Building An Online Community for New Orleans I - The Vision Thing - Structure
(x-posted to Keyboard Networking and YatPundit)
Since the NOLA Bloggers Bazaar project is definitely moving forward, I want to lay out some of my thoughts on, as Bush 41 would say, "the vision thing."
Initially, I thought it sufficient to say that I wanted to start a community for New Orleans that was based structurally like Daily Kos, MyDD, or RedState. I was surprised to see how many experienced bloggers did not understand what I have in mind.
One of the ideas being floated by local bloggers was to build a site that would serve as an aggregater to make it easier for folks to read and comment on the blogs participating. It's an ambitious and worthy project, but it's not a community. It won't give those coming to the site a sense of ownership. That's the goal here, a dynamic community where members feel they're part of something.
One of the things that makes a community like DailyKos so successful is that the platform, the Scoop software package, allows members to do several things:
Comment on the "Front Page" (FP) stories.
Create their own blogs (called "diaries" on Scoop sites), including their own online polls.
Rate the quality of individual blogs by "recommending" them.
Allow site managers to "promote" individual blogs to the FP.
Rate comments posted by users, positively and negatively.
There are many Content Management Systems that have the first two features, but the others are crucial to building a solid community. If the only people able to recognize the good work of a diarist are the site's managers, the hierarchy created discourages participation. Invariably, personality issues will pop up, accusations of favoritism, etc. When a blog entry is positively rated by the community, it goes on the "recommended list," and becomes featured. (That entry can still be promoted to the FP as well).
Allowing community members to rate comments is also crucial. The nola.com website now has a number of blogs, and comments there are often pretty nasty. The levels of racism and personal attacks on that site are some of the reasons that many bloggers won't participate there. This has created a divide, though, between the non-technical user and the more tech/blog-savvy users. A community that contains a policing function that will remove comments deemed inappropriate by the community will catch on fast.
That's basically my vision for the structure of the community. To this end, I'm going to set up both the drupal and Joomla Content Management Systems on YatBazaar so folks can offer feedback.
Blog comments for this post are closed, to focus the discussion of the Bazaar project to the Forums.
Since the NOLA Bloggers Bazaar project is definitely moving forward, I want to lay out some of my thoughts on, as Bush 41 would say, "the vision thing."
Initially, I thought it sufficient to say that I wanted to start a community for New Orleans that was based structurally like Daily Kos, MyDD, or RedState. I was surprised to see how many experienced bloggers did not understand what I have in mind.
One of the ideas being floated by local bloggers was to build a site that would serve as an aggregater to make it easier for folks to read and comment on the blogs participating. It's an ambitious and worthy project, but it's not a community. It won't give those coming to the site a sense of ownership. That's the goal here, a dynamic community where members feel they're part of something.
One of the things that makes a community like DailyKos so successful is that the platform, the Scoop software package, allows members to do several things:
Comment on the "Front Page" (FP) stories.
Create their own blogs (called "diaries" on Scoop sites), including their own online polls.
Rate the quality of individual blogs by "recommending" them.
Allow site managers to "promote" individual blogs to the FP.
Rate comments posted by users, positively and negatively.
There are many Content Management Systems that have the first two features, but the others are crucial to building a solid community. If the only people able to recognize the good work of a diarist are the site's managers, the hierarchy created discourages participation. Invariably, personality issues will pop up, accusations of favoritism, etc. When a blog entry is positively rated by the community, it goes on the "recommended list," and becomes featured. (That entry can still be promoted to the FP as well).
Allowing community members to rate comments is also crucial. The nola.com website now has a number of blogs, and comments there are often pretty nasty. The levels of racism and personal attacks on that site are some of the reasons that many bloggers won't participate there. This has created a divide, though, between the non-technical user and the more tech/blog-savvy users. A community that contains a policing function that will remove comments deemed inappropriate by the community will catch on fast.
That's basically my vision for the structure of the community. To this end, I'm going to set up both the drupal and Joomla Content Management Systems on YatBazaar so folks can offer feedback.
Blog comments for this post are closed, to focus the discussion of the Bazaar project to the Forums.
