A tale of two communities – What car dealers can learn from XBMC pt 1

I’ve said it often enough, but as you all know, I wear two hats. I have two jobs that are, in many ways, the same (except I only get paid for doing one). In both jobs, my role is to answer questions, push for community involvement, get people excited and pro-active, and draw eyes to the product being sold.

Yet for all that I am essentially a community manager for both Lubbers and XBMC, interacting with the user base of Lubbers is absolutely nothing like interacting with the user base of XBMC.

For a moment, let’s ignore the relative difference in tech savvy. Obviously, that difference is going to exist and be an important issue. Still, a great deal of people spend just as much time online dealing with Lubbers as they do dealing with XBMC. So, tech savvy aside, how do they differ?

Mostly, they don’t. The people at lubberscars.com are the same as the people at xbmc.org. People are the same everywhere. They like free things. They like sexy things. They like pictures of Natalie Portman… They like being able to show off to friends and wow the community.

In reality, the big difference between the two communities lies in how each respective organization embraces them.

Cars VS Computers – Guys love both!

I’m going into this discussion under the opinion that XBMC is better at social media than Lubbers. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I don’t find the odds of that happening especially likely. The most obvious evidence that they differ lies in the after-effects of posting on their respective Facebook Fanpages. When I post on XBMC’s wall (as XBMC), the fanpage invariably grows by between 20 and 100 fans. When I post on Lubbers wall (as Lubbers), the fanpage frequently loses fans.

You could say the reason for that is exclusively that XBMC gives away its product for free, and Lubbers doesn’t, but I think that’s a false (or at best limited) conclusion. You could say that XBMC more naturally lends itself to an online social environment, but I’d argue that practically since their invention, cars and trucks have been bought and sold almost entirely because of the social values connected with them. “Like a rock” and “built Ford tough” mean things to Americans. Entire families in the upper mid-west identify themselves as “Ford families” or “Chevy families.” As such, I’d be extremely surprised to learn that this intensely social paradigm doesn’t exist on the internet at least as much as the real world.

So let’s presume, for the sake of argument, that Lubbers COULD be as good at social media as XBMC. Let’s presume that a massive number of people out there, guys in particular, but girls also (given that cars are often also marketed to women, unlike XBMC) would actively like to talk about their vehicles. So if Lubbers COULD be a good social media company, why aren’t they?

XBMC – Masters of their Universe

To figure that out, we should start by breaking down what makes XBMC so great on an interactive level.

The members of Team XBMC interact with users on a minimum of six separate levels. Today, I’m going to talk about two of them.

The Wall

First, there is the front wall, in which the Team gives users important new information, like the release of a new software version or the announcement of a new platform upon which the existing software works. A dealer website, where vehicles are listed and news about the dealer is made available to the public is the closest equivalent to the XBMC wall. Yet even that is a weak equivalent.

There are two major differences between a dealer site and XBMC’s site in this regard. First, dealers don’t get to announce every single car they have available. If they did, potential purchasers would stop paying attention immediately. It’d become ultra-spam. Perhaps a more reasonable method would be to introduce new models or new lines (for new car dealers). Used dealers are simply out of luck for listing vehicles in this way. However, listing new vehicles would really only be part of the reason you’d keep such a wall. XBMC is always free, so we never get to do this, but car dealers have specials that they run, like Ford Truck Month, that would make perfect wall fodder.

Second, dealer sites rarely have any kind of discussion abilities built in. Every wall post made by XBMC is another opportunity for comment and conversation by XBMC users. The solution to this problem is not as obvious as you’d think it might be. Sure, you could add a discussion section under every vehicle and every page and every posting, but you’d need a really on-the-ball backend system to notify you of all new postings. Eventually, the hope would be that there’d be enough cross talk that negative posts could get buried, which is how XBMC often handles negative posts, but on dealership sites not enough users/customers have been trained to comment, so the dealer would have to do all problem management, which, of course, means they’d have to do all searching out of problematic posts: a monumental task without a powerful backend system that alerts about all posts.

