Greg Dunlap  0:01  
So today on the podcast, we're going to talk with Lisa Maria Marquis, an independent consultant living in Boston. Lisa Marie is a frequent speaker on the UX and content strategy conference circuit, as well as being the author of the excellent book Everyday Information Architecture, which was published last year by A Book Apart. And today we're going to be talking about ... none of those things at all. So, welcome to the podcast Lisa.

Lisa Maria Marquis  0:26  
Thank you. Thank you very much for thinking of me on this podcast. Sure.

Greg Dunlap  0:32  
So you have a private Slack. That's about Star Trek. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

Lisa Maria Marquis  0:41  
That makes me sound extremely cool. Thank you for that, being identified as the person with the private group about Star Trek.

Greg Dunlap  0:52  
I mean, sounds good to me.

Lisa Maria Marquis  0:53  
Oh yeah.

Greg Dunlap  0:57  
So tell me about this little community that you've put together and how it got started.

Lisa Maria Marquis  1:04  
Sure. So first, we can say it, like we said, it's a private Slack group. What I mean by that is it's my friends. It's people I personally know who I wanted to bring together into one space so that we could share our very nerdy GIFs with each other without like, polluting Twitter with it. So we needed that space. And I knew we needed that space, because what had happened was, I would go to conferences where you would maybe see your your professional colleagues who would become friends once or twice or three times a year, you know, on the various conference circuits. And, you know, you go to the conference, and then you're at the bar afterwards and you're talking and someone brings up Star Trek, and all of a sudden three people join the conversation with the most enthusiasm you've ever heard. And we all get really excited and start shrieking and then we talk about Star Trek until two in the morning. That happened at conferences, and we became people who knew each other in this professional context but who also shared this this ever burning passion for the Roddenberry world. And we tried, I think a few different ways to to make this community happen in a way that felt continuous with our conference experiences. Mostly through Twitter, right, it got to the point where I would see something related to Star Trek and I would tweet it and I'd start tagging the people I wanted to see it and it was just like, the whole tweet was just tags and it was not sustainable in order to make sure everyone I know know who loves Star Trek can see this, you know, this picture of a Kardassian or whatever.

Greg Dunlap  2:59  
This GIF content must be seen. It's very important.

Lisa Maria Marquis  3:03  
Yes. Well, and it made my life much more difficult in this regard when Swear Trek got started, and that Twitter account is just constantly firing on all cylinders, and, you know, luckily everyone started following them on their own. So, you know, it wasn't on me to always share the GIFs. But the point is, Twitter was too nonlinear. Right? You couldn't have conversations. Also over the last couple of years, not really over the last couple of years, many years ago at this point. I started a Tumblr that was about Star Trek. Once again, I'm very cool. I can't stress that enough. I started a Tumblr that was not just about Star Trek, but it was actually an outlet for me to write these personal essays that sort of addressed issues of feminism and inclusion in Star Trek episodes. So it was just a bit of cultural criticism in a very informal context. I wasn't writing journalistic pieces, I wasn't sending them out anywhere. I just wanted a place to take apart, you know, what does happen in the Ferenghi community when women's aren't allowed to operate in business?  What impact does that have on a society and what lessons can we take from that into our own culture? So I started this Tumblr, and I found that I enjoyed it. I ran it for I don't know, two years, maybe it's been a couple years since I really did anything with it. I really enjoyed spending my time that way and thinking through those problems and experiencing those thought exercises, but they were just me, you know, and I didn't have I didn't have anyone to be like, "Well, okay, but how, what is the user experience behind the universal translator?" How do we get into this or an example that came up today in my slack group is  "Where are the bathrooms on the shuttles?" So these various specific, very nerdy questions. But the kinds of questions that only come up amongst, you know, serious fans who are who are really not just casual watchers of a show, but who are immersed in the world building qualities of a piece of media, and want other people to share ideas talk about it. I think the fact that I work in user experience and information architecture and content strategy means that I am already asking those kinds of questions about my own world, right? I ask those questions on websites. I ask those questions of companies. It's not difficult for me to apply those skills to the society I'm looking at in the Trek universe. So I think that's why we kept having these conversations at conferences and then trying to have them on Twitter. And then, you know, I had my tumblr and it all kind of coalesced until I was like, I guess I just need a slack group. Because I didn't want to leave Twitte. And as we all know, Twitter's sort of became a garbage fire recently. And so it was, it's hard to use Twitter the way I used it a few years ago. I didn't like the idea of moving to Slack because Slack is a closed system. We can talk about that more later. But it's a closed system. And so I didn't love that idea. Twitter has the advantage of you can share something with a bunch of people, but someone new can walk into that conversation and we don't get that on Slack. But it was the best way to bring everyone together and have those sustained conversations. So I asked a friend of mine if she would join me if I started a Slack for that. And she said yes, and I said good enough, and I just started inviting other folks I knew. I was like, at least I've got one place with one person. I'm actually not sure how many members are in the group now but it is more than one. And they are all you know, friends of mine who I know like to talk about, take apart the the issues that are inherent in a piece of media.

