Matt Haughey, creator of one of my favorite web community environments, MetaFilter, recorded his recent SXSW talk so that folks who weren’t there for it could still hear about the lessons he’s learned after 11 years of community moderation.

The talk is about 40 minutes long and I recommend spending the time to watch it. There’s a fair bit about team moderation that doesn’t apply to me or my museum (yet), but I still took a lot from it. My highlights:

Part I: In order to be a good moderator, Matt says you need to do the following:

Be a model citizen: Be active and involved and participate with the spirit and manners you want other participants to model.

Don’t be overprotective: If you imagine a thread of dialogue in your community as a concert — the moderators can be the bouncers/security at the front of the stage, promoting the idea that if they aren’t clearly present and intimidating, things will get out of hand; or moderators can be planted within the audience, cheering and singing and participating, but also committed to ensuring everyone else’s right to do the same.

Give participants a place to vent and offer feedback: Incorporating a parallel space for commentary about the community can be helpful not only in giving participants a place to be heard, but also helpful in keeping other content areas on topic.

Highlight the best of your site: While this seems like a no brainer, creating a space where the very best examples of community interaction are showcased gives prospective users a good view into the site’s activity and gives current users something to strive for.

Part II: As MetaFilter’s evolved over the years, so has Haughey’s approach and toolset for moderating its community. He spends the second half of the talk outlining and elaborating on the following process:

1. Identify both the things you want to have happen on the site and the things you want to avoid.

2. Inspect what it looks like when those good/bad things happen and look for patterns.

3. Build custom community management tools that recognize those patterns so that you can react quickly.

###

MetaFilter is a community that feels safe and smart, and one that I frequently look to when designing my own projects. I envision scenarios where we use Haughey’s approaches not only for community moderation, but also evaluation and learning outcomes. Kudos for him for being so forthright and open about his site and its operation.