Noteworthy addition: If you are paying attention, you’ll realize that I’m advocating a company approach their front page as a blog, rather than as a traditional business frontpage, contrary to the behavior of Gawker and co. The fact of the matter is, 350 million people use facebook. There are an insane number of twitter accounts. From this point forward, people are going to be more and more likely to dislike even a landing page. They will want information the second they hit your site. People like to talk and form communities, but they need reasons to start talking.

The Forum

Quite probably the most powerful source of communication between Developers (Devs) and XBMC Users (Users) is the Forum. This is an open place where ideas can grow, egos can also grow, and angry people can complain… a lot.

I don’t want to spend too much time extolling the benefits of the forum, but as far as communication and information exchange goes, it simply cannot be beat. Blogs and Wikis have their place. Instant communcation is all good and wonderful. Social Media is neato burrito. But if you want to identify the heartbeat of the XBMC community, it is our forum.

And, in all honesty, this is probably true for nearly every really social website out there not named Facebook and Twitter.

Lubbers obviously has nothing even vaguely like the forum, but the solution to this problem, just like the Wall problem, is not as simple as it might seem. Lubbers can’t just install a forum. Or, rather, they could do that, but then Lubbers would suffer from the exact same problems it suffers from now. No participation. No community involvement. Lubbers is a nice place to buy a car, it is not a car community leader.

Some people, myself included, have tried to band-aid over this problem. We’ve initiated give aways. We’ve recorded some videos, written a few blog posts. These attempts have their place. Even doing so little has caused a massive spike in the number of Lubbers related hits to the website. But in the end these methods remain band-aids. They are an attempt to take the ways of the old media, package them into nice new media gift bags, and try to raise sales.

Eventually, they’re doomed to fail to better methods.

And what are these better methods? Well, let’s consider how Team XBMC interacts with its forum members vs how Lubbers might interact with potential forum members.

No current developer created XBMC or even still works with XBMC. Think about what that implies. It would be as if the people currently running Lubbers were all people who frequently buy cars here. It’s a crazy little stat, but it’s a stat made possible by the incredible Forum.

Every user interested in truly interacting with Team XBMC is required to register on the Forum. From there, they get to ask questions, make suggestions, or discuss random topics typically related to XBMC.

As the user progressing in understanding XBMC, he or she will slowly stop asking questions and turn around and answer questions for others. First simple questions, then more complex ones.

Most users stop at that point. In fact, most users stop at the point of registering. So much discussion has been generated in the past 10 years that almost all questions have already been answered somewhere or other.

From this point, some few users go on to actively help develop XBMC. They code new skins. They create addons. They provide fixes to the underlying code. They help move XBMC onto new, exciting platforms. Or, like me, they become Forum Moderators and Community Managers.

It’s a living breathing community of people, all of whom are dedicated both to the final product of the XBMC Media Center, but are also dedicated to the community itself.

To make Lubbers anything like that would take hard work, dedication, and a LOT of man hours.

First, we’d need a forum. That’s the easiest step.

Second, it would be impossible for a single person to fake an entire team. For one thing, I don’t know everything that the entire Lubbers team knows. For another, it would become extremely obvious, quickly, that only one person in any position of authority was speaking.

To truly create a living environment, we’d need practically everyone at Lubbers to participate in the online forum. Mechanics and Service Advisors would have to become deeply involved in the car Troubles sub-forum. Credit Advisors and the Buy Here Pay Here company would have to answer questions and provide support in the Credit sub-forum. Salesmen would be required to constantly create and update threads about new and used cars that have popped up on the lot. It would honestly take a village, and that’s for the mere 300-500 vehicles Lubbers has, plus Service work. I can’t imagine doing anything similar for a national company like Automax. (Fortunately, I don’t have to!)

If everything went as planned, my job, as Community Manager, would honestly be a pretty relaxed and simple one. I would mediate disputes, get the attention of people in power, remind people that customers don’t automatically have all the knowledge we have, and move questions to the appropriate areas.

Honestly, as I think about it, I feel more and more excited about the prospect of such a system. It would absolutely revolutionize any car dealership with the self-confidence and force of will to pull it off.