Greg Dunlap  7:04  
You touched on something interesting there, which is this whole balance, weighing the scales against an open environment where everybody can be involved and a closed environment where it's a bummer that people can't be involved, but you can also have a lot more control over the kind of conversations that happen or the way that you govern a space. Especially when you look at a series or a couple of spaces that are as widely opposing on those things like Twitter versus a closed Slack group, right? Did that enter into your decision making like that you would be able to create a place that you were able to govern? Maybe set a set of standards around discussions as a part of this?

Lisa Maria Marquis  7:55  
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, there's a there's a lot to unpack actually. Um, so where do I start? I mean, I think I did want, I was nervous about it, right? I was very nervous because I wanted to be able to control the conversation on the one hand in that I didn't want, you know, Joe Rando showing up and either being disruptive or derailing or harming other members of the community. I wanted to make sure that the group was going to be supportive and inclusive and model the values that I felt I had and that I felt my friends had. So I wanted a certain amount of control there. But that also means I have the responsibility to ensure that that then happens as well. And I think it's very easy for us to say well, I am this way so obviously a community everyone will be this way too. But we all have blind spots. And you know, we can't really control everything that goes on. I think I'm in control of this group in a sense, but I'm not. The buck stops with me, but everyone is their own person and they, say things. They make jokes. We can't always control how those jokes will land. It's a bit of an illusion really to think that just because one is running a community one is controlling that community. Right? So that's one issue.

Greg Dunlap  9:26  
When you made it, did you create any kind of a formal Code of Conduct or anything like that for it to express that. or has it been more of a casual I know that the people who I've invited understand what we're after here kind of thing?

Lisa Maria Marquis  9:43  
Oh, no, no, no, I had a code of conduct because you cannot leave it to the latter thing you said. You just can't trust that everyone's on the same page. Everyone's my friend, so we all think this way and we we do to the most part, I think a lot share, you know, very similar values and certainly have similar understandings of how things work. But if it's not written down, if there's not a place to point to and say "This is what we all believe", then it doesn't count. It doesn't count. So getting a code of conduct put together was literally the most important thing I did before I invited anyone to my Slack. I was not going to start that community unless I had something on I was gonna say on paper, but on the screen, you know, that actually laid out "Here's what I expect, here's how people should conduct themselves."

Greg Dunlap  10:35  
It's interesting, because a lot of places I mean ... it's not surprising to me, given the fact that I know you and what the care that you put into the world and things like that. But I think that a lot of people who set up these casual spaces have a tendency to not think about those things until problems arise. 

Lisa Maria Marquis  11:03  
Absolutely. I you know, when you go to enough conferences, when you are involved in industry discussions about whether conferences should have codes of conduct. There was a big Twitter blow up years ago, like five years ago, six, six years ago, God who knows ... about codes of conduct at UX conferences, and I came down very hard on the site of you need one, you have to have one, your conference is not a safe space unless you have one. And I still believe that, and even though I was setting up a casual, informal, digital thing with my friends, it's exactly the same advice as going into business with your friends, right? You still need to have a contract, you still need to write things down. You still need to say who's responsible for what, who's making what payments, whatever it is. This stuff has to get written down or else problems will occur. So it was very important to me that that I established something before ... honestly, before I even sent out an invite I was like this has to be visible and present in the group.

