|
home · articles · whipping your community into shape |
New upgrades to icommons.org
We have some exciting new upgrades to icommons.org to report! The latest updates to the site include:
- The ability to upload vertical pictures along with horizontal pictures to the site. We've also set the minimum picture size from 600 to 420 pixels, and you can upload both jpgs and pngs.
- Additions to our list of embedded videos that can be supported on the site - now video... more
|
| |
Whipping your Community into Shape
dean (United States) · Jun 17th, 2007 2:17 am · 30 votes · 1 comment
|
| |
Here's a familiar scenario: you have an amazing idea, a core of eager participants (from all over the place), and some ideas for a collaborative web space. The Community Building panel discussed how to take the aforementioned ingredients and shape them into a salient community.
SJ Klein, who has experience developing communities for both Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), suggested that a good first step to successful community building is lowering unnecessary barriers to participation. In his experience, potential contributers are sometimes scared away without reason -- they fear their contributions are "not worthy" or that the social norms of a particular community are too esoteric. SJ advises that you make your target audience aware of how they can participate, and to enthusiastically welcome them into the community.
Bjorn Wijers, co-creator of Simuze.nl, described a thriving underground music movement that has a serious and dedicated community, despite its being ignored and evenly actively opposed by the Dutch mass media. Bjorn thought that a key to the success of his site/community was that the core developers of the community took small steps that eventually lead to a bigger whole.
SJ argued that while taking the first steps is important, it's really the "grand vision" that gets people passionate about a being a community member. The vision is what drives everyone to engage the cause.
Nelson Pavlosky, founder of FreeCulture.org responded to a question on the potential bottleneck of a community leader. Nelson, being an unpaid community leader, suggested two potential solutions to the problems of an overextended leader. The first, pay the leader and the second, break down and distribute the leaders responsibilities, where possible. It was agreed that having others help defray the number of demands upon a single bottleneck is very important.
An audience member asked the panel about how to balance rewards, payment, encouragement, and recognition, for community members; this lead to a smattering of discussion around non-material recognition and encouragement. Despite not reaching a focused consensus, generally, all of the panelists acknowledged the power and importance of praising and publicly recognizing community members.
In regards to material rewards, Jon Phillips, of Creative Commons, Inkscape, and the Open Clip Art Library, warned against the possibility of self 1-upsmanship that can result from using prizes as motivators. For example, giving away an iPod as a prize and then doing a follow up contest and being expected to give away a laptop. This type of cycle is obviously not sustainable.
A broader discussion of how reward community members and leaders led SJ to the example of Global Voices, a worldwide blogging community. Global Voices began with a few passionate founders motivated solely by their mission. The organization developed into a serious transcontinental grassroots organization that gained enough traction to attract funding and enthusiastic support. The founders decided to keep a core of full time employees to keep the project running. They also decided to give very small stipends to their bridge bloggers, who do translation and aggregation of the best blog posts in their community. SJ reflected that it was the passion and dedication of the leaders and members that made Global Voices such a huge success, not that they were able to pay people to work full time.
Practically speaking, it's smart to set up a base of communication tools to enable your community to flourish. When it makes sense (or is necessary), you build frameworks for the community to interact and communicate through. As these systems develop, they can be tweaked to best suit the community's needs. In the end, it's necessary to find a suitable forum to build your community, but it's the excitement and passion that matter above all else.
tags: communityville croatia culture community building online volunteer members collaboration
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote
add a comment
