Fighting for Better Creative Communities — A Creator Interview with Sydette Harry

Jenn Schiffer: Hi, I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the Community Engineer at glitch.com here at Fog Creek. Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. Today I’m here talking with Sydette Harry, Editor-at-Large at the Coral Project. We’re going to talk a lot about community and what she’s doing in that sphere.

So you are Editor-at-Large at the Coral Project.

Sydette Harry: And Editor of Mozilla.

Jenn Schiffer: And Editor of Mozilla?

Sydette Harry: Editor, Network Mozilla, yeah.

Jenn Schiffer: Awesome. What does that mean?

Sydette Harry: I’m responsible as the Editor-at-Large at Coral … I started as the Community Lead, so I was responsible for research and looking into how you put together and describe communities specifically around journalism. We were started as a partnership between the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mozilla and the Knight Foundation.

It originally started with: how do we make better comments? One of the things we came up with after we started doing our research and planning is that comments aren’t singular. Comments are a reflection of community, so if you want to have better comments you have to have better communities around journalism.

Now I’ve now moved on to Editor-at-Large, so how do we talk about and do some of our research? With Mozilla, trying to build that journalistically into a foundation. How do we make a community of people who care about internet health? Coming from Coral, how do you make a community about people who care about internet journalism and journalism in general? What are the things and the guides that you need to make this work? What are the things that work for communities, and basically being in the archives and being in the crates and going to the meetings and going, “Let’s do this thing.”

The slogan we have for Coral Project ended up being “Because Journalism Needs Everyone”. One of the things that is … I loathe to use it, but the evangelization is getting people to think about projects, specifically within tech, that need communities. Whatever you’re building needs a community, because you need more than one person.

Jenn Schiffer: When did the Coral Project get started and why and how?

Sydette Harry: It was originally thought about in 2012 or ’13. Sasha Koren, Aron Pilhofer, various people from the Washington Post and the New York Times looked at the comments and went, “This is bad.” And, “What would we need to build tools around the comments?” Because it’s a very tech thing. “Let’s build a tool.”

As it got forward, Greg Barber who is in charge of partnerships, we started looking at that this needs to be an interdisciplinary thing. You cannot build your way out of sociocultural problems; you actually have to look at their roots and examine what they are.

They hired Andrew Losowsky, who is our Project Lead. The General. Then I was added as the Community Lead, and the goal was: so we’re going to create guides, because it’s great to … What happens a lot is people ship out to tech, and “The tech will fix it!” And there is an algorithm that nobody understands. That is the fixture, but nobody knows how to use the thing, how to adopt the things.

Also, starting to think about what works in communities and how you bring people on and where are the places we can talk about that.

That led us I think into a lot of places that I don’t think people traditionally look for in tech, when they’re thinking about communities. So sports, theatre. Theatre of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal was a big one for us. Museum curation, all of that. Like, how do you really, when you want to bring people together, to be together, how do you deal with that?

Jenn Schiffer: So, I have worked with news sites before, and when the comments were bad, which happens quite quickly, one of the options was, “Let’s get rid of comments.” I know some sites have done that, but why is that problematic? To just get rid of comments entirely? Why would you put the work into keeping commenting there?

Sydette Harry: I think that’s a common misconception people have is that people always … because we started as a comments platform, people always go, “Oh you always want people to keep comments.” No. There are some places where we talk to them like, “Please close your comments. You are not about this life; you are not about to put in this work. Please close these comments.”

The issue that often came up with this is that there was a close the comments. There wasn’t a, “So how are we going to connect with our community? How are we going to help people talk to each other? How are we going to get feedback? Is that an email, is that a poll, is that a post?” When you are producing content for people, and more, let’s be blunt, when your business is based on the content people produce for you, your comments, your tweets, your posts on Instagram, Snapchat, all that, how are people able to tell you what they need? How are they able to see that you are listening? How are they able to feel heard? Those conversations didn’t happen.

It’s kind of … it’s the version of when you’re told to clean your room and you just start shoving things under the bed, and after a while if you don’t actually clean the room the bed just starts lifting. That’s what the problem was. Because for some things, you don’t need comments. There are certain issues where if you are holistically considering your community, you don’t need to constantly expose people to how terribly other people think of them. But what you do need is a way for communities and people to connect, and also more importantly correct you in how you are handling them.

