.

How did you get started with Infectious? What was your inspiration for doing it?

The truth is, I had a friend who decided to have a muralist paint his car. This was back in around 2001 and we all thought his was kinda nuts. Then we’d ride around San Francisco in this ridiculous Honda Civic with a pastoral Spanish landscape all over the car and it was a fascinating experience…everywhere you went you ended up in conversations with people about it and the reactions people had were just amazing.

So, it got me thinking about art and surfaces and expression and the social interactions created by mixing these together. Those were the earliest seeds of Infectious.

It was a few more years before you actually started the company, though. Were you just waiting for the right time to get it going, or was there another moment where you realized it could be a good business?

I started playing around with the idea and researching materials during nights and weekends, figuring out if there was something there, and during that time i was also cueing in on how these same variables (art, surfaces and expression) were manifesting on the web (Threadless being one of my heroes).

It was the intersection of these two things that made Infectious start to feel more real…like there was something there. So it was really just an idea I was obsessed with for many years, and annoyed most of my friends with by talking about it obsessively and brainstorming out loud to whoever would listen. Then I finally hit the moment where I realized I had to either take the leap or shut up. At that point I realized I had to go forward, since the ‘what if’ question would have driven me nuts.

At what point did you start getting artists involved? And how did you do that? You’ve built up a great community at Infectious.

We started with the car art or car decals. We always had the vision of a larger product line, but the idea of car art was where the concept started and it was very novel. No one had done anything quite like it, so we started to create a site for community created car art and then we realized ‘oh wait… no one knows how to design car art’. We weren’t even sure what the specs were: how big could you make these things? What resolution was required? How complicated could the cut lines be? And so on…

We quickly realized before we could get open community involved in anything we needed a core catalog so people could see products and get the basic idea, and ideally that catalog would come from inspirational artists. We set out to recruit the artists we loved, and took a very personal approach to it.

That was just months of discussion, research, courting and explaining the idea to various artists. It probably took us 9 months to get the first 15 artists…was really hard, but the more artists joined us, the easier it got.

Was there a tipping point where you realized your artist community was big enough that people were coming to you, rather than you going to them?

Mmm…I think it has been an evolution. In the beginning we dreamed about the days when that would happen. We definitely have many artists coming to us on a daily basis now, but we still do lots of proactive outreach and I imagine we always will. Building community is very much of a dialog.

Do you have a philosophy for attracting artists? What’s your sales pitch?

There are some core principles we have…

We existing to replace blank spaces with art and creativity. We think about ourselves as a platform for artists…we try to make them the celebrities of Infectious. We only sell pieces on the site that an artist loves. (This may seem obvious…but it’s surprising how many times companies will mess with an artist’s work.)

If an artist doesn’t like something we work hard to make sure they are happy. We don’t own artists’ work… we just license it. And finally we don’t mess with their $$. There are so many stories of artists getting screwed over on royalties or late payments so we try to be really on top of taking care of that stuff.

Are the artists generally pretty receptive, or do you have to do a lot of selling? When you first contact them, that is.

It varies. I guess like any relationship, sometimes we fall in love instantly and sometimes relationships are developed from months of courtship.

You’ve been in the online world for awhile now – have you noticed any differences between building a community focused on artists vs any other type of online community? Are there different rules to follow, or issues to overcome?

Hmmm. I guess I can only speak to this anecdotally, but i feel like building community with artists is harder. Getting people engaged can be tougher, but once engaged, it is a deeper and more sincere level of engagement. You’re asking people to participate in very thoughtful and creative ways, which is precisely why it is harder. I think it also means you need to treat that participation with more respect and appreciation.

Do you have any can’t-miss tips for someone starting an online design community? Words of wisdom?

Persistence and sincerity.

Care to elaborate?

Building a design community requires commitment. It’s something that needs daily attention and involvement. It is essentially building relationships in a world where there are lots of other things competing for the time and attention of creative people out there. You need to commit to that relationship a long time before the community commits to you.

By sincerity, I just believe that people are good at smelling BS. They want to be part of communities with people from companies, not companies. Infectious is built with a voice and communication philosophy that tries to be truly our voice, not something contrived or invented. It might turn some people off, but it’s pretty real.

Great advice, thanks. In terms of building a community, it seems like it requires some combination of having the right product (an interesting concept), the right technology (website and tools to make it happen) and the right promotion (spreading the word, getting people involved)…are those equally balanced, or does one stand out to you as being the most important?

I think there are even more you can throw in there, like the right incentives and the right mix of people in the community, but out of everything I would say that the most important thing is something really creatively engaging. Something that makes a light go off in a designer’s head somewhere, that makes them stay up all night because they are excited about the idea.

