Developing Online Communities?

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."

Comments

A minimal approach would be to integrate....

[smagruder]

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.

Have you thought about what you're asking?

[abh]

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.

doh

[slashdotnickname]

Signs that your project to start an online technical community is off on the wrong foot:

1) Ask an already established technical community "how to begin"
2) Stating a goal of "generating buy-in from customers" in the same sentence that admits "features that are widely available in other [free] places"

Selling communities.

[hitchhikerjim]

"community" and "customers"

sort of opposite concepts. In one, people are choosing to work together on something. in the other there's a central power who's trying to get a group to buy something.

The biggest failure of "online communities" in the 'net days is that most of them are corporate sponsored marketing schemes rather than actual communities.

It's doomed, don't waste too much time

[Zadaz]

Sorry you got stuck with this. As a marketing effort, a "community" site is probably doomed.

It's been done before.
If your potential customers want to talk about [your product related things] they already are. Somwhere else. Getting them to migrate over to your (heavily moderated) community ain't going to happen.

The marketing effort needs to have it's own marketing effort.
Next, assuming that people want to have a community and don't, it takes a a critical mass of users congregating in the same place at the same time to get a community in motion. At least 10,000 willing participants within a very short time. This is hard to do for a compelling product. If you're just selling nuts and bolts, you're going to have to bust your ass to get enough people to the site to make a community. If the most recent message on the boards was posted two days ago, no one is going to want to hang out.

Staffing?
Even slightly active community takes several people to moderate properly. Most companies who attempt to set up a community are surprised by this maintenancecost. In the end this dooms a successful community because the company can't control it.

So...
Since you're probably doomed, I would do something very simple. PHP-Nuke with most stuff turned off, and a good forum mod. (Good = easy to moderate, good at blocking spambots).

I'd avoid a wiki, they require someone with both vision and good organization to set up properly, are a pain to maintain, and are a community Resource, not a community.

Joel Spolsky has written about this

[akkartik]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCom munitieswithSo.html

Something good from Something Awful

[cyranoVR]

Lowtax, the mastermind behind Something Awful recently gave a speech on this topic at the University of Illinois. His entire presentation is available online, and is definitely worth checking out.

forums are key

[BortQ]

I have found forums to be the key in the communities I participate in. You can build other things around them, but the forums are the bedrock. Other then that, check out what Guy Kawasaki has to say in: The Art of Creating a Community