Greg Dunlap  12:15  
I think the parallels to starting a business with your friends is an excellent way to look at it. You know, in terms of again, your rights, setting expectations and making sure that everybody understands what they're getting into.

Lisa Maria Marquis  12:29  
And you know, it's so funny. Starting this slack group for Star Trek has really kind of driven home the point that even though you think you and your friends all believe the same thing. you really don't. Because, like,  I love everyone who's in my little community, but some of y'all got some opinions that I don't agree with! Some people just feel like certain things aren't canon and some series don't count and some theories are worse than others. And you know, we're all going to have different opinions on who the best captain was, even though we are friends. And even though we share so many similar overlapping perspectives, we can't agree on these things. So why would we assume? If we can't agree on these very simple things that have no value or stake in anything, why do you think we would automatically believe exactly the same thing when it comes to the care and safety of people? So you have to write this stuff down.

Greg Dunlap  13:36  
How long have you had the Slack together?

Lisa Maria Marquis  13:39  
Not very long. I started it I want to say around the time the pandemic started, no connection. Wow. No connection. I think there was maybe an element of well, it's not like I'm doing anything else, might as well. But yeah, it was maybe in March, it was in spring sometime. 

Greg Dunlap  14:46  
I find that really interesting because I had been under the impression that it  had been around for a longer time because it seems fairly clear to me that the needs that this group serves, and this is probably somewhat intentional and somewhat in the nature of bringing together groups of friends, but has expanded beyond the scope of simply having a place to talk about Star Trek.

Lisa Maria Marquis  15:12  
You mean sometimes we talk about Firefly too? Yeah.

Greg Dunlap  15:19  
Or even books and comics or, you know, other other mediums for science fiction nerdery

Lisa Maria Marquis  15:26  
It got pretty broad pretty immediately, which actually surprised me. I started it by creating in Slack, a separate channel for each Trek series. And I sort of said, Okay, well, you know, if people have some kind of science fiction related topic that isn't Trek, but they still want to talk about it, and I was thinking like, maybe someone wants to say something about Star Wars. Please don't. You know, maybe someone would, I was like, put it in the random channel. You know, I sort of made this misc category and I was like, Alright, go nuts. And it took like one day and all of a sudden we had a Battlestar channel, we had a Firefly channel. We very quickly made a books and comics channel. So we could talk about just reading recommendations, nothing to do with Trek at all. So there was a sense of, okay, when you like one sci fi thing, you tend to like other sci fi things, right? So a lot of us have seen the same sci fi shows from from the 90s and aughts. And we wanted to talk about those but also, we're really just it you know, ingesting media, right? We're really just talking about the ways that we consume and think about media. So it's a very natural thing to, I think, just say, well, what are you reading right now? You know, I'm looking for a new novel. I'm looking for a piece of nonfiction what's on your plate and the folks in there are just so willing to share what they're doing and talk about it. So I think it's really nice the way it expanded so quickly and so organically to encompass so much more than Trek, even though that is still the kernel that brings us together and cements a lot of our conversation.

Greg Dunlap  17:07  
Yeah, and I mean, I don't know how anybody else feels. But I think there's probably ties together with the timing of the pandemic that having discussions that carry so much and yet so little weight is really refreshing.

Lisa Maria Marquis  17:25  
Yeah, I've found it to be a necessary place to spend time sometimes. You just need to laugh. You need to have moments that that make you feel alive. Not just constant frustration and constant anger. There needs to be a break in that somehow. So I think this is a time when a lot of small communities are flourishing, because we need more intense connections right now.

