 So I'm aware that we're kind of running short on time. So I'm going to do everyone a favor and go back in time and not make any slides and just talk predominantly off the top of my head, OK? It's going to be a pretty short talk. So I wanted to talk about how you document communities and what you document and what you don't document and what you do and don't open source. And it's one of those things that, I mean, why do you do it? Why do you document anything? And we've heard it already, because it's a live repository of what's going on, advertise what you're doing. It's also to let people know that the community is being taken care of, just like Deb said. That's actually one of the main aspects of it. It's an unintended consequence of the fact that you document is that there is evidence that this place is being taken care of right now. So that's what you're doing when you document. So what do you document? What do you not document? What do you open source? So there's the clear stuff around who we are, why we're doing it, when we do it. You've often got actually a good bunch of logs of what you do through your event stuff, so Meetup or whatever you're using. You don't need to document that. It actually tells you what's going on. All the stuff about why you do what you're doing. As a community manager, what else do you document? You document all the FAQs. I'm a newbie, what should I know? One of the things you really need to document is who knows what. And this is mostly like as much for the new people coming on entering the community as well as the new people coming in and taking over managing the community. You need to know where you store the paper clips. So that's not just things like, where do I find the chairs on a Thursday night at the hall, but it's also things like, where do we store the logos and the passwords? Mostly it's about who knows what about what. Who do I talk to when this thing breaks down and who do I talk to when I want to find out how to update this weeky and who takes care of their embersments, that's what you document. And you make that as publicly open as you possibly can within your community. Sometimes you can't. I mean, you tend not to store your passwords on like a public domain site. Although I've seen people do it. I've seen people do it like, you know, in plain text. Try not to. It hurts sometimes. So the mailing lists are a live documentation site. You know, this is the history of the community. Who's through mailing list logs to figure out something about the way a place works. Yeah, yeah. People here do. In most other places, nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's amazing. It's really stupid because it's one of the best logs about how the cultures evolve and what's going on and what the decisions were made. So it's no different to recording, say, the decisions we came to during this board meeting. It's a really worthwhile place to look at. Nobody does. So don't bother thinking of it as somewhere that people are going to look at, except like the seriously geeky people. And in this community, yes, that matters. Which brings it around to the other side of things, which is you've got to make sure that you have really clear codes of conduct. So you document that. You document that every time people enter any online space, also any time they enter a physical space one way or another. We don't always do that, but it's actually really worthwhile. The other thing I wanted to say, yeah, one of the things that's really worthwhile documenting is how you fit into the landscape of other communities in your area. Like actually you have cross links or have portals that link whatever project you're working on to all the other projects that do what you're doing. Who here has done that? Who here has thought about doing that? Yeah, a couple of people. Yeah, yeah, everyone's thought about it. We've all talked about it, actually. Lots of people have talked about it. It never happens. It's a really worthwhile thing to do. Tell people when they enter your site. So we work in this space, but we actually also overlap a fair bit with these people and these people. It's just worth letting people know that that's what you do. Now, this is an unpopular opinion. There's a lot of stuff you shouldn't document in my opinion and this is my opinion. I think you really shouldn't document how you manage the community for several reasons. Lots of it's already documented actually. Like people have been doing this whole group thing for some time, so don't reinvent the wheel. Like there's stuff that you need to tell people about. Like these are the 10 most frequent conversations that people ask that we as community managers get into or this is what matters to us from a culture point of view. But ultimately, you can't tell anyone how you do that. You can record things like make sure you speak to every person that walks in the door, especially if they're new. You can't really record what you do to manage the community. You can learn it from other people in the place. So don't lie to yourself. Don't pretend that you can record all the different things that you do to make the community what it is. Let people have conversations about it and make sure that people learn from each other, either through the mailing list, which they will. But that's an organically evolving document. You can't sit there and write that down. You can pretend to or you can take chunks and say, so here's an example. But ultimately, it's a bit pointless because really that'll change over time and you're better off learning it as what's going on. That was anything else. So there's the gray area of, as a community manager, what do you do about troublemakers? Who here is like dealt in that situation where you know you've had the offline conversations about, so there's this person? Yep, yep. And so there's the back channel conversation about it. Yeah. What do you do about it? Yep, that's one option. Sorry, so distract them with a mathematically impossible problem for several weeks. Yep, that's one option. Another option was go to meet space with a large hammer, was it? Thanks. Thanks, Vic. What else? Wait a second. We had to ban an account from the mailing list that was occupied by multiple people. Yep. It was really weird. They all posted it as Steve. Yeah, so you ban people. But how do you, OK, so how do you document how you came to the decision? How does that, how do you document that for other people who are going to be taking over what you're doing? Yep. Just the team archives. Archives, yep. What else? Collective memory of those who are still around. Right. Yeah, the collective memory of people who are still around. Yeah. It's one of those things that like a troublemaker will likely show up again and will likely show up somewhere else right near you. And there are people you know who aren't currently dealing with this person who probably will soon, like soon enough that you'll know about it. What do you do about it? Yeah? So we had a problem maker in our community and it was a physical space community and it got to the point where I told them to no longer attend and they switched to attending another like-minded group. And because we have relations with one of the organisers of that group, we do have a conversation back and forth in a back channel. It's not documented. Yeah, yeah, that stuff's not documented. But it's in people's emails and it's been around for a long time. And when you're dealing with all the other people in the same space, you know each other and you tell each other about this. It's kind of one of those gray areas because you know how much are you impeding on people's privacy if you make this stuff public, even semi-public, even accessible by a very small group of people. My opinion is you don't really document it any more than we already do because there will be archives, there will be emails. When this person resurfaces, they will be around. It's really worthwhile sending an email to anybody who might come in contact with this person and that's your archive, that's your documentation. If anybody else has other ideas, I'd love to hear about it. But you know, it's one of those gray areas. When you're documenting a community, a lot of the stuff you do, you think you're documenting or not. You're just sending emails. That's it, thank you.