Jenn Schiffer: You have the guidelines, you have Talk and you have Ask. Can you tell me about Talk and Ask?

Sydette Harry: Talk is the comment box, so how you moderate comments. Where you put things in, how do you generate those? Ask is our first product and that was the one, I think, it was very important for us to start with and people were very confused by it. This is how you collect user-generated content and submissions and make polls and get things. There was a fourth product that’s just kind of built into talk that allows you to look for things and search for things as you moderate, so that’s on the moderation end but it comes from …

One of the beliefs is that the best way to have people be interested in you is to be interested in them. One of the things that journalism I think has failed continually at and is still failing at in a lot of ways is how are you showing people that you are interested in what they do and interested and how they ask and actually actively soliciting the truth about their lives. Most people were telling us they were using Google forms or SurveyMonkey. These are all great things but they are not for a journalistic workflow. They are not for text. They are for large data aggregation, so you wanted something that kind of cut and then put it into the way journalists would work and allowed you to contact people and allowed you to preserve identities and identify personally identifying information, because these are the things that journalists do with the people.

It’s, how do you create a tool that helps people “people” better, in a workflow? You want to recognise that, and you can do something with a text field that you can’t do with a cell, so that was what Ask was for

And it’s actually been used really well. One of our most recent projects was a discussion about race in Boston, and there had been various responses to different parts of it but one of the things people were so receptive to was the ability to be able to tell their story and get feedback and not feel like telling their story was preparation for battle. That is so often, especially for the most marginalized: if you want to tell the truth, you’ve got to prepare for battle.

With something like Ask is, you get to contribute. You get to tell the truth and if you want to go forward you can, but you also get to do the work of verification and all the things that are important to journalism and protect your sources and protect your community.

Jenn Schiffer: At least in the open source community, you and I both are greatly involved in open source communities, we have dealt with things like licensing and now codes of conduct for projects sort of thing, like the Talk project has a code of conduct and the Apache licence and for Glitch we’re trying to put our best foot forward and lead in with being a friendly community, and so we’re trying to build tools to allow that. So we’ve added a feature to allow you to add a code of conduct, allow you to add a license fairly easily, but we know that that’s just the first step.

What are some things that we can learn from physical real world communities in tech communities, besides … like, code of conducts have existed. Every mall in New Jersey has a code of conduct at the door, you know what I mean? Like you’re not supposed to rob or hurt people. You go on a bus and it’s like-

Sydette Harry: Oh Lord, we just showed our age. Malls.

Jenn Schiffer: Right.

Sydette Harry: What are those? Everybody saying, “What is a mall?”

Jenn Schiffer: I’m a Jersey girl now, so … But you know, what else can we be doing, for example listening to our users: what should we be doing to build tech to give those protections to our users?

Sydette Harry: One thing that’s really important to me whenever people talk anybody the codes of conducts, and I love OpenNews Source codes of conducts, they’re amazing, but codes of conduct are almost always talked about in this way of how do we want people to not behave? Like, “Don’t do, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.” Think of it as a “do.” What do you expect people to do when you come in?

This is where I do the terrible thing that I’m not supposed to do but I was an athlete in school and forgive me, but it’s kind of like if you play a sport, you do not expect that you will always get away uninjured. That’s just not how that game works. But you are made aware of what is and isn’t in bounds, and you are indoctrinated into a culture and that culture can be toxic or problematic but you know when you hit the field, that’s where the goal is. This is how we’ll choose a time. A lot of times when you go into comments in other places, that’s not part of it. They don’t include what do you do, how do you do it, where is the spaces. That is what I think a lot of tech needs to start doing is people think the solution is tech, when tech is the tool people will use to create the solution.

Jenn Schiffer: It’s the medium.

Sydette Harry: Yes. So how do you get people to … How do you want people to be in that medium, and think of that that way, as well as you should have a code of conduct and no longer think this is a discussion no more. Even if you don’t have it officially, unofficially you end up with a code of conduct, so have one. And be comfortable with it being malleable.

It is something that you’re responsible for and you might not get it right, but you have these steps and you have them in place and this is how you will activate them, and this is what you want from the community. Not just this is the thing we have to do, or, “Don’t be a jerk, guys.” That’s nice, but to me that’s not where the warmth is. The warmth is, “We are here to do a thing and we’re trying to do the thing of our best ability, and this is how we want to help you know what the best looks like.”