Web Numbers Down, Science Guy Up: The Thrilling Conclusion

On November 23rd, I posted about the massive downturn in website performance by Lubberscars.com and talked about all the ways in which I used statistics to my advantage.  Well, we’re approach February 23rd, and I’d like to let you all know how things have gone since then.  It’s time to relieve the tension that I’m sure you’ve all been feeling for the past nearly 3 months.

To make a very long story short, we’ve recovered.  A lot.  A whole, whole lot.  To recap early November, we’d just dramatically altered the way our website worked.  We listed prices for all but a very select few vehicles.  I’d implemented a new vehicle listing page that Reynolds insisted would be way better for Search Engine Optimization purposes.  The numbers of leads we were receiving had fallen precipitously, but we’d expected that as a necessary evil that went along with a marked increase in page views.

And then the bottom fell out.  We lost 2000 page views in a week.  Leads kept dropping.  There appeared to be no sign of recovery.  I flew into action, trying to root out the cause, and… then I spent 2 and 1/2 months talking about other things on this blog.

So what happened in those 2.5 months?  Quite a lot.  Throwing the car into reverse on the whole new listing page seemed to stop the decline. Pageviews held steady through the rest of November. They dropped again, a tiny bit, during the Xmas holiday, but that was expected.

Leads pretty well held constant after changing back to the old listing page.  Neither massive increase, nor massive drop.  And then we hit January 1st.  The next month and a half was nothing short of amazing.

Page views and leads, from the drop to the rise

That chart tells an amazing story.  Look at the blue line.  From week 45 to week 46, we dropped by 2000 views.  And then, on January 1st, we started to recover. And recover.  And RECOVER.  Our form views are now higher than they were prior to the collapse by entire standard deviation!  We have gotten more leads in the past two weeks than we’ve ever gotten in any two week period, literally ever, and certainly since I started working here.

The crazy thing about this recovery is that page views per person have held constant.  See here:

As you can see, from Nov 18th (the height of the massive drop) until yesterday, the number of pages viewed per person on the Lubbers site held steady at around 6.5 views, give or take a view. As far as car dealer sites go, that’s actually an amazingly high number.

But if views per person didn’t change, why… how have the numbers done such a massive turnaround?  I’ve got one chart that answers the question immediately.

Thank you Google, Yahoo, and Bing!

In weeks 52 and 53, Lubberscars received an absolute explosion of new visitors being directed from the big three search engines. We went from averaging 150 to 300 visitors a day, to between 400 and 600 visitors a day.  In a week, are are now getting around 2000 visitors, rather than between 1000 and 1500.  That increase, combined with 6.5 page views per person, results in MASSIVE numbers.

And now, I’m at a new brick wall.  I have no idea why our numbers have exploded.  I hate to admit that, but it’s the absolute truth.  To my knowledge, we haven’t started doing any really aggressive advertising.  We buy no Google adwords.  We don’t market on Yahoo. And the website hasn’t really changed. The economy hasn’t dramatically gotten better since Christmas.  I guess there’s a possibility that the post-holiday crowd is really into cars this year, but nothing like this happened last year, so I’m somewhat doubting that.

So I’m left with only one conclusion. There might be a better one out there, but this is the best that I’ve got.  In late December, one of the most google respected sites on earth might have created approximately 1000 new pages all linking directly to Lubberscars.

I am, of course, referring to Facebook. In December we held a contest for a new iPad, and suddenly gained 1000 new fans in a few short days.  I don’t, honestly, know if that’s the cause of the increase.  It seems like that would be a crazy cause.  But I don’t see any other reason for the recovery.

To conclude, I’ll leave you with two more pictures to think about.  First, of course, Natalie Portman.

Obligatory Natalie Portman picture

And second, the entire history of Lubbers page-views and leads from January 1st of last year until now, 13 months later.

Hey, other car dealer website folks.  You like apples?  You see weeks 3 through 7? How do you like them apples?

How I joined Team XBMC

You know how sometimes you find yourself doing a job for free, but you don’t mind because you love the job, you love the ideas behind the job, and you love the community associated with the job?