If you can make that light go off in someone’s head they’ll work through bad website design and proceed to tell the world for you. Not that i advocate bad website design or ignoring promotion, because they are critical, but they gotta be built on a foundation of inspired creativity.

And how do you guys deal with things like inappropriate submissions, trademark violations and other pitfalls of the trade?

We review all submissions and use our judgment as best possible. Most of the cases when this stuff pops up, it tends to be pretty flagrant, like porn or a real obvious copyright ripoff. Those are easy. We’ve been lucky to not have had too many hard times with it yet

So, in closing…what’s next for Infectious? Where do you guys go from here?

We see the world as blank spaces that are opportunities for creativity. For us to effectively cover more of the world with art, there are a few things we need to do…get more artists, designers, illustrators and photographers joining us and contributing their creativity. We need to extend that artwork onto more and more products/surfaces, either on our own or though partnerships with companies that make products in need of art. And finally, building awareness for Infectious with consumers. We, of course, want to get as much Infectious art out there as possible.

Great stuff – thanks very much for your time!

Our chat took place a weeks ago over IM, with my comments in bold…and big thanks to Tyler for his time and wisdom:

So way back in the old days when blogs weren’t in the mainstream (and required a decent amount of know-how even to set up) you started up the Athletics Nation site. What was your inspiration for doing that, and what were your goals when you were getting it going?

My inspiration came from feeling alienated as an Oakland Athletics fan. I couldn’t seem to find enough coverage of it. My appetite was insatiable and I had a degree in journalism. So my friend encouraged me to start a blog.

Truthfully, I think he was largely tired of hearing me talk about Eric Chavez’s potential and whether he’d ever reach it or not. So he, being a blogger himself, encouraged me to start Athletics Nation. I had no idea if anyone would show up but thankfully people did, and quickly.

Do you think there’s a direct correlation between the lack of A’s coverage that was frustrating you and the success of your site?

I think so, because I think as companies like ESPN got bigger and bigger over the years, they started ignoring a huge segment of the population of sports fans. A’s fans, Royals fans, Tampa Bay Lightning fans, Cleveland Browns fans, we were all in the same boat. Our needs were being ignored by other traditional media companies in favor of scandal (Barry Bonds, Terrell Owens) and the East Coast media bias.

That’s interesting – I see a Mozilla parallel right away, in the sense that there was a pent up demand for a new browser before Firefox launched, thanks to several years of Microsoft dominance and inactivity. Anyway, when you started the site, what were your expectations? And how did you promote it?

I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I thought I might just be preaching to myself and no one else. But when people started showing up on my little Typepad site, I realized that there were a lot of people just as frustrated. And the A’s weren’t just ignored by the national media, they were ignored in their own backyard because of KNBR-AM, the huge sports talk station in town also ignored them in favor of the cross-Bay rivals, the Giants.

I was thrilled that so many people had the same perception that I did. So my friend and I realized that there was a business opportunity there. We went ahead and surveyed the baseball blogosphere at the time, which wasn’t incredibly well developed. But there were a lot of great blogs out there. I started recruiting on a vision that we would be stronger as a collective rather than individuals.

I read an interesting quote from your friend Markos in a New York Times article about SB Nation: “There are some parallels [to other blog networks]. But none of them are building community. At the end of the day, our company is going to sink or swim on how well we can build community.” How big a role did this notion of building a community play in your success?

Well, we try and do more than just exist in the sphere of the site. Every year I have Athletics Nation Day where we have hundreds of people get together at the Coliseum and attend a game. You get to know the person as well as the screen name. We try and foster a sense of belonging.

As long as you love the green and gold, we’re going to love you, and I think so many of our sites have taken that exact approach. Athletics Nation truly was the model for a good deal of our now 200 sites.

Was this whole emphasis on community-building something you consciously planned out, or did it happen organically in the process of creating the site and filling that void?

As for the community building, that was something we knew would be important from the very beginning. In order for our sites to sink or swim, it was going to be dependent on people showing up and interacting. If they didn’t, many a community has died a rapid death.

As someone who has personally built up or fostered many successful online communities, what advice would you give on the best way to do that?

Truthfully the best way to do that is to be yourself but also have a genuine approach that you care what the people who visit your communities want to discuss. Ask them questions and don’t just believe that your belief is always the only way. I think a lot of bloggers get into it to stand on their soapbox and while that’s a part of it, your audience often has great contributions as well.

Do you have a sense of what people are looking for (consciously or not) when they become part of an online community? And I mean that not in a specific way like “being an A’s fan” but in a more general sense…

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think people are just looking for a place that has honest opinion and someplace that also regulates the community as well. It basically forces people to treat each other with respect. A place that doesn’t tolerate the old message board, wild, wild west mentality of saying anything to anyone.

How do you maintain that? The openness + level of respect, that is…a lot of sites aren’t as successful in doing that and basically devolve into a lot of pretty unpleasant comments and chatter.