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. I think that there is … and a lot of tech codes of conduct sort of are like TL;DR don’t be a jerk, because I feel like a lot of people in the tech community need to be explicitly told that being a jerk is a bad thing, because again, we see the leaders in this industry and the people who have made apps that we use every day and they’re known for being jerks and everyone’s like, “Oh, I want to be like that guy,” you know?

Sydette Harry: And there’s also everyone’s definition of a jerk isn’t always the same, and especially for technology, where we’re trying to build for a world, we’ve got to try and think of that. So how do we make it comfortable for people to let us know whether or not we’re successful at what we’re doing?

That is what I think codes of conducts are and that’s about what communities are is, how do we come to actions that achieve what we want, in ways that centre the people we want in the room, that we all can participate in? It’s not just everybody who believes in the same way, because your version of jerk and my version of jerk may be different, but there might be … but we can have a complicit discussion of, “This is how I’d like to be addressed. Please do not do this and that and that.” We can have that, and we should have spaces in our communities, and you should have a place to be able to talk about that and have a place where you’ve decided on that.

Jenn Schiffer: I feel like when it comes to thinking about humans, which is what we’ve ultimately forgotten about in tech, that we’re building software for humans, a lot of people … You know, working as a consultant, accessibility was always an afterthought, if a thought at all for projects. It’s like, well, it seems bad for business to allow people to be jerks in your community and drive other people away. It seems bad for business to not build tech that everyone can use.

Sydette Harry: We are, and the “We,” and my first question is always, “Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold up. Who’s ‘We’, fam? Who is the ‘we’? Let’s start there. Who do you mean by ‘we’?” “Um, people.” “Which people?” “Uh, people who do … “ “Does everybody have a phone? Is this a … how far in a legacy phone is this?” Like, there’s a whole thing that goes through and very often one of the first things with Coral we would do is go, “So what is your community for? Who is your community?” A lot of people would just kind of go, “Of course it’s our readers.” You’re like, “Are you sure? Or is it your subscribers? Or is it subscribers who will comment?” It’s like, that’s not an easy question.

Jenn Schiffer: Or is it your advertisers.

Sydette Harry: Come on now. And that’s not an easy question, and people like to pretend it is because it makes things simpler, and there needs to be an admission that it’s not simple.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, and I think that I’ve recently learned that you need user personas. You need to have an idea of who your users are and you’ll learn that there are other people slipping into the woodwork that have been using your technology in a different way than you had expected, and you have to see that as an exciting challenge to meet and not a, “Well we’re not really going to cater to them because that doesn’t really help us hit our bottom line; they’re an edge case.” I feel like we have to go more into this.

Sydette Harry: No more edge case.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. Like edge case as being a fake idea.

**Sydette Harry: **Because everybody is … Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Design for Real Life, and I love it, is this idea that there’s no such thing as an edge case. There’s stress cases. Because depending on where you are, end of day everybody’s an edge case. Like, if you are flustered and nervous you will miss information. If you are looking for something, if you don’t have access to something, if you lose your phone, if you do this, if you do that, you are going to need something, and if you design for that in the beginning, you don’t sit there and go, “Oh holy crap, what happens when people don’t have broadband?”

There’s a lot of stuff now where like, “Oh, we didn’t understand that people don’t have broadband.” I’m like, “Because you all are in San Francisco. Nobody went down to Kentucky.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, when your sort of user sample is the people who share a co-working space with you, like, is that actually really a cross-sample that’s significant at all.

Sydette Harry: And you need to present your business in that model. I mean, if you can make your money off of just kinds of people like the people who are in your co-working space, that’s a good business model. The problem is when you say it’s for everybody.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah, and I think that’s the one thing that we need to catch ourselves on in tech is that you can be building the tool for a small set of people. That’s totally fine. But you can’t jump on a table and be like, “We’re saving the world,” you know? Unless you’re actually putting the work in to try to save the world, but if you’re building an app that is for a specific group of people …

Sydette Harry: And who are you saving the world from and once again, who’s “we”?

Jenn Schiffer: Exactly, yeah.

Sydette Harry: Who is “we”?

Jenn Schiffer: So what is the future of the Coral Project? What is in the works? What can we see in the future?