I spent three years at law school, and the only time I ever felt happy doing work during those years was when I was working entirely for free on something that had absolutely nothing to do with being a lawyer.

A Brief History

In 2005/6, I visited my friend Paul’s house.  He had “modded” his xbox so that it could play movies.  Being something of a geek myself, I thought this was awesome, and I resolved to do it immediately.  Being something of a not-very-awesome geek, I discovered that modding an Xbox required soldering tools, which sounded like WAY too much work.

The Unbearable Nerdiness of Being

A year or two passed, and the idea of turning an Xbox into an entire home Media Center became ever more increasingly irresistible. I stayed up late at night, reading xb0x scene, scanning lifehacker stories, and doing all sorts of intensely irresponsible things, when I probably should have been studying law.

Finally, I took matters into my own hands. I knew I would never willingly use a soldering iron myself on an Xbox.  Certainly, I wouldn’t on my very first attempt at using a soldering iron, so I found a person in the KC community that did Xbox modification, not because he got paid to do it (he didn’t), but because he really liked soldering. These were back in the bad old days when it was possibly illegal to modify Xboxes. Microsoft didn’t especially care, but there was still an element of danger. These days, the fear is mostly gone thanks to an opinion put out by the Library of Congress, but it’s still pretty exciting to think back on the crazy times of those days.

So I got my Xbox modded, loaded up Xbox Media Center, and was happy as a clam.

For nearly 2 minutes.

Then I decided I needed to find out all the cool things it could do. I spent a lot of time finding out awesome things on xbox scene and always flirted with other Xbox OSes, but invariably I would return to Xbox Media Center (XBMC).

Almost immediately after modding my Xbox, I discovered it was becoming obsolete. Team XBMC put out a statement that they were planning on moving the software to Linux and other OS platforms to take advantage of High Definition video content. To reduce confusion, they were also renaming XBMC to… XBMC, which now stood for XBMC Media Center. Recursive naming is a joke only a programmer could love.

Everybody loves a good recursive joke, right?

I popped my head in and out of that scene for a while, entirely missed out on a pretty crazy row among the XBMC developers, considered making a Hackintosh to use “OSXbmc,” which was the Apple variant of XBMC (as I understood it and which ultimately came to be known as Plex), and eventually settled on sticking with what I knew, specifically MS Windows.

Fellows by the name of Wiso and Chadoe were leading the charge to port XBMC to Windows. I’ve been a Windows baby since 3.1, so I decided to provide whatever support I could. I bought a computer from Dell that could decode HD video content, registered on the XBMC Forum, and began to become active.

The Early Days

Early on in the Windows port of XBMC, there were quite a few hiccups to iron out.  The port itself had gone fairly smoothly. The developers chose to use OpenGL as a renderer, rather than DirectX, primarily because it was easier and because it maintained cross compatibility across XBMC branches.

The installer was brief, fairly uninformative, didn’t know how to handle advanced user rights, and had odd problems with default vs portable installs.

I was in heaven.  It was a simpler time. Lots and lots of problems existed, but each problem had a relatively simple fix. Or, if the fix was bizarre and challenging, then it was still a mere 4 or 5 steps to nirvana.  The hardest questions to answer were difficult, not because the problem was hard, but because the solution was painful. “You have to buy a new video card.” “You have to buy a new CPU.”  ”You need to take your computer outside and burn it, now, before it causes anymore pain and misery.”

It's a bad, BAD computer!

These answers infuriated people, but they really were often the only solution.  2008 was an interesting year. Anything built before that year was probably too old to run 1080p video content (though a few things, such as the very laptop I’m typing this on could run 720p just fine). Anything built after that year was designed specifically with 1080p content in mind.

But Chadoe, Wiso, Jmarshall, Elupus, Spiff, and all the rest made great strides. Nov 14th, 2008 marked the release of Atlantis, the first official release supporting XBMC for Windows, and already, since my joining a few brief months earlier, massive improvements had occurred.

In May of 09, another massive release happened. And in November of 09 XBMC for Windows shifted from OpenGL to DirectX (along with many, many other things).

