Notions of authority are not eroding. People will continue to seek out and reward expert opinion. No one is storming the proverbial gates, and there are still plenty of people who want to get inside them. What is happening instead is the creation of a de facto, rather than de jure, culture of curation to deal with a world that has become more of an abundant present than a considered past.
Tag: community
The Tyranny of Structurelessness. An article that started as a talk during a conference called by the Southern Female Rights Union. It dates to May 1970. Interesting to read by itself and in the context of more current flat organizations and communities.
Local newspapers, news deserts, and simple stuff:
But truly, there’s no divine law nor any practical argument to explain why newspapers are the preferred caretaker and distributor of community information.
Stijn does a great job illustrating why local newspapers are not irreplaceable.
WordCamp Philly: Building Community
The first session of the day at WordCamp was with Patrick O’Keefe who talked about building a community around your WordPress publication. Patrick is from iFroggy Networks and has written a book entitled “Managing Online Forums.”
Patrick believes there are 3 key things to do to create a strong community. You need to have quality products and content. You should appreciate your readers, commenters, and followers. Finally, you must create a respectful and healthy culture around your content.
Quality content, email, and comments are the three types of “community by default” with any site. They let anyone come in and participate on your site. To encourage more people to get involved it helps to shine the spotlight on commenters sometimes. Forums, comment plugins, and social networks extend your community and allow more people to get involved.
With forums and lots of other social aspects of your site Patrick says, “If you don’t set it up to be successful then it won’t be.” It’s not enough to just have a forum linked on your homepage. You need to feature it, highlight content from it, and more. You cannot launch something and leave it alone, any community needs a significant time investment.
Key to anything you do though is ownership. Patrick emphasized that you need to own your content and your community in a tool that is truly yours. He also talked about things like edge rank which is Facebook’s algorithm for surfacing content in your news feed.
Ultimately, “people want to engage with you in spaces they already are.” The less friction between discovery and participation the better for your community’s growth.
Let’s meet and work. An index of places to freelance and co-work around London. Sounds like an NYC map is also in the works. Somewhat related to and idea I wrote about earlier this month. (via swissmiss)
The Software is Wrong, Not the People. Good observations about the approach the WordPress community takes toward building software. Listening to users and understanding the validity of their frustrations helps foster a passionate community.
Gina Trapani on community
If you can create a culture of teaching and learning within your community like what went on when Greg showed us git, your project will take off. Those moments are more important to the humans involved than any app feature.
Gina Trapani – Your Community Is Your Best Feature.
Automattic’s WordPress 5K
Just got back from a 5K run for Automattic’s World Wide WordPress 5K. The weather wasn’t as nice as yesterday, the last mile was in sprinkling rain, but it was still a good workout.
Like Nick mentions, it’d be cool to set up a counter next year to see how much distance people log around the world. That combined with a map of where people are running, walking, biking, or swimming their 5K would be a cool visualization of the WordPress community in action.
12 characters and 12 months later
Andrew Nacin recaps his first year spent contributing to WordPress. Pretty cool story. The energy he brings to WordPress is tremendous, I’m definitely looking forward to the next 12 months of code from nacinbot Nacin.
July 27, 2011
Status
I was going to comment with WordPress theme and code tips on a blog post today. Instead, the only option was Facebook comments with no fallback. It makes no sense to me that you’d control publication of your content while simultaneously making interaction with it contingent upon a single, corporate platform.