Archive for the “Online Communities & Discussion” Category

Check out the results at this topic on Louisville History & Issues.

Seeing what visitors actually do on a discussion board not only triggers brainstorms for positive functional changes and a significant re-orientation of what content is developed.

Analytics are also letting me know, brutally, of the limitations of the discussion board approach to creating a thriving online “community”.

How does one really go about creating an “open discussion zone” that keeps people sticking around, and better yet, participating?

ReadWriteWeb recently has been talking up the new role of community managers in companies, especially start-ups, here lately.   See their posts “Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?” and “Community Manager Jobs Are Hot”.

The term community manager has traditionally had this definition, but that’s not what I’m talking about.   Well, hopefully, we don’t have any Ralph Furleys amongst us (Don Knotts was cool though!).  

Anyway, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has boiled the definition down to the following:

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

I certainly think this is a great start, but I think it basically captures one side of the job, the part that everyone sees, and the part the person in the role projects, but doesn’t address the actual ongoing intricacy of making a job like this work to success.

The other side of the job is the shaping of the process of discussion itself.   This involves both a grasp of discussion dynamics as well as social media technologies/trends (where being a person with web programming knowledge is very helpful).

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One of WebCommons’ non-profit pet projects, the local discussion board Louisville History & Issues, is becoming increasingly prominent in Louisville political and history circles, but even more interesting for discussion here, it is also becoming a highly functional (master?)piece of web software.

Louisville History & Issues (LouHI for short) is based on WebCommons’ fork of phpBB version 2 that is currently dubbed “Citizen Assembly Board” (CAB for short).   CAB has been in development for several years, and has many interesting and unusual features, many not even available on the newest version 3 of phpBB.   Of course it also doesn’t enjoy some of the newest features and design approach of phpBB 3, but that has its own set of pros and cons, and I will likely muse about that in a future post here.

LouHI is currently undergoing a phased release of its “Version 3″, which I am touting as the “finally useful!” version.   Read about the changes in Phase 1 as well as plans for later phases after the jump.

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