In slightly over a year, XBMC for Windows had been transformed from a somewhat hacky XBMC Windows port to a thing of true beauty that “just worked.” And in that 16 months or so, I had not programmed a single thing. I didn’t write code. I rarely even suggested that other people do so.

What I did do was evangelize XBMC to the masses. If a user had a problem and was angry, I calmed them.  If they wanted to find a way to get the devs to pay attention, I’d walk them through the process.

I even spearheaded an idea or two, suggesting steps to make installation and interaction easier, and helping to codify various ways in which early attempts at using Windows MCE remotes could be generalized to help everyone.

I was an extremely active user who did everything possible to be accurate, modest, and calm, but, in the end, I was still just a user.

Joining the Ranks

In June of 2009 the Team was growing tired of coding, handling forum mod duties, and the million other tasks necessary for maintaining a community the size of the XBMC User base (a base that numbers in the hundreds of thousands), so they brought a few active users on board. That first class included Haggy, Clumsy, and myself.

None of us looked like this.

It’s funny. I’ve gotten a fair number of awards, commendations, honors, etc. in my life, yet I’ve never felt prouder than the day I was asked to be a Moderator for XBMC. It was the first time in my life anyone had affirmed for me that my method of handling people was the correct one. In other worlds, I was not aggressive enough, not interesting enough, too loud, too quiet, too me, too not me.  For XBMC, I just did what I always did, and everything was effortlessly correct.

Also, I’d never worked harder to gain a position that I didn’t even know existed.  It feels good to be rewarded for hard work.

My understanding of my job duties in those times was very limited. I had gotten a position because I worked hard. Surely my new job meant I had to work even harder, right? This was my mindset, as I did my very best to burn myself out. I was online hours and hours each day, answering as many questions as I possibly could, trying to resolve every issue I came across, and holding new users hands like they were small children. One day, I was the last poster on every thread on the entire front page of the Windows subforum.

That kind of pace is not maintainable.  I got a job in the real world, drifted away from XBMC, spent several weeks feeling guilty for not talking as much as I once had, and considered downgrading from Forum Moderator to plain old User.

The Shift to Community Manager

Then, in January of 2010, I noticed that new users (XBMC 9.11 had just been released) kept asking the same repetitive questions.  ”How do I get the pretty pictures?” “What’s the library?” “Why does XBMC act weird with my mouse?” A thousand questions that had been answered a thousand times: there had to be a better way.

And there was. It was to be the way that ultimately changed my entire approach to Forum Moderation. I approached the Team – from whom, until that point, I’d mostly only received orders – and explained that I was tired of dealing with “newbs,” so they needed to grant me administrative privileges to the XBMC Wiki. I was going to create an entirely new page, dedicated not to explaining XBMC as a whole with thousands of links to code heavy pages, but rather to a simple, brief explanation of just what XBMC is, why it is cool, and how a user can take his own media and start showing off in 20 minutes or less.

I called it the Quick Start Guide. I wasn’t the first ever to write a quick start guide, but I was the first to finally get around to doing so for the Team.

That Guide did two things for me. The first happened immediately; the second took a little time.

Firstly, the Guide showed me that I had a voice in Team XBMC. I rarely raise that voice, but from that day forward, when I say the users need something, the Team listens. They don’t always agree, and they don’t always care, but they always listen.

Secondly, the very first Quick Start Guide was rudimentary. It had no pretty pictures.  It was often poorly worded and too brief or too wordy. It wasn’t beautiful, but it WAS a starting point, and sometimes a user base that cares only needs a starting point to make something fantastic.

If you compare the Guide I wrote originally with the Guide in its current incarnation, you’ll come away thinking two things. First, “Wow, Nathan is a terrible technical writer.”  Second, “It’s amazing how effectively the Users turned a terrible guide into an awesome guide.”

It is the effectiveness of the users that took the longest for me to understand, but, when I did, it was also the thing that stunned me the most.  A person trying to grow a community doesn’t need to dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T.’  He or she only needs to help make the users excited and point them in the right direction.  That’s how Wikipedia works.  It’s how the best forums work. It’s the very definition of Twitter and Facebook.

