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Developing Online Communities?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the from-the-ground-up dept.

Johnny asks: "I'm involved with a project that is looking to develop an online community for technology oriented business customers. Although there are various communities on the web, there is no centralized source of information for the customers. If you could develop an online community to encourage collaboration and information sharing, what features would you want included? How would you go about including features that are widely available in other places (weblogging, message boards, wiki) and generating buy-in from customers."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. A minimal approach would be to integrate.... by smagruder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    a discussion board and a wiki into a portal, and it would be easiest if all these were developed with similar technologies (I know all of this could easily be done with existing PHP-based apps). A blog-like component could be created via tying a page on the portal site into a forum that resides in the discussion board, or you could integrate dedicated blog software.

    Also, given that your community will want to deliberate and reach decisions, you would likely want peer-rated discussion and enhancing polling in the board. Of course, wikis also provide for "talk", but IMHO, wikis are best left for collective reference/documentation building, not ongoing discussion/deliberation.

    As long as you provide the portal/hub that ties together the ability to build a community reference, discuss/deliberate subjects of importannce, and somehow come to decisions, you will then have the basics of an online community.

    Of course, this is all just a nutshell off the top of my head.

    Hope this helps.

    --
    Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
  2. Have you thought about what you're asking? by abh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you've identified that there's a need for this type of community (since you say there's no centralized source), then wouldn't you already know what information you want included?

    Building an online community is no different than building a successful website, successful blog, or successful discussion forum: you need to have something that differentiates you from the hundreds or thousands of other related websites out there. If you've identified something unique you can offer, or offer in a better way, then you've already answered your own question. If you just want another site to do the same things as existing sites, then you will fail.