How do you keep a project’s culture true to its core principles when it’s faced with overwhelming interest? In this talk, Azz and Kat draw from experience as early adopters of the Dreamwidth project, both from observing the founders build the culture they wanted to have, and their contributing roles in encouraging the culture in the face of a sudden surge of interest.

1. Keeping your culture afloat
through a tidal wave of interest
~~o/~~
Cultural Scaling Storytime
with Azz (azurelunatic)
and Kat (MissKat)

2. Who are we?
Azz
• Azure Jane Lunatic
• azurelunatic
Kat
• Kat Toomajian
• zarhooie

3. What’s a Dreamwidth?
• Social blogging, a code fork of LiveJournal
• Approximately ¼ million lines of code
• Owners
– Denise Paolucci
– Mark Smith (zorkian)
• 5 field offices, 6 paid staff (plus occasional
extras)
• 50-60 active volunteers
– 2/3 women
– 65% never coded before DW

4. A Brief History of Our Project
• 1999: bradfitz founded
LiveJournal
• 2005-2009: LJ sold various times
• 2008: Dreamwidth code fork
launched, slowly
• 2009: 5 months of utter chaos
– Tons of interest
– Deep dive dev work
– Sorting volunteers
– Open Beta Launch

5. The Problem
• Great news! Your project is popular!
• Bad news: everything you loved about
working on it has gone away. 

6. Our Solutions
• Diversity Statement & Guiding Principles
– A cultural compass when all navigation is lost
• Quotes Database
– Celebrating our awesome history
• Jargon page
– Unpacking our cultural baggage
• The Welcoming Dance
– Orienting new arrivals: friendly brutal
efficiency

7. Developing a Constitution
• “Run it right” needs defining
• Finding your values
• What does “wrong” look like?
• How do you avoid getting it
wrong?
• What does that imply for “right”?
• Both technical & social
principles
• Be as comprehensive as you
feel you need to be

8. Diversity Statement
http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversityPlatitudes are cheap. We've all heard services say they're committed to "diversity" and "tolerance" without ever getting specific, so here's our stance on it:
We welcome you.
We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size,
nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, neurotype, religion, elder status,
family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-
identification. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians,
photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in
between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in
touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break
after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches.
(We welcome Internet beginners who aren't sure what any of those terms refer to.) We
welcome you no matter if the Internet was a household word by the time you started
secondary school or whether you were already retired by the time the World Wide Web
was invented.
We welcome you. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, leather, piercings, a
pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something we can only dream
of. You may carry a guitar or knitting needles or a sketchbook. Conservative or liberal,
libertarian or socialist — we believe it's possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to
come together and learn from each other. We believe in the broad spectrum of individual and collective
experience and in the inherent dignity of all people. We believe that amazing things come when people from different
worlds and world-views approach each other to create a conversation.
We get excited about creativity — from pro to amateur, from novels to haiku, from the photographer who's been doing this for decades to the person who just picked up a sketchbook last week. We support
maximum freedom of creative expression, within the few restrictions we need to keep the service viable for other users. With servers in the US we're obliged to follow US laws, but we're serious about
knowing and protecting your rights when it comes to free expression and privacy. We will never put a limit on your creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable — even if that someone is us.
We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. We believe in being inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of anyone who
comes to us with good faith and the desire to build a community.
We have enough experience to know that we won't get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don't know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we can
certainly work to avoid offending anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we'll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we'll do our best to make good on our mistakes.
We think our technical and business experience is important, but we think our community experience is more important. We know what goes wrong when companies say one thing and do another, or when they refuse to say anything at all.
We believe that keeping our operations transparent is just as important as keeping our servers stable.

9. Guiding Principles
http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles
We are committed to:
Open access. We will never make it hard for you to get your data back from us or move to a different service if you want to. We will provide you with tools to facilitate backing
up your data, and we will never try to lock you into using our service in any way.
Interoperability. We will seek to integrate our service with other services on the Internet, following open standards, to allow you to work with other sites as much as you want
to.
Open source. We will release every code change we make under a generally-accepted open source license, aside from internal configuration files and anything we are
contractually obligated not to publish. We will provide details on what code we don't publish, and let you know why. We will work with a community of volunteer developers, and
encourage and nurture the volunteer development process. We are committed to making it easy for others to install and maintain their own instances of our server code.
Community review. We will make our development process and our business decisions as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback at all stages. While we
know we can't please everyone all the time, we know that our users are incredibly diverse, and the ways they use the site are just as diverse. We will strive to take your feedback
into account as much as we can.
Respecting privacy. We will provide you with tools to make choices about your privacy, and respect those choices at all times. We will never sell or trade your private data.
We as a company are committed to maintaining your privacy and making it easy for you to show your journal and its contents to as many -- or as few -- people as you'd like.
We operate our service under the principles of:
Transparency: We believe that you should know why we make the decisions we make. We will
explain our reasoning as much as possible. We will make it easy for you to know as much as you want
to about what we're doing. We will always err on the side of providing more information, rather than
less, whenever possible. At any point, you should feel comfortable that you understand why we're
making the choices we're making.
Freedom: We believe in free expression. We will not place limits on your expression, except as required by United
States law or to protect the quality and long-term viability of the service (such as removing spam). We will provide you
with tools that make creativity and free expression easy. If, at any point, we have to place restrictions on your
expression, we will tell you why, and work to find the best solutions possible.
Respect: We believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings. We will never
discriminate against any group of people. We will work hard to maintain inclusive
attitudes, use inclusive language, and promote inclusiveness at all times. Our Diversity
Statement isn't just there so we can pat ourselves on the back. It's there because we
believe that our diversity is our greatest strength.
We will remain advertising-free.
We won't accept or display third-party advertising on our service, whether text-based or banner ads. We are personally and ideologically against displaying advertising on a
community-based service. Advertising dilutes the community experience. It also changes the site's focus from "pleasing the userbase" to "pleasing the advertisers". We believe
that our users are our customers, not unpaid content-generators who exist only to provide content for others to advertise on. We are committed to remaining advertising-free for
as long as the site exists.