This is a gratuitous and totally unrelated pic of Natalie Portman

A Community Manager’s roll is pretty simple. You need to encourage new users, discourage jerks, calm down angry people, and highlight the happiness of joyful people.  Most of all, you need to trust users in a way that developers aren’t allowed to.  Code Developers are required to assume users are complete morons, because a few of them are, and one must always code to the stupidest in a group.  Community Managers must placate the stupid angry people, but their real role is encouraging everyone else. You must trust them to answer questions posed by newbies. You must trust them to edit your wiki.  And you must encourage them to someday advance from user to editor, coder, or developer. Today’s user is tomorrow’s programmer.

In other words, just so long as I do a good job keeping all of you awesome users interested, you will pay me and XBMC back ten fold by talking about it, expanding for it, helping your parents install it in their homes, and perhaps one day coding it. You guys are the heart, the life, and the blood of this operation, and you all amaze me at how quickly you move and how much excitement you bring to the table every day.

I’ve only known the title Community Manager for about 72 hours, but I believe I’ve been living that title since I registered in 2008.  I believe I’ve been granted the authority to act out that title since 2009.  And I finally realized what it meant to BE a Community Manager (or whatever I was calling it) in 2010.

Now, I believe I can say that there are few, if any, jobs that I could ever find as fulfilling as that of a Community Manager, where every day I talk to people as excited about software as I am, as amazed by sights and sounds as we all are, and as dedicated to make our own little bit of the world a better place.

2012, Jan 2nd edit: I wrote this post nearly 1 year ago. Since then, many exciting things have happened. My job has changed a bit. Users and developers have come and gone. But the enthusiasm that I see in our base has never once evaporated. Keep an eye out Wednesday as I post the XBMC 2011 Year In Review. …At least, the year in review from my perspective. As always, this is MY blog.

The XBMC Tightrope

In the early 1960s, the United States invaded Cuba in what later came to be known as the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. This was intensely embarrassing for the United States, and, worse, it led to one of the most terrifying moments in the history of the planet Earth.

Russia decided to send nuclear missiles to Cuba so that Cuba would be better equipped to defend itself against future U.S. military strikes (which is to say, so it could prevent all future military strikes by threatening to blow us the hell up).  The U.S. set up a naval blockade to prevent these missiles from reaching Cuba. Russia threatened to launch an all out nuclear attack on the U.S. And the U.S. prepared for the worst case scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction.  The world was about to be eradicated, leaving only cockroaches and mutated fish behind.

In 2008, XBMC suffered a near cataclysmic event in its development history. A number of XBMC for Mac developers decided they didn’t want to play by XBMC rules. Or they felt threatened by the Windows and Linux developers. Or everyone was really angry. Or nobody could agree on whether to develop using SVN or GIT.  To this day, the causes are hazy, but the outcome is not. The majority of XBMC for Mac developers decided to leave and form their own software team called Plex. Team XBMC was left knowing that it was time to take steps to prevent something so shattering from occurring again.

The causes of these two historical developments are, curiously enough, exactly opposite of each other. The Plex split occurred because team members could not agree.  The Bay of Pigs Fiasco and Cuban Missile Crisis occurred because the many voices of the federal gov’t felt incapable of DISagreeing.

Every team, every group, every organization the world over faces this struggle on an almost constant basis. If literally everyone agrees, then there’s probably something wrong with the project. If so many people disagree that no resolution can be reached, then there IS no project.  Every day and every conversation is a constant struggle to walk a tightrope between zombie-like conformity and calls for revolution.

So the question we must ask ourselves is a simple one. Why is this, and how can it be combated?

Groupthink – Groups eat brains!

Nearly everyone agrees that the chief cause of the Bay of Pigs Fiasco was Groupthink, which, put succinctly, is unanimous public agreement due to the human desire to not create waves. Chiefly, this is exhibited in the form of suppressing all ideas, regardless of whether they are good or bad.  This desire to not rock the boat can be fueled by many things, chief among them are fear of being bullied, fear of looking stupid, and fear of being cast out of the decision making group.

There are, of course, as many more causes as there are stars in the sky, and from an evolutionary perspective, they probably all stem from our backgrounds as social creatures that needed to move in packs for survival.  These evolutionary causes are not incredibly important for the discussion.

