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| The 'Building Communities' panel, by by Mllerustad, flickr.com |
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At the panel discussion on 'Building Communities: Moving Beyond Rhetoric to Channelling Peoples’ Energies' on 1st day of iSummit'07, Jon Philips, the moderator explained very succinctly three things to do before building a new community.
1) Keep the barrier as low as possible: For example, you don't want to build a house for twenty people when only two people will be staying there. He used this analogy to explain that one should start using simple and easily available communication tools to communicate with the members. No need for fancy, big setups.
2) Before starting a project, Survey: Find out what's already there on the landscape. See who is doing what. With search like Google, it is pretty easy now.
3) Consolidate & Collaborate: Once you've seen what's there, consolidate. Join other projects out there. Don't replicate. Instead, join and collaborate. For example, it would not be wise for someone to start from scratch a platform to collect global information when there's Wikipedia already there. Its a lot easier to make use of Wikia or Wikipedia rather than start all over again.
Only if there's no community already does it make sense for you to start a new one.
About the speaker: Jon Phillips is an open source developer, artist and scholar with 13+ years of experience building communities and computing culture. He is currently developing the Open Source project the Open Clip Art Library, works for Creative Commons and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Design+Technology department.
tags: dubrovnik croatia other community summit07 icommons jon philips
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