Well you need to be really clear about the community guidelines. Put them up front and even implement a system to monitor them. At Athletics Nation we use a three strikes rule, which is appropriate for baseball. And it’s monitored by their peers among the community.

In terms of looking at your success and how you’ve built up these communities, how would you describe the balance between technology (as in the blogging platform and the ability to have community policing of the comments, like you described) marketing (generally spreading the word) and the product itself (the content on your blogs)? In other words, what role have each of those elements had? Is one more important than the other? How do they fit together?

I think you have to balance them all. They’re all really important. The technology enables our bloggers, but without a really strong blogger who knows how to build community the technology wouldn’t create the community on its own. It’s all stuff that run hand in hand.

Where do you see SB Nation going from here? Do you have goals you haven’t met yet?

Oh yeah. I started the company to be the number one online sports destination for fans of any team and any sport. And until we get there, I won’t be satisfied. The company started in 2003 with the launch of Athletics Nation and I really think that we can get to where we need to be. I’ve never been more positive about it.

Great stuff. Any final words you’d like to share? Pieces of advice? A message to Mozilla?

Here’s my message to Mozilla: keep adding kickass features to Firefox. I’m a big time fan.

Thanks…and we will!

Our recent conversation (held over IM) is below, with my questions in bold. Read on and enjoy…and many, many thanks to Markos for taking time out of his busy day to share his knowledge.

I read an interesting quote from you about open source: “Open source politics, open source activism, open source journalism — the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause. Bloggers and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited.” That was back in early 2005…how has the open source movement changed things in the last 4 years?

We have a black president with the middle name of “Hussein.” That was kind of big.

Do you think that would have been possible without open source and the culture around it?

Nope. On Daily Kos, my copyright notice used to be “steal what you want” until someone pointed out that they could steal my trademarked name “Daily Kos” and get away with it. So I had to tighten my copyright notice a bit, but it still allows people to use whatever they want from the site for any reason. I don’t care about attribution or compensation, I just care about getting the word out. I think it’s an ethos that has allowed our little movement to grow exponentially at a time that traditional media, and their closed system, is atrophying.

You see that mostly in people’s desire for aggregation. The old media propensity for hoarding its content, and refusing to acknowledge or reference that of their competitors, made them vulnerable to people like me and Google News who are about giving people what THEY want.

It’s interesting how you see that same pattern repeating itself in so many areas – you could say the same thing about Microsoft and Mozilla, for example.

Of course. I wonder if anyone would choose a MS browser if it didn’t already come pre-installed on their PCs.

When you started the Daily Kos site, the whole notion of blogging and even building communities online was still pretty new. What were your expectations when you started the site?

None. The biggest liberal blog at the time I think was Atrios, and it was getting maybe 600 visits a day. There were some other “big” liberal sites like Media Whores Online, but they didn’t have traffic stats or comments. So, those of us writing at the time couldn’t possibly have expectations of anything. There just weren’t any examples of anyone striking it big with the medium.

What prompted you to start it, then?

Frustration that liberal voices were completely absent in the traditional media. As much as conservatives whine about “liberal media”, the post-9/11 media environment was one big infomercial for George Bush and his pet war in Iraq. For anti-war voices, they would purposefully find marginalized figures, like Janeane Garofalo. “Serious” people knew Bush was right and had to have unfettered power to do what he needed to do. And people like me scratched our heads and wondered where all the sanity had gone.

At what point did you start to sense that the site was moving from you just publishing blog posts to a genuine community of people? And was that something you had set out to do, or did it just happen organically?

Kind of instantly. I watched other political communities self-destruct. First was Delphi forums during the 2000 prez race, then a dude named Olivetti who quit. Then Taegan Goodard’s Political Wire which had comments at the time, then MyDD…and all of these sites were overrun by flame wars between partisans of both sides to the point their proprietors shut down the sites in frustration (well, not Delphi, they just became obsolete). When MyDD shut down its comments in late 2002, I think it was, everyone rushed over to Daily Kos.

Having learned from the failures of the others, I immediately announced that dKos was a progressive community, and that conservatives would be on a short leash. There was a lot of crying about “free speech” and whatnot, but I made clear that cons had plenty of places to go online – Free Republic, Lucianne, etc – and liberals didn’t, and that Daily Kos would be a safe haven for progressives. I aggressively cleaned out the conservative troublemakers, and what do you know, liberals liked their little safe haven

Having been through the process more than once now – both with the Daily Kos and the SB Nation sites – what would you say the keys to building a community online are?

A safe community environment, and patience. Like a city, if you grow too quickly, it fractures the community. The best growth is organic. Of course, the Huffington Post might prove otherwise, but I still believe very strongly in organic growth.