What is important is identifying methods to reduce the effect of our need to fit into our groups. Irving Janus identified key methods that would theoretically reduce GroupThink as it existed in the 1960s. These included:

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of “critical evaluator”. This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
2. Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
3. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.
4. All effective alternatives should be examined.
5. Each member should discuss the group’s ideas with trusted people outside of the group.
6. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
7. At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil’s advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.

Needless to say, if a team followed this strategy, it’d be intensely difficult for GroupThink to form.  Unfortunately, a group following this strategy may well find itself in a constant state of stagnation. Each member will be heard, and all members will likely learn a great deal in the process, but quite probably nothing will actually get done.  So, while excellent in theory, Janus’s suggestions were not amazingly effective in actuality.

Kennedy famously attempted to avoid GroupThink during the Cuban Missile Crisis by following these steps.  While GroupThink was certainly avoided, absolutely nothing useful came out of the meetings.  In the end, the Crisis was avoided by back channel secret discussions held between Kennedy and Khrushchev in which they agreed to back down and dismantle various weapons systems in especially scary places.

Viva La Dissolution! – We hate each other and always will!

The other end of the spectrum from GroupThink is the impossibility of agreement among parties. Mediation is the art of resolving these disputes, and there seems little doubt, even to this day, that mediation is much more an art form than a science. Every dispute is different. Every pair of combatants wants something entirely unlike the pair before.  To find a resolution is exciting and intense and almost impossible to replicate in a scientific study.

The only thing that most mediators agree on is this: Whatever people are verbally arguing about is rarely the thing they are actually fighting for. A divorced couple may be arguing verbally about who gets the sofa, but in reality they are fighting to the death about who caused the most emotional pain six months ago.  The words themselves are almost always an afterthought to the war of emotions that are happening under the surface.

The Microsoft Kin was signed, sealed, and delivered, and then almost immediately withdrawn from the market. And why? Well, honestly, I have no idea. But from where I stood it certainly looked like a group who was pushing the Kin forward was experiencing GroupThink, while another group, upon discovering and discussing the release, was prepared to eat a $100 million loss in irritation at a branding error.

Microsoft is, without a doubt, a behemoth of an organization. It employs thousands upon thousands of engineers, developers, testers, sales people, managers, and janitors. To discover that two groups within its walls were talking over each other’s head is not shocking. Sure, it resulted in millions of dollars down the drain, but that happens all the time at Microsoft.  They’ve got a few dollars to spare.

Yet while it is not shocking, it is highly regrettable. A company with those kinds of resources, if firing on all cylinders, would be a force to be reckoned with, rather than a company that merely teases users with the Kin, the Courier, and the Surface.

The Software Development Tie-in

And so we return to XBMC. Since 2008, XBMC has seen steady growth, both in user base and in features and usability.  How?

I would argue that two totally unrelated organizational practices are taking place.

The 20% Model

First, XBMC Developers follow the 20% Model popularized by Google. Specifically, rather than a developer asking for group guidance on whether a new feature is a good idea, they just go ahead and make the new feature happen. Once coding has already begun and is in some kind of advanced state, it is presented to the group.  In this way, it is simply too late for the group to shoot the idea down as stupid. Instead, they are forced to grapple with an idea that is already demonstrably working.

Of course, many group members will still try to shoot the idea down, but the developer who originated the idea will undoubtedly fight back, which is totally unlike the typical behavior that is seen when the idea has never been acted upon.

Typically when people present ideas to a group that have no backing in reality, if even mild resistance is met, the idea is invariably dropped and wasted.  When the idea already exists and is in a semi-working state, the idea presenter fights hard to ensure the idea’s survival.

The most recent (and famous) example of an idea presented to Team XBMC in a nearly fully formed state was XBMC for iOS, which Scott Davilla presented in such an advanced state that it could already mostly decode 1080p video without difficulty.

Often in the XBMC forums, users become offended when an XBMC Team member suggests that a user code a feature he requested, thinking that the Team is blowing him off.

