Reading Seth Godin’s blog this morning I came across what was a very relevant item for me, about jobs for the future – the Online Community Organizer. The proximity of Seth’s description of this role with the position I’ve identified and am currntly recruiting for the Information Authority couldn’t be closer. I trust Seth will not mind me replicating the post here:
What if you want to hire someone to build an online community?
Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the
players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being
the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and
tedium…
It would help if that person understood technology, at least well
enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write.
But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the
group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a
marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications.
They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence
without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk
the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.
Since there’s no rule book, it would help to be willing to try new
things, to be self-starting and obsessed with measurement as well.
If you were great at this, I’d imagine you’d never ever have trouble finding good work."
The problem for me (and anyone else seeking this skill set) is that we’re fishing from a very small pond, which I can verify from the very few applications I’ve received to date. However, if you’re out there and see something of yourself in this role description, please apply via the Information Authority web site. A more detailed description of the role is included in the attached PDF document.
Download lsc_ia_ia_community_and_stakeholder_management_sd_final.pdf