Greg Dunlap  18:02  
I've been involved in online communities for a really long time, like going back to the BBS days. And something that I've noticed that has not changed in all of those decades of watching people get together online is that it seems like there always comes a point where people need to subdivide. I usually see this when communities reach around 200 people and sometimes that subdividing turns into a group of people  like you're looking at, you know, here's a couple people that I met in the UX and content strategy world and we're going to go over here and talk about Star Trek. You don't necessarily say the UX and content strategy world sucks. It's just like, I like these people an we want to hang out. But you know, I've definitely seen it the other way too where there's a group of people who say "We're going to take our toys and go over here" And it's always fascinated me what that need is right? Large groups are great and people love them, but people also crave the connection from smaller groups, too. And you've given some examples of why you felt the need to create this group. But I was thinking of it from a bigger picture standpoint. What is it in us as people that feel this need to carve ourselves out from other groups of people?

Lisa Maria Marquis  20:24  
I think it's very individual in some ways and obviously trends throughout throughout society. Some people  love large groups, right? I mean, I don't. I'm an introvert and large groups are very stressful to me and I don't want to be part of a 10,000 member Slack community. Around the time that I started my Star Trek group, a friend invited me to a large Slack community. I don't know how many people but it wouldn't surprise me if it was 10,000. It was like an invite only select group. And this person invited me because they were like, "Oh, you like Star Trek? Well, we have a Star Trek channel in this group, you should come participate in it." And I got in there, I stayed maybe a week, maybe two, and then I quit because I couldn't find purchase, right? I couldn't find any kind of footholds to engage me in. People might have been talking about interesting things, but it was such a large group with so many unfamiliar faces. I didn't know anyone except the person who invited me. There was just nothing to make me feel like I could approach someone. It was like going to a conference and walking into that that big room where everyone's standing around with a cup of coffee already immersed in their conversation with their friends. And a you're like, I guess I'll just stand next to the crudités and talk to the wall. It just didn't really, that's too big of a group. I do better when there's a smaller set. The scope is smaller, it's expected to be more intimate. You can make deeper connections. That's not to say there aren't times when when you want to talk to the crudités again, but I think different types of personalities, someone else thrown into that exact same giant Slack group might have totally loved it and just become a major member of it. But not me. I couldn't do it that way. So, I don't know. I think carving out smaller groups as a way of making socializing manageable for some of us. I think it's a way of establishing or asserting identity. That's why we identify ourselves so much through the music and movies we love, right? I'm thinking maybe of teenage years when it's like your music is everything, like the band you listen to is complete, like 90% of your identity is like who you're listening to. But we still do that right? Even as adults we really think about, "Oh, I'm a I'm a Trekkie." There's a word for it, that's that's part of my identity.

Greg Dunlap  23:10  
No, it's interesting because I've actually used that, I didn't even really think about this until now, in my own personal life. I actually remember the first time that I met you, and I have this shirt that has the lyrics to the song "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on it. And you said, "God, I love that song. It's so special." And I love that song. And I think it's very special. And there's that like connection right there. 

Lisa Maria Marquis  23:32  
Exactly. We were friends because of that moment. Exactly. Even though I don't know any other Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs. That is the only song by them I know. But I love it so much. So yeah, it gave us a cultural reference point. A touchstone that that said, You're not just a face in this giant sea of people. I'm not just a face. Now we're going to have something we can point to and say "We we speak this language together."

Greg Dunlap  24:03  
Yeah, and I think that another thing that I'm thinking about there is that one of the reasons that we've seen this online so much is because online communities do tend to attract introverts, I think, and you're right introverts in general, they're just more comfortable with smaller groups. So an introvert might join a smaller group. And as it grows, they're like, I need to pull this back a little bit.

Lisa Maria Marquis  24:31  
Mm hmm. I think also, too, there's it's not necessarily entirely this but I think you need to rely more on those cultural connections online because you don't have facial expressions. You don't have tone of voice, you don't have the kinds of social cues and ways of getting to know people that you have in real life. So it becomes I think, more Important in digital spaces to sort of assert, like, these are the TV shows I watch, and this is what I listen to. And this is how I dress. And this is, you know, this is who I am distilled into these like easily packaged bytes, so that I can communicate it digitally. I can share who I am digitally.

Greg Dunlap  25:20  
And another thing that has struck me as I've thought about this heading into this conversation is you talked about the ways that even in your own group, all of these channels spawned off for different things, right? And your work inherently is tied to taxonomy using information. It's interesting how, in a way, this is kind of our way of taxonomizing ourselves. Like we are creating the categories that define who we are to the world.