Incredibly, blowing the user off is almost never the point of the suggestion. Rather, we are uniformly promoting the 20% rule. If the user can make his idea happen in practice, rather than in theory, then we will have no choice but to acknowledge the feat and seriously consider adding the code to XBMC.

This first organizational practice is the THE reason that Open Source software development works so well.  While a great deal of development can result in splintering from the original source code (as has happened multiple times to XBMC), anyone can sit at his or her computer and think, “Today, I’m going to change the world,” and nobody will be able to tell them they are idiots for thinking so.  Who knows, that person might go on to create Android, XBMC, Linux, Ubuntu, or any of countless pieces of software that have done their part in changing the world.

Positive and Open Communication

Second, I would argue that Team XBMC maintains a practice of invariably positive and open communication. The Team members like what they are doing, they like each other, and they are rarely afraid to admit a failing, because almost every failing is temporary.  In coding, unlike life, success can almost always be ensured by learning just a little bit more than you knew a second ago.

This means if one Team member doesn’t know how to do something, he says so, and he does not fear the backlash of other members calling him an idiot, because everyone knows that we all started tabula rasa, knowing nothing. We do not stoop to the level of personal pissing matches, and we react swiftly and negatively to users who decide that the point of the game is to see who has the biggest geek glasses.

We accomplish this deep and continuously renewing method of communication in three ways.

• First, almost all communication occurs via computer.

Organizational Psychological research exists that seems to suggest people are less likely to defend their positions in face to face confrontations, or, if they do defend their positions, they are less likely to be swayed to alter – in any way – the stance they have taken.  Face to face confrontations are too fast and too tricky to allow deep thinking on the issues, and so we resort to our baser instincts.

Online discussion, on the other hand, providers a powerful means to discuss the positives and negatives of an idea or project in a reasoned way without being forced to issue knee jerk pronouncements.  People still do, of course, devolve to the knee jerk argument, but in a controlled environment where everyone knows each other, certain social rules develop.

For the members of Team XBMC, the first unspoken social rule is this: “The ONLY black and white rule is the GPL (the License that keeps XBMC open source). Everything else is open for discussion and revision.”

Or, more simply, XBMC is more important than your pride.

• Second, we maintain an open forum, where everyone – users, developers, support people, and even those who donate money to the cause can talk openly and on the same level.

In this way, we can keep record of active users, useful discussions, interesting challenges and suggestions, and anything else that catches our fancy.

• Third, we keep a continuously running dialog in a private chatroom on IRC.

Think of this chatroom as a constant stream of communication among a minimum of 20 to 40 people at any given time. If someone is starting a fight in the forums, it comes to the attention of the team in a matter of moments, so we know to douse the fire.  If we are coordinating the release of a new version of the XBMC software or discussing other time sensitive plans, we can do so immediately and in real time. If somebody wants to tell a joke or if several people decide to jointly watch a live event from 400 (or 4000) miles away, they can do so and keep a conversation about the event running the entire time.

To make an already long story short, we avoid GroupThink AND revolution through exactly the same methods. Though both are totally separate functions, their base causes remain remarkably similar. Both appear to be caused by a lack of communication and a fear of being dismissed in some way or another.  We maintain tight and near constant communication, and not a single one of us fears dismissal for even the silliest of reasons, particularly not when A) we’ve already gone through with our idea, and B) we know that every single member is in a boat very similar to our own.

Conclusion

As you no doubt know, the Earth was not eradicated during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You might be less aware that Plex was one of the last two groups to splinter from XBMC. (The other group to splinter was Boxee, but that project fork was an agreed upon action that has been mutually beneficial for both Team Boxee and Team XBMC, and therefore somewhat outside the realm of this discussion.)

In the end, the it appears the tightrope walk is a little easier for a software organization that pushes its developers to act upon their ideas BEFORE they present them to the group and that pushes for communication to the degree that all the members feel more like family and friends than coworkers and staff.

A lack of communication, it seems, is the ultimate cause of both GroupThink and group dissolution. And the solution for any software development group, as seems only natural, is to make communication a central focus by making communicating easier, more frequent, and filled with more confidence.