Intentionality
We are intentional in the ways we interact with, engage in, and support each other across fandom spaces. We believe that fan communities are powerful, purposeful, and help to shape the broader world through their influence on mass media and fans. We shape our fan communities to reflect the world we want to live in. As such, our communities intentionally center the experiences of marginalized people and provide space for fans to create, learn, and share. As a coalition, we seek to engage and support one another by sharing resources, knowledge, and opportunities across organizations and fandoms.
Cultivate Intentionality
PRACTICE 1: ESTABLISHING COMMUNITY AGREEMENTS
Joining a new fandom community is exciting! But it can also be confusing, especially if you don’t know a lot of people already involved. Providing clear ways that community members can participate and respect one another makes it easier for people to join and easier to maintain a healthy community in the long run!
One of the best things about fandom is that it’s made up of people from all walks of life, coming together around a shared interest. People in fandom bring their own thoughts and experiences, creating robust conversations, detailed fanfic and fanart, and elaborate theories. However, this also means that people are bringing along their biases and prejudices. This is why fandom spaces, be they chat forums, cons, social media accounts, or any space where folks come together, need to have Community Norms around how we as fans are interacting with one another, in order to keep our spaces safe for folks with marginalized identities.
Community guidelines can look many different ways, but here are some questions to guide you through creating your own: ask yourself who, what, where, why, and how?
Who are the people in your community?
This will influence the guidelines you want to build. Is your community dedicated to supporting creative work by BIPOC? You probably want to establish some norms like cheering each other on for small and large accomplishments and some rules about how (and if) members should critique each other’s work!
Are you a community of activists? Time to think about what issues you’re all passionate about and the ways that power and privilege influence your community’s ability to take action!
Is your community intergenerational, or mostly a single age group? The needs and norms of adult, youth, and intergenerational communities have some differences when it comes to events, language, content, and interests, so it’s important to think critically about that from the beginning.
In any circumstance, you should create a community where everyone can participate safely, so having a strong policy on how bigotry and harassment is handled is non-negotiable. For example, Flame Con has a harassment policy for both their in-person and virtual events.
What is your community about?
Whether you’re creating meta analysis, discussing fun theories, building activist campaigns, writing fanfiction, or anything else, it’s good to make that clear to your community from the start. No organizer or community can do everything, so being clear about the projects your community will work on together can help everyone find the right place for them! This will help dictate what sort of community norms you'll need. For example, Black Girls Create states in their code of conduct for folks to “Keep The Mission At The Center,” and that their community “exists to push our values of connecting, cultivating, and building with each other.”
Where are you building your community?
Will you be online, offline or a mix of the two? Establishing norms based on where your community exists is key!
If you’re offline, create guidelines that make sense for where you are - a library book club will behave differently than a cosplayer meet up at a con. If you’re online, communities can look and behave differently based on what platforms and types of tech you’re using. What works on Discord won’t necessarily work on Instagram. Establishing norms based on where your community exists is key!
Why does this community want to be together?
What is it that makes your community unique and cohesive, and how will you nurture that? Lots of podcasts, creator communities, and activist organizations already exist. Why is it important that your community comes together in this new space?
How will you share these norms?
Once you’ve answered the who, what, and where of your fandom community's norms, how will you share these with new members of your community? Some social media sites allow for pinned posts, or you can email them to new members. Facebook groups and Discord channels have features that allow new members to review and agree to community norms before entry.
Hashtag Ruthless Productions hosts a Discord with clearly defined rules for participation, which you can review here. For in-person events, attendees can be required to sign an agreement upon entry.
Fandom Forward and Black Girls Create both host annual conferences where they have both formal codes of conduct that members sign, as well as informal traditions like late night campfires that provide touchpoints that members look forward to every year. Having your guidelines in a readily available place like on a website or in a google doc where you can easily send a link to new folks can also be a way to share!
The final key ingredient to creating a healthy fan community, especially for people who already face inequities in their everyday lives, is moderation. Lack of moderation in online spaces is why the phrase “never read the comment section” is so common. Moderation looks different in different spaces, so ask yourself who will be doing the moderating and what your moderation policy is, and be sure to include these policies in your written norms. Some things you'll need to consider are: What is your policy for when folks violate your guidelines? How many strikes does someone get before they’re removed from the group? Is there a policy for reentry after someone has been removed, and if so, what is it? How will members who notice policies being violated contact the moderators?