Lisa Maria Marquis  26:00  
Yes. Yeah, for sure. I think that is so much of what we do in information architecture, in taxonomy, in concepts of categorizing and organizing things is that we are trying to make sense of the world. We are trying to kind of take in all of this data, all of this sensory information, and parse it to make it easier to live. Really, that sounds very dramatic, but that's what it is, right? That's what we're doing. We're trying to understand who are we and what are we doing here? God gets this very fundamental kind of existential thing. I never thought of it that way. But yeah, it is. It is like a very deep existential, like, what am I doing with my life? Where am I going? 

Greg Dunlap  26:53  
You did a talk at Design/Content conference a couple of weeks ago, and you bring up this quote by Richard Saul Wurman, "When you categorize information you also create new information" right? And I feel like over time, as I found these sort of niches for myself, they've changed the way I view myself in addition to the way that I present myself to the world top.

Lisa Maria Marquis  27:15  
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this is not just about communicating to other people who we are by saying, "I like Star Trek". It's also understanding ourselves, right? It's also how we identify ourselves to ourselves. So you know, am I really a Trekkie? If I don't have my group, I mean, if you don't have this, this is just like issues of representation in the media, right? Like, if you don't see yourself reflected out there, in movies and TV shows, in your friends, in your social circle, in your culture, then like, it is hard to understand yourself. It is hard to understand where you fit in with all of that. So I think finding connections with other people who also sort themselves into these categories is super important to just functioning well in society.

Greg Dunlap  28:16  
For something as simple as a gathering place for people who love Star Trek, it really does seem to me, and I think this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about it because ... I'm probably in you know, 40 Slacks, but probably 20 of them have no more than 20 members, and they're some variation of what you're discussing here. Right? They are basically closed or loosely governed groups of people with a common interest and a lot of them have people who overlap and a lot of them don't, but you know, I think I feel like there's there's a real human need that this kind of grouping or this kind of putting people together and managing them in some way just really fulfills something that's very core to who a lot of people are.

Lisa Maria Marquis  30:11  
I always felt like I was much more online than my real life friends 20 years ago, right? I was always doing something with ... Oh, God ... I was never on Myspace because I don't know why, but like back like I was on Friendster, I was on DiaryLand, I was on LiveJournal. All the old school kind of emergent digital communities of the late 90s and early aughts. I was there when none of my real life friends were. None of them cared. They didn't do that. And that was just always something I loved. So I was a pretty early adopter of Twitter. I made almost all of the friends I currently have right now I have made through Twitter. Not recently, not recently on Twitter. But like 10 years ago on Twitter, these are connections that I made digitally that morphed into very intense and important real world friendships. So it makes sense to me that I have now kind of continued that trend for myself into Slack. You know, that's just a different platform to to carry those conversations over away from a platform that has become really toxic. But to get back to something you said about that earlier, the downside is, you know, Slack is a closed community. And so what I worry about now is, yes, I get to control this group. Yes, I get to have my little conversations with my little friends. But who's getting left out of this conversation? Right? Who, who is not able to say, "Oh, I love Star Trek, too"? Who is who is not getting to participate in this community? And maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal, because it's Star Trek, like, who cares, find another group of Star Trek people to talk to you, whatever. There's lots of Trekkies out there, believe me, but it becomes more important when we're talking about a Slack group that is say, female professionals who are basically operating a whisper network. Who doesn't have access to that space because it's on Slack? Or you know, if I'm hearing in a Slack group that I shouldn't trust such and such conference organizer or I shouldn't trust such and such UX leader because they're abusive. That's information I'm getting because I'm part of a closed group. How do you open that up while also keeping people safe? And I mean, as far as I can tell, you can't. And that sucks. That sucks. So, I don't know. I'm stuck.

Greg Dunlap  34:17  
I think that balance is really important and really difficult. And it's one of the fundamental paradoxes that we encounter in these online groups in that, you know, there's a lot of times information and you I think of it in the other end. For instance, say, you've got a Slack with a bunch of VCs and tech CEOs, right? They're controlling access to the information that they find valuable and use to enrich themselves. It's the other side of the same coin. So the closed systems can be dangerous in some use cases, but they're also useful in others, and it's the parts where they overlap where there's some paradoxical things that I don't have a good answer to working out either.