Can you explain by what you mean by ’safe’?

A place where like-minded folks can get together and discuss and argue about whatever their passions might be. For Daily Kos, that meant creating a place where liberals could gather without being harassed by people who wished them ill. For Sports Blogs, that means Red Sox fans talking and debating their favorite team without dealing with heckling from Yankees fans…and vice versa.

What about disagreements among people in your community? People who might be in the same general ballpark politically, but start name-calling or causing trouble over smaller matters. Or, in my case it might be a matter of someone saying something like “Your design sucks…you don’t know what you’re doing.”

That’s an entirely different problem. At Daily Kos, we’ve sort of ignored that stuff, though now we have a “director of community” — a longtime trusted editor — who is becoming more proactive in engaging in such disagreements before they spiral out of control. But yeah, people are ruder online than they’d be meeting in person, and it’s certainly a challenge for any community.

Do you have any general tips or advice you’d give to people looking to build communities online? What should or shouldn’t they be doing?

That’s a tough one, since I’m not sure how much of my success has been luck, and how much has been skill, but finding a niche that isn’t oversaturated is key. At SB Nation, we’ve been more successful in markets without well-established players. If someone has the juice, it’s tough to come in and build success. Even in 2002, when I started, the Bush-bashing blogosphere was full enough. My niche was elections, and I did that well enough that it kick started the site.

Second, look for a spark that will kick you off. For me it was the Iraq War. I was a rare vet in the political scene able to intelligently speak about military matters from personal experience, so I benefited from my informed commentary at the time and people gave me respect due to my military background.

Three, (and there aren’t in any thought-out order), be patient. Unless you are Arianna Huffington with a few tens of millions to throw at marketing efforts (and an amazing ability to get booked on every show imaginable), things will take time. At SB Nation, we’ve found a 1-2 year ramp up period for our successful sites, and that’s with kick ass community-centric software driving those sites.

Four, have good technology. Lots of off-the-shelf tech will get you off the ground, but at some point, you may want to think about how to best serve your own unique community. Originally, I thought about trying to save on the development of the next version of Daily Kos by borrowing heavily from development work on the SB Nation platform, but then realized both types of communities had HUGELY different needs.

Five, despite what I’ve said about my importance vis-a-vis community, you have to have a strong commanding voice that makes people want to return and hear more. People originally came to Daily Kos because I offered combative electoral analysis with an edge, and eventually stayed because of the community.

And lastly (I think), the way your site looks is important. Brand. When I started, I’d go to a site, read something interesting, and then forget what it was so I couldn’t return. All the sites looked the same, blue, using stock templates, etc. With Daily Kos, I had memorable imagery — the flag guy, the vivid oranges, etc. Lots of people hate the site’s coloring, but damn if it isn’t memorable. Daily Kos looks like nothing else on the web, and that strong branding has been a huge help in not just building my intitial audience, but building the credibility and respect that has helped grow it.

That’s really great advice! Going back to the concept and ideas of open source, what happens next? In terms of cultural, political, social impact, that is.

It just happens. I know old media is desperate to try and find a way to halt their decline, and have all sorts of crazy ideas and strategies, but in the end, the world changes and if you don’t adapt, you perish. Since open source is in essence a reflection of the popular will (people are directly engaging, bypassing traditional gatekeepers), it will always remain relevant. It’s up to other institutions to adapt to changing norms to try and stay relevant. Apple has been very good at this, Microsoft not so much.

I’m in the midst of a grounds-up redevelopment of Daily Kos that will hopefully be even more empowering to my community. If it was just about me, the current site gives me all the pedestal I’d ever need. But, the community can always do more if it has the right tools, and so I’m embarking on this major (and dangerous) project to try and give them even more ability to shape the direction of the site.

Care to share any hints on what that’s going to be like?

People want to be empowered, and open source allows that. It’s why we’ve seen so many successes in that realm. I can either try to ignore that trend, stand in its way, or embrace it. Currently, community members are limited to just a single diary a day, everyone shows up on the front page, even if just a few minutes, and they’re unable to work together without using outside tools (like Google groups, etc).

DK4 (the new version, due out in Q4) will allow people to host their blogs on Daily Kos (like blogspot), create group blogs, and there’ll be tools for internal communications and collaboration. So, no limits on writing, but at the cost of front-page access — the recent diaries list would scroll faster than a stock ticker. So we’ll have tools to find the best material and feature it on the front page (and some of that stuff in even more prominent positioning than is currently the case). Some of those tools will be software, others will be human editors.

It’s a very community-centric upgrade, which makes me excited. I long ago learned that my success doesn’t stem from my own writing, but from my acknowledgment of the power and importance of community.

This has been really interesting stuff, and I appreciate it a lot. I know others will really enjoy reading this as well – thanks for all the other words of wisdom.