Citizen Agency

Stewart and the Flickr folks are good friends of the Agency. They’re good people, espouse very positive principals and have learned a great deal in working on Flickr. The magazine covers and feature articles don’t hurt their popularity, but in my experience, they’ve remained just as day-to-day and unassuming as if they’d never found international fame. In fact, Tara and I ran into Stewart on the bus to the office a short while ago and it couldn’t have been more reassuringly mundane.

Recently Stewart was interviewed by CNN. His answers were pretty down to earth but didactic all the same:

CNN: Is this desire to be creative and share inspiration a new phenomenon? Where do you think it comes from?
Butterfield:

I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative — they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever. Enabling and empowering that is a very powerful force in human nature and I think it’s always been there.

When people talk about Web 2.0 it’s this all-new, never-seen-before thing. If you think back to the 19th century, if you wanted to listen to a song you’d get the family together, go into the parlor and everybody would pick up their instruments and play a song.

Over the course of the 20th century that changed with the invention of radio, movies and television, so that when you wanted to listen to a song it wasn’t something you made yourself; it was something you purchased and consumed. The idea of people making music or art or entertaining themselves is much older and I think more fundamental. A lot of the more creative outlets you see in Web 2.0 are a return to that more fundamental human nature.

CNN: What’s the key to making online communities work?

Butterfield:

I’m not sure I have a universal answer to that. Take the people working on Flickr, including myself, a lot of the development team and Caterina Fake who’s my wife but also the co-founder; all had really extensive experiences with online communities, most of us going back to the days before the Web. We worked really hard but I don’t think we had any formula for how to pull it off. Flickr could have gone in a million different ways.

A lot of our success came from George, the lead designer, and Caterina. Both of them spent a lot of time in the early days greeting individual users as they came in, encouraging them and leaving comments on their photos. There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too.

Definitely give the whole piece a read. I think his attitude and experience is really valuable and just so happens to be very much in line with the things we’ve seen and what we council our clients on.