Lisa Maria Marquis  35:48  
Yeah, why not? Lets finish it. Here's the answer. We got it. Greg and LMM brainstormed and we figured it out and ... we didn't. We didn't figure it out. It's tricky.

Greg Dunlap  36:06  
I think another thing that's important when you talk about the value of these closed spaces, especially when you have people are friends, and I've seen it in your group a bit. I think I've seen it more in other groups, but especially in a time like where we're all so isolated from other people in physical spaces and neighborhoods and families and stuff like that, is that they become real support networks for people. Yes, this is a place for a bunch of people to get together and talk about Star Trek, but because it's kind of a controlled place where people generally know each other or are all in the same worlds, after a while, people do kind of start to open up about other things than Star Trek or even science fiction in their lives. And that can also be really valuable for people, especially if they don't necessarily have that network in any other way.

Lisa Maria Marquis  38:39  
Yeah, actually, I think that's one of the things that I love about running a Slack community and it's also one of the things I love about Star Trek and media criticism and watching things in order to take them apart in general is because they provide gateways to very important and, and tender discussions of things. You watch an episode of, I'm trying to think of an example. Of course, I can't think of anything off the top of my head while I'm on a podcast. If you watch an episode of a show where someone experiences trauma, that becomes a point of someone in your group saying, "I know what that's like. And I want to talk about it because I need to talk about it" or something. So I think when you engage in media criticism that way, I think it's important to create space for those conversations to happen around it. Otherwise what are you doing? Why are you watching the show? You know, if you're not going to be open to real life stories about how things impact people I mean ... drama is inherently about about conflict and  about what happens between people. So a show like Star Trek ... shows like Star Treks ... So many shows ... they provide us those windows, they give us those those opportunities to think about how our own lives just cross and unfold and get messy. And that was part of why, like I said, I wanted that code of conduct from the very beginning. I wanted to make sure that the people who were in my group were going to be safe for each other and supportive of things like that that might come up. I mean, I don't think my group has seen anything that. No one has like unpacked trauma in my group. I think things are sensitive, right, like things just come up. I'll give an example that has nothing to do with Star Trek, but happened in the Star Trek group. We were we were sharing baby pictures of ourselves. We were sharing with our group, childhood photos, pictures of us from high school in elementary school or baby pictures and I wondered out loud, you know, in the group, "How do you all have so many baby pictures of yourselves? My mother has all of mine". You know, like I don't have pictures of myself because they're all still at my mother's house in albums. And two people immediately in the thread where like one said, "Oh, you know, my mother passed away. So of course I have them." and the other said, "Yeah, my mother's in a nursing home Of course I have them." And I was like, that was a really insensitive thing for me to say because of course I didn't think of that. I didn't mean it that way. My own personal experience was that my parents, who are relatively young and very healthy, and have a home and they have all these things. They have my stuff. They have memories of my childhood still with them and I have not had any opportunity to take them, the way that would happen if one were putting a parent into an assisted living facility or saying goodbye to a parent. And that's a very, very simple example of I just didn't think beyond my own experience. It just did not even cross my mind. And I felt very bad. And I apologized. And I said, you know, that was thoughtless of me. And of course, they, in turn, were very gracious and forgiving. So I appreciate that. But I'm glad that I have made a space where people felt safe to say that to me, and people felt like they could say those things that were personal to them, and that I would have the opportunity to apologize and be forgiven for it. So like, cool, great, good job.

Greg Dunlap  42:47  
And you know, kind of looping around back to the beginning, I feel like if it wasn't for the thought you had put into the space and what you wanted it to be upfront, that those kinds of connections would be much more difficult to have happen.