Sydette Harry: Here’s where I get to be very proud of my team. They are now in 23 newspapers and working other projects and integrating with other people, and constantly developing and iterating and it’s open source, so people are joining in. It is plugin adaptable, so people pull in plugins to do polls and measure civility and identify trolling and heat map comments, and it’s all open.

Jenn Schiffer: I was going to ask you what your hopes and dreams were, because on the Glitch team, we always like to talk to each other about what our hopes and dreams of our work and in general, but a lot of that sounds like really good hopes and dreams and goals, and we think of hopes and dreams not as like, something that’s a pipe dream or something like that. They actually become our sort of goals and values.

Sydette Harry: Dreaming is work.

Jenn Schiffer: Exactly, yeah.

Sydette Harry: Dreaming is work, and this is a conversation I have with people is that you have to have hopes and dreams because hopes and dreams also tell you why what you want isn’t possible right now. So I want a Ferrari. Why don’t I have a Ferrari? Because I don’t have the money. So you have to think about what is separating you from your dream. Now you might go halfway down your dream and decide you don’t want it no more, but if you want it, it has to become something that you talk about and too often you get this, “Oh, well you’re such a dreamer.” I’m like, “Yes, and?” I’m also a worker. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. In terms of hopes, I mean the apple pie in the sky is that everyone get along … not get along, but we get justice and reparations and an end to exploitative capitalism and yadda, yadda yadda. You know? I was raised by a revolutionary. The most important thing is that we give people and we build things for people to find the best uses for their potential, and give them the space to find resources that aren’t given to them, and continue to build a tech landscape that allows for that more than the other thing. I mean, there are things I want but they’re … I think for me what has been most amazing for tech is the time when I’ve gotten to be my best self, and I’ve gotten the space to be my best self. I think that to me is a better goal than a lot of the larger ones. Am I giving the space, am I giving the tools, am I giving the resources for people to be their best selves? If they don’t want to be their best selves, I got that. I’ll back myself up. I’m good on that. But with journalism and all of these things, especially through Coral and codes of comment, is: how do we provide the resources and tools for people to do that and continue to build them in a way that allows them to have good examples to build for themselves?

The biggest hope and dream’s that it stops being a couple of people in a room talking about a thing, and we’re going to see that it starts being the world looking at, “How do we want to communicate with each other? How do we want to actually deal with this space as part of our lives?”

That becoming the focus of what we talk about with tech, as a tool in the world and not as the 600 guys making way too much money in small sectors of the world. More like, who are the people who are putting pedometers on cows and helping save the dairy industry? Who are the people that are doing micro-lending so that my friend’s family business for 30 years gets to stay on its feet? What is the newspaper that started up in my personal neighborhood because the kids didn’t believe that they were being covered but they had Adobe, a Mac and an internet connection, so they have a newspaper? How do we make those moments possible, and how do we make them possible as many disciplines and things as we can?

That’s my ongoing dream. Like, it doesn’t have a close. It’s like, “Okay, we got here. Can we do better? Can we do it again? Can we do it again?” That’s the thing. I actually enjoy it. I really do. So that to me is the hope of tech, and that’s the flip side of the, “Okay, I really want to fight everyone.” But there is something amazing when you see someone go, “Look guys! I made my first news, I made my first zine, I made my first song,” and you watch people have this relationship where it goes from, this is thing that other people do, to this is part of my life. If we can get as many people as possible to that moment, super excited.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. I like the idea of the future being thinking, “Oh look how far we’ve come,” not, “Oh God, what have we done?” Right now, we’re at, “Oh God, what have we done?” And so yeah. My hopes and dreams are aligned with yours there. But I do want to say thank you for-

Sydette Harry: Thank you for having me.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. Thank you for coming here, thank you for your work on the Coral Project and at Mozilla and thank you for fighting, because that’s where we need to be at right now.

Sydette Harry: We always talk about love as this soft and beautiful, wonderful emotion and I say that is true, but the other side about love is it’s defense. If you love something, you want it to continue living and there is no greater love than insuring someone’s survival. Sometimes ensuring someone’s survival is a fight, and it’s very uncomfortable. We all get, “Eh, ooh, but I, eh, eh, eh,” and I think sometimes if you are really met with someone that does not want to ensure the survival of what you love, you have to fight. Okay, we can make up after a fight, but if we gotta have a fight, gotta have a fight.