One last note on norms - while it’s good to take time to establish these, it’s also important to revisit and revise them as time goes on! Groups, interests, language, and knowledge all evolve, and revisiting your community norms and expectations is a good way to make sure that your community is evolving, too!
PRACTICE 2: TAKE ACTION WITH INTENTION
One of the best parts of being part of a pluralist community is (obviously) doing things together! That means that whether you’re planning a party, protest, or podcast launch, you want to make it easy for your community to show up and support. How can you do that? Try the triple A’s!
Ask: when you’re building something for your community to participate in, provide lots of ways for everyone to give input. Hosting open meetings and town halls, offering surveys, hosting chats on social media, inviting fans to volunteer, and encouraging people to create art are all ways to get your community involved in making something together. The more a community has input on making something, the more they will want to be involved when that creation is introduced to the world.
Access: there are a lot of factors that go into making an event accessible, but we’re going to talk about three big ones:
Format: Provide captions; provide visual descriptions; make in-person events hybrid. Building a community that can be accessed by everyone takes a lot of thoughtfulness, research, and sometimes money, but the more you invest in it, the more you’ll create a space where every fan has the opportunity to participate.
Cost: What are the direct costs of participating in your community, and are they reasonable? For example, if you’re hosting a ticketed event, can tickets be sold on a sliding scale or made available for free? What are the indirect costs of participating in your community, and are there ways to offset that? For example, could your community establish a reparations fund to support Black and Indigenous cosplayers’ supplies and travel? You may be surprised how many folks in your community are willing to pay extra if they can in order to support those who can’t!
Timing: Timing is key when you’re working together, and not being thoughtful about when you host things can lead to a lack of participation. For example, students don’t really want to attend an event during final exam week, and parents of young children may never be able to make a 6pm meeting. Setting events and meetings during hours that work for your community is key to making them accessible. Another option is to make your projects asynchronous - that just means make it possible for people to participate at a time that works for them. This is a great option for creative communities, volunteer projects, and more!
Ask Again: After a project or event, it’s time to evaluate! Host a debrief meeting with your team and send around a survey to your broader community asking what worked well, and what can be improved. This will help you build better, more fun and accessible events in the future, and probably provide some warm, fuzzy feelings when you read over what everyone’s favorite parts were!
PRACTICE 3: CREATING THOUGHTFULLY
Creation is a huge part of fandom, and of communities as a whole! When we create we bring so much of ourselves, our backgrounds, and our experiences to our work. This is a strength, but sometimes it’s also an easy way to cause harm even if we didn’t intend to. Before you put a creation of any kind – whether written, visual art, podcasts, video, or otherwise - try a “yikes check.”
A Yikes Check isn’t the same as copyediting or general feedback. Because we all carry our own internal bias, sometimes those biases can come out – even (and often) unintentionally – in our work. It’s also possible that because we don’t all have the same lived experience, we may not have thought about how a piece may be read by someone with a different experience than our own. A Yikes Check is when you share something you’ve created with a group of people who did NOT work on it originally and ask them if anything made them go “yikes.”
It’s important to remember that a Yikes Check isn’t a judgment – in fact, one of the best ways to practice allyship and work towards social justice is to be willing to accept and change practices and work that causes harm, no matter if your intentions were harmful or not. If we all approach our work with this mindset, we’ll do a better collective job of not causing harm.
Often, the things we create as fans may be in response to something – a piece of media that didn’t quite meet our expectations, a creator who let us down, a debate within our community, or even just a current event. As community leaders, it’s really important to truly respond, rather than react to a situation. Here are some key ways to make sure you’re doing that:
Time - Give yourself some time to think about how and why you want to respond. What are the things you want to communicate, and why do you want to communicate them?
Why - Ask yourself why you’re responding, and if you’re the best person to do so. Is it possible that it would be better for you to step back and uplift other voices - particularly those who are most directly affected - instead?
Purpose - What is the outcome you hope to achieve from responding? It’s easy to get wrapped up in Internet anger, and anger isn’t inherently bad, but especially if you’re speaking as a leader of a community it’s important to consider what you hope your response will achieve. Are you asking for an apology? Are you taking a stance? Are you hoping a situation or behavior will change? Are you making a point?