Lisa Maria Marquis  43:04  
Yeah, I mean, if you don't set those expectations, then then what happens is you're watching a TV show together, you're talking about a TV show together, and it's all surface. It doesn't go any deeper. It doesn't. You don't engage with it, and you don't engage with each other. And then that's not a community. That's, I don't know what, that's a bulletin board. That's Wikipedia. It's just, it's not personal. It's not. What's the point? You know, if you're not going to make a real connection, what's the point? So I think by being purposeful and intentional with what kind of community I was trying to create, who I wanted to have in it and what the ground rules were for interaction, I think that helped. And another thing I'll say about the code of conduct too, is I do think it's not just it's not enough to just have the code of conduct, it's important to make sure it's visible, and it's important to make sure that people who are new to the group know about it, and you know, have read it and, and acknowledge it so that it's not just saying, well, we have a code of conduct. It's actually saying this is a living document that is part of this space. I think I ended up editing it like a week after I got started, because, you know, I had an idea to change something or something someone said lead me to change something. So you know, it needs to be a presence and, and living a visible document. 

Greg Dunlap  44:30  
And of course, you yourself have to be prepared to do something about it if you need to. 

Lisa Maria Marquis  44:34  
Oh, yeah. Like I said, you get all the control and all the responsibility.

Greg Dunlap  44:42  
That's right.

Lisa Maria Marquis  44:42  
It's tough, because, you know, like I said, nothing has happened. Nothing negative has happened in the group and I'm glad for that, but something could. And then honestly, I will have to look at myself and say, "Well, what do I do? How do I handle this?" Yes, I have these guidelines in the code of conduct and I hope that I will act to my utmost in accordance with that, but also just full disclosure, I'm terrified of conflict. Terrified of it. Cannot handle it. So if something negative were to happen, you know, I would struggle with that. And I wanted to start the Slack group for many months before we actually did it. And that was one of the reasons why it took me so long was because I was like, am I really up for that? Am I really up for addressing a problem that occurs? I think I am. I think I am. But it's not going to be easy for me. You know, it's it's gonna be tricky.

Greg Dunlap  45:37  
Well, I would say that most of the conflicts that I've seen in communities that were difficult to resolve, were the result of someone not having those conversations with themselves before those problems happens. So I would argue that the fact that you have actually sat down with yourself and faced that and said "Yes, I'm up to it" means that you almost certainly are because most of the people who I've encountered who aren't, the main reason they're not is because they had never actually believed in their heart that it would ever happen. Or even worse, they didn't bother thinking about it at all. So I think that's really the key thing that that a lot of communities miss out on that you've actually done.

Lisa Maria Marquis  46:32  
Oh, thank you. I actually, that makes me feel a lot better. Confidence.

Greg Dunlap  46:38  
Good. Well, I really appreciate you sitting down and talking with me about this today because I think these kinds of communities are really important and really fascinating. If anybody wants to find you out there in the world, how would they do that? Are there any projects that you're working on that you'd like to plug before we go

Lisa Maria Marquis  47:00  
Sure, yeah, thanks. I would love if people would buy my book that'd be really cool. It is called Everyday Information Architecture, and it is out from A Book Apart, you can get it at abookapart.com. It is written for anyone who works on the web. So if you are a content person, if you're a copywriter, if you're a designer, if you're a developer, it doesn't matter. Read the book. It's I think it's good. There's a Star Trek joke in it, you know. You can follow me on Twitter, except that I really am avoiding it these days. So I will not really be present if you if you reach out to me there. But my handle there is redsesame and that's also my handle on Instagram where I'm a lot more active. And finally, if you enjoyed the part of this conversation that was about Star Trek, you can read my old Tumblr. It's still out there and it is holodexmachina.tumblr.com. So enjoy my essays about the Ferenghi. That's, yeah, maybe don't. Edit out that last part.

Greg Dunlap  48:14  
I'll link to it in the show notes.

Lisa Maria Marquis  48:15  
Wonderful, great.

Greg Dunlap  48:17  
Okay, I will also give a hearty vote of confidence for Everyday Information Architecture. It's a really excellent book. I recommend it to every single client I've worked with since it came out. So everyone should definitely go out and buy it. And it's my pleasure, and I really appreciate you talking today.

Lisa Maria Marquis  48:37  
Thank you. I'm so glad I could be here. I I love I love talking about Star Trek. I love talking about communities and this has been an awesome experience.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai