Welcome Home by Johanna Harness
The backstory:
#Amwriting started as a small hashtag on twitter over three years ago. Within six months of existence, it had grown into a nonstop chat. What was once a small, intimate group became an ever-expanding, close-knit group. We just had a bit of trouble keeping track of each other.
That's how our first website began. With the hope of knowing each other better and welcoming new members, I started collecting and posting short biographies of our participating writers. Anyone tweeting with the hashtag was free to submit a bio.
Yeah, I know. Crazy. I had no idea how fast we'd grow.
I couldn't keep up, so I accepted help. I still couldn't keep up.
My solution was to create a new blog where members could post their own bios.
This worked for us and the site grew. Our membership increased. Our traffic increased.
Unfortunately, at the same time, we also became the target of spammers. No problem. We added more security and then we added security on top of security.
It took a lot of bandwidth to keep the site stable and that was okay for a while.
But our traffic kept increasing.
It didn't take long for our web host to notice. Apparently we were sucking up all the internets from all the corners of the universe, causing vast slowdowns of knowledge for meek and powerful alike.
Something like that.
The bottom line? We were booted out.
So we went to a nicer host, someone who would pay us immediate attention, someone who liked us and thought growing a website was a good thing.
And then we took down the nice man's server a few times.
Oops.
So yeah. We hobbled through to the end of August without causing a swirling black hole of internets---but apparently it was a near-miss kind of situation.
I shut the site down for the month of September to rebuild.
And here we are.
At some point I had to accept it. We are no longer a slightly-larger-than-cozy, medium-size community. We've become a big group and we need a big solution.
I looked for a single, big solution, but it didn't exist.
The best blogging platforms offered no good way to manage membership. The best membership sites were often difficult to navigate. Everyone wanted to charge big bucks for the things they did well without satisfying even a portion of our community needs. And don't even get me started on terms of service! Argh!
Fortunately communities aren't composed of platforms. They are composed of people.
So many times I hear authors asking, "Do I have to tweet?" or, "Do I have to blog?"
It makes no sense.
Telling writers they must tweet is like giving someone a hammer and saying, "get to work."
It makes much more sense to ask the basic questions first: Get started with what? What are we building?
Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, G+, Groupspaces: all are tools.
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Ah, yes. So if all you have is a twitter, you might be tempted to use it not as a place for discussion, but as a place to sell and market your wares.
And if all you have is a G+, you might forget it's a place for threaded discussions among small groups and turn it into just another place to improve search engine optimization.
And if all you have is a Wordpress blog, you might be tempted to turn it into a membership directory.
The key is not looking for a one-size-fits-all tool.
We have to focus on people and communities first. What do we need? A membership directory? Fine. We'll go to a place that's great for building directories. A blog? We'll go to the blogging experts. An ongoing chat? Yay, Twitter! Short announcements? Ah, Facebook.
You get the idea.
We didn't need any single platform. We merely needed a hub.
Today I am proud to welcome you to the new #amwriting site. Is it Facebook? Twitter? Groupspaces? This blog?
No.
The new #amwriting site is the center for all things #amwriting. It serves as our ever-changing map or, because it pleases me, our card catalog.
Welcome home to amwriting.org.
