In blogsavvy today, James Farmer makes a very good point regarding how to organize online communities:
While the hub model of online communities has each person coming to one place, the hubris approach has each participant secure in their own space and the 'centre' simply being an administrative / aggregation portal to these different spaces. Through the portal context each user is able to find relevant users to themselves and aggregate individually each of them. In essence you have a blogosphere... just right on your doorstep.
Blogsavvy ยป Creating and sustaining a local blogging community - hubs, hubris & your neighboursphere
In the new High Octane Blogging Bootcamp and the original Learning Blogosphere, we used a combination of the two to a little bit better effect than either alone. In my experience with both of these efforts, there are really three dynamic components required to create an effective blogging community:
- Creating an information space where participants can see each other as well as other related information from outside the community.
- Giving participants their own soapbox where they can say what they want and getting them to say it.
- Giving participants feedback so that they know what they are writing is having an impact.
The three points are important together, but the last is the one most community implementers miss. Most people abandon blogs and other social media because it is like pouring their efforts into a non-responsive void, i.e., they are not seeing an effect for their efforts. The feedback can come from the community aggregate or from an individual playing a facilitator role. The real ability to scale a community comes when you can harness the community dynamics to give individuals the feedback they need.
You need the first point, creating an information space to attract people into the community and to provide conversation starters. People are very good at reacting to things they see at hand. They are (generally) poor at working off of hypotheticals. Design of the information space needs to focus on making things concrete and visible.
Finally, you need to get people started contributing (the second point). This implies two things. Contributing has to be brain dead simple and low cost. You should give concrete contribution goals (see point above) because goals will give people an idea of what they need to do.
How do Farmer's notion of hub and hubris fit into this? Simple, the hub needs to exist to attract hubris and hubris needs to feed the hub. In other words, for the community to sustain, it needs to be a self-reinforcing system that provides value to participants.
Thanks for the thoughts Bud, I think you're dead right about the feedback mechanisms and practices:
"The real ability to scale a community comes when you can harness the community dynamics to give individuals the feedback they need."
An interesting idea which came up at Blogtalk, via Mark Bernstein, was the validity (or otherwise) of comments. Personally I think they're invaluable (and have a lot of room for improvement) but there are negative community behaviours and sometimes effective feedback can highlight ineffective or problematic communication channels... it's an interesting area.
"Relationship" is an competitive advantage in Chinese business. The last one u mentioned is an invaluable idea, it stimulate us to search and snip the "relationship" in China blogsphere, creating value-added business community for small and medium enterprises in China.