Re: UKNM: Communities: Fact or Fiction!

[Charles Linn]

Clay Shirky wrote:


> > This was a bit of a surprise to me.  I had always assumed that aiming to

> > create online communities was a sensible aim for building traffic, and

> > that therefore it would be a sensible part of any business model.

>

> Unlikely - community is usually measued in the thousands, with the

> number of truly active participants numbering in the hundreds. Traffic

> needs are usually measured in the millions, with repeat traffic

> measured in the 10s or hundreds of thousands.

>

> Community can be a fine addition for those that want it, but the only

> 'community' sites that have that kind of scale are value-neutral

> homesteading places like geocities.

>

> Look at hte failure of places like Echo and the Well to become viable

> large-scale businesses.


OK, how about this. The UK (and I'm sure the rest of the world that I

don't know about) is made up of thousands of off-line communities. For

the sake of argument, lets take Friends of the Earth's local campaigning

groups of which there are about 250. Say each group numbers about 1000

people (some are much smaller and some much bigger).  Make a website for

one and you have a small community website which may have great repeat

viewing but is useless as a commercial model.  So far I agree with Clay.


How about if you give each local group a Content Management System

driven web area, with common key areas such as 'members list',

'discussion area', 'Campaigning reports', 'Events', 'useful links',

etc...  You make one group member, probably the secretary, responsible

for entering and keeping up the content, and you get all of the groups

to fill in their details in the listed areas, and then you aggregate all

the content into a supersite, summarizing all the local campaigning

going on in the UK and all the info relevant to it.  Now what do you

have?


You have a community orientated website, catering for perhaps 50,000 -

100,000 people, providing a huge networking and information sharing area

where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.  This is

something very useful for anyone who is a member of a local group and

would encourage a real feeling of belonging. It would probably also be

interesting to people not members of local groups as well, as it would

give an overview of all of the environmental campaigning going on around

the country and could being database driven the info could easily be

searched and archived.  So the repeat audience my be 200,000 say, but

still essentially a community lead site.  


Of course this is not a commercial example as FOE local groups are not

in general known for their huge consumerism, and may object to being

shown banners, but the model itself of bottm-up-site-building using

existing communities and aggregating them; as opposed to building a site

all about Stock Car Racing and then trying to market it to anyone who is

interested, essentially in a push fashion - This is what I would call

top down and IMO is what most websites are about.  The bottom-up model

if it can be managed is likely to be a more long term approach but

ultimately a stronger model again IMO.


Cheers


Chas


-- 

Chas Linn

Web Producer

Friends of the Earth 

www.foe.co.uk (Yell Awards - Runner Up 1999) 

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