Dawn Foster, one of the BarCamp PDX organizers, is facilitating this discussion. She’s interested in how people build communities.
How is collaboration changing within communities? Moving from mailing lists, newsgroups to blogs, wikis, forums …
Face to face (F2F) interactions build more trust than you get online.
How to bring non-technologists into online communities? Knitting is one of the biggest of these.
People treat each other differently F2F than online. Educating newer generations in social norms, cultural differences, etc all play a role.
How do you find forums moderators, e.g.? Let people who might want to contribute know where you need help. Not just technical but someone to set the expectations for community norms. Important to create a sub-community for the moderators.
Communities self-organize their structures more than being placed into a hierarchy.
Network weaving: intentionally creating tighter and more connections within groups. People apparently do this for a living?
Building a strong community, from a corporate standpoint (or any project), means that people have got your backs when bad PR comes up. Give trust to your community, and they’ll reciprocate. Companies have done this forever as product advisory councils, which also provides a beta testbed.
Building an internal corporate community is required before you can build a strong external community. And letting your internal engineers or whatever hear real customers firsthand sometimes makes the difference. Connect the creators to the users.
Business models move more toward ecosystems and away from your traditional corporate structure. Away from a two-state system and toward a spectrum — no longer just producer vs consumer.
When do bloggers become marketers? Are they still impartial if some company pays them to blog about its products? Does it matter?
More stuff. Funny relevant comic at http://xkcd.com/c256.html
Striving for greatness 