When friends and colleagues ask me what I do, I explain that I am a "digital gardener". The garden in question is one of Ireland's largest and fastest-growing online communities. It's called P45, an irreverent entertainment website for disgruntled office workers in Ireland and further afield.
The website, www.p45.net, is also a thriving, bustling and very unusual "virtual village" - a new online space where its inhabitants meet, chat, joke, flirt, rant, complain, do flat-sharing arrangements, reveal intimate problems and swap advice, give job-hopping stories and generally share their experiences of living in the Celtic Tiger.
Why do I call it "digital gardening"? Because a lot of talk about the Internet has all the wrong emphasis. It stresses things - "instant software solutions" and "connecting computers" - rather than people. Digital gardening, on the other hand, is about processes rather than products. It's about connecting people and building communities in a surprisingly organic fashion.
Getting the technology and software right is crucial, of course (see panel), but technology is just one part of the equation. Too many Irish websites believe all you have to do is plug in the right "chat" or "discussion board" technologies and - hey presto! - your online community will sprout overnight.
Virtual communities don't happen like that. They take time, patience, and a firm grasp of the underlying social dynamics of online spaces. In real-life gardening, you might want to "put manners" on nature. Or you learn to come to terms with the patterns and forces behind the apparent chaos. Similarly, digital gardeners don't attempt to fight against the "nature" of cyberspace - they try to work with its rhythms and timescales.
One of the main ways of structuring an online community is to use a "chat room" or, in P45's case, "discussion boards" (see panel). But setting up the software is only step one. These structures and interactions don't happen by themselves. A key role in managing and nurturing these spaces is the digital gardener or "moderator".
The gut reaction of most people starting a discussion board is that the moderators are sort of censors or referees, keeping the discussions on track. But that's only one aspect of their role - and a fairly negative side at that. Sure, occasionally you have to weed out unruly elements, or "tidy up the borders" (structuring the discussions into the appropriate threads and forums). And once in a while there's "firefighting", smoothing out differences between users who might, for example, contravene your basic ground-rules, or misinterpret others and get involved in heated exchanges (or "flames"). One of our golden rules at P45 is to "Attack the idea - not the person".
Most of the time, though, your moderators should have a delicate, light touch. They need to know whether to jump in to help the conversation, or sit back and stay low-key, going with the flow. If anything, they should reassure users that they aren't into heavy-handed control practices. Just because they have plenty of potential clout, exercising it all the time would be the Net's equivalent of concreting over all your flowerbeds and nuking everything with weedkiller and slug pellets. Sure, you'll have a tidy, low-maintenance online space, but it's not very pretty. And nothing much will grow there. Digital gardening is a subtle and positive art. You need to "prune back" older discussions and "seed" new debates, have a "compost" heap (an archive) for older discussions, encourage regulars and welcome newcomers, help registered users who may have forgotten their passwords and so on. And you have to look after the "lurkers".
For each message posted onto our boards, there can be 80 to 100 lurkers - people who sit back and watch the conversations ebb and flow. After a while the tentative newcomers become more confident, and register to post their first messages, or "de-lurk". Registration is free and takes about a minute, and many of these new users quickly become regular contributors.
The initial stages of developing your discussion board takes a lot of patient husbandry. It's like planting some parsley and waiting weeks for the seeds to germinate - and a full season after the seedlings grow into full plants and start self-seeding. With P45, it took about six months for the boards to become far more self-maintaining.
A key element of P45 is that it's largely self-governing. Newcomers are "trainee dossers", then they become full-blown "dossers" after posting 25 messages. We pull most of the moderators from the ranks of ordinary users. It's a self-designing universe too, with the early users designing its shape and structure for later users. For example, most of the early discussion areas were work-related ("The Nightmare Boss From Hell", "Worst Work Experience" etc). Then a regular user suggested a sort of catch-all area to discuss things with nothing to do with the workplace. Hence the "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" area was born.
Since then, almost 100,000 messages have been posted to this one area alone, making it the largest thread on any Irish discussion board. Its conversations and debates are often far more frank, funny and free-wheeling than any Irish radio phone-in. Other discussion areas have gradually evolved -after we'd clearly identified a grassroots demand - from food and sport to travel, literature ("Between the Covers") and film and television ("Screen Dreams").
Digital gardening also entails keeping a good eye on your site's traffic logs. These indicate how fertile the various zones of the site are, and the collective behaviour of your users. In the early days, the bar charts would edge upwards from around 9 a.m. (Irish time), then peak around lunchtime, and gradually calm down towards 5 p.m. Then last spring the patterns changed dramatically, as we began to attract an army of Irish users based in North America. We would often wake up to more than a thousand messages flowing back and forth across the Atlantic in the early hours.
P45 has grown in 15 months to become one of Ireland's top 25 sites in terms of traffic. More messages are posted to it in half a day than most Irish discussion boards get in an entire year. It proves that digital gardeners are not some sort of "add-on" luxury. Trying to build an online community without them is a bit like trying to run an airport without traffic controllers, or running a bar without anybody behind the counter.
Eventually, after a lot of digital gardening, your discussion boards take on a life of their own. The inmates take over the asylum, but it's not totally mad. It's a bit like the later stages of the Sim City computer game, though at times the boards are more like a cross between an amateur soap opera and a friendly snug in your local pub.
People are still getting used to this relatively new form of communicating via computer networks. Taking part in a text-based conversation is familiar enough to feel like there's nothing to it, but unfamiliar enough to feel like a very new form of human interaction. Even more unfamiliar is when you meet fellow P45ers in the flesh. They have used the Net to organise more than a dozen real-life meetings and reunions, from Dublin and London to New York and New Orleans, involving several hundred people. And while you initially worry that you might meet a few mad axe-murderers, you find they're just as witty, intelligent and normal in real-life . . .
Michael Cunningham is at: journo@excite.com