10. Brad, in his dorm room, with bml
• Mocking legacy code
let devs blow off
steam
• New devs needed a
culture of support, not
mockery
• Principles check
• Mockery died down,
devs found other
ways to express
frustration

11. Don’t stick to your guns
• Cultural drift happens
• Review your culture
• Review your principles
• Back down as needed
• Change can be really positive

12. Quotes Database
http://qdb.dreamwidth.net
• Just for fun
• Cultural snapshot
• DIY – public QDB
not appropriate

13. Problems it solves
• An alternative to full public logging
– Introduction for newcomers
– Acculturalization for newcomers
• Low-effort: fun, not virtuous
• Compare to constitution

14. Common Jargon
• Large influx of new
folks
• Unfamiliar with terms
• Central place for
terms
• Not highly curated

15. Unexpectedly Helpful
• Answering actually
frequently asked
questions
• 2 times = into jargon
page
• Entries nominated by
actual questions, less
in-group’s idea of
jargon

16. Jargon Changes
• Document early
• Retire as prudent
• Jargon fads can be
really weird
• Roll with it—unless
it’s harmful

17. The Welcoming Dance
• We’re like bees!
• Cultivating culture of
inclusion and
helpfulness
• Sometimes we
missed things
• Sometimes people
went away
confused/sad

18. Problems
• There were way too many people coming
in at once
• Exhausting to invent new orientation
speech from scratch
• Project not suited to funneling new arrivals
through a formal orientation
• Project leader availability limited
• Volunteer skill/project need mismatch

19. The Welcoming Dance
http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/IRC/welcoming
IRC/welcoming
The IRC Welcoming Dance!
This is an outline of many of the features often found in the #dreamwidth IRC Welcoming Dance.
Greet and welcome the new person.
Inquire from whence they have come (from dreamwidth.org itself, from the FLOSS community, browsing through Freenode channels, or
otherwise) as this may make a difference in the background information they have about the project and the purpose of the channel.
If unfamiliar with the site/development project, it is often appropriate to explain; a number of freenode-browsing folks are unaware that
#dreamwidth is ultimately centered around a coding project, and may have just dropped by to chat. Random chat folks are of course welcome
as long as they act in accordance with acceptable channel conduct.
Dreamwidth.org is an open-source social journaling project, a code fork of LiveJournal.com established in 2009. Diversity statement, guiding principles, and open
source manifesto: http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversityhttp://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/opensource
There is an infobot; infobot has been trained with some helpful links, including help on itself and some of the other channel bots.
infobot, help infobot
For FLOSS folks who are looking to get involved, do they have a dreamwidth.org account? It is not required, but it is a helpful tool for development and becoming/staying
informed about all the things.
Would developers like a dreamhack? They are free hosted Dreamwidth development environments.
infobot, dreamhack
If they plan to contribute code, layouts, documentation, or the like, before their contribution goes live, they'll need to sign and return a contributor license agreement.
infobot, cla
Other volunteer stuff besides development exists; there are some Dreamwidth.org communities with organizational stuff/info.
infobot, communities
Basic channel rules: don't be a jerk. Politics, especially US politics, and religious wars are not allowed. (Beyond the simple principle that it's
easier to keep the peace in a low-politics zone, the site owners' politics differ enough that the two of them need to never talk politics with each
other.) More detailed rules links are in the topic, which are:http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/notes/IRC#Rules & http://dw-
volunteers.dreamwidth.org/14888.html
Information on the Dreamwidth IRC channels in general:
infobot, irc
If people are using jargon you don't understand, don't be afraid to ask; there's also a collection of some of the local jargon.
infobot, jargon
There is a quotes database, featuring fun moments of times past and with some information about general channel culture.
infobot, qdb
Standard disclaimers about food, fiber arts, and volunteerism.
http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/IRC#Hazards

20. Risks of getting it wrong
• Alienating potential volunteers
• Negative buzz
• Increasing exclusionary reputation
• Discouraging interested newbies from
dev/open source

21. Iterating in the Firehose
• Trial and error:
identifying the
common elements
• Connecting the
person with the right
project
• Identifying people
who won’t work out,
early
– Helping them self-
identify
– When to give up?
• People who came
from open source
were different from
people from the site
• People who came in
via Freenode search
were often trouble
• Up-front indoctrination
with cultural
documents cut down
on problems

22. Storytime with Kat and Azz
Successes
• Dealing with firehose
• That knitting enthusiast
• Self-install vs. hosted dev
environment
• (Finally) dropping the co-
lead
• Handling difficult people
Failures
• Overwhelming
• That knitting enthusiast
• Poorly handled rejection
from support team
• Poor choice of spam
team co-lead
• Insular culture

23. Q & A