As we build to the launch of The Art Of Community, I am really keen to make the most out of artofcommunityonline.org. I am excited about the opportunity of not only building the website into a more expansive information portal about the book, but to also provide discussion and facilities about community management, leadership and growth in general. As such, I am looking for your feedback.
What would you like to see on this site? What features and facilities would you find useful? What would you like to see regarding the book, and what regarding general community management topics?
Feel free to throw some ideas in this general direction and lets see what I can provide for the Art Of Community community. Thanks, folks!
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Well, at the risk of being obvious I think forums would be an excellent way for readers to discuss the book and how it relates to their own communities.
Which, of course, builds a community around your book and the site, for extra meta goodness!
Nathan: indeed, I have been thinking a forum could be a good idea. I will certainly look into options.
Higher-contrast text vs. background would be a great improvement for those of us whose eyes are older.
I think some kind of forum would be a good way of discussing things, but I’m not sure if you could keep it as clear as possible.
Maybe giving the posts of the experts a highlight and grouping the forums around the different chapters would help with that.
Forums are a bonus, certainly. Polls, contests, things to drive interaction and pull ideas out of us and make/urge us to think. I know I can get lazy about interaction at times unless prompted by something that has some sort of promise. People are fickle, wanting freshness and novelty AND familiarity at the same time. Using a familiar wrapping, give a pull toward a novel direction while offering some promise or low level incentive, like titles in the line of bean counting on ubuntu forums.
Official guest forum writers/moderators in the vein of a guest blogger would be cool. An opportunity to converse in forum with some of the so called high profile individuals surrounding the project would also be cool. Also irc sessions with this theme in mind would be potentially nifty.
Sorry about the back to back post…
Just a thought on the guest blogging/forum thing…
To pull in so called guest presence from totally non-technical aspects of the community building world would be a pretty cool thing, and might bring good perspective and conversation when held up to comparison…eh?
A directory of community leaders and organisations to help create a community of community leaders and organisations.
I was going to say forums too, but looks like a few people beat me to the punch. Forums would be the easiest and most flexible way to enable some interesting conversation. There are probably more interesting things you could do, but they’ll probably take some time and experimenting, so in the meantime, forums would help get a conversation started.
Some sort of location aware stuff would be nice.
Thanks for all the fantastic feedback, folks!
I like the idea of a forum and I really like the idea of guest blog entries, particularly success stories that were helped along by the content in the book. I am also really keen to use this site as a source of ideas and discussion ready for the second edition. This is very much an evolving book.
Thanks for the input, folks. You are all heroes.
Although it has been said, I do like the idea of site “successfull-cases” oriented. Maybe a kind of wiki or so on
A forum could be useful, but, I guess this type of leadership is only learned by leading. Or studying how the others lead. For that, I’d like to see something like a compilation of sucessful cases.
In the same address that post above, I guess a site like http://ted.com but community-management oriented could be very useful. Or something like http://www.initmarketing.tv
I really love both sites
I think something along the lines of a “Where to start” or a “How-To” section would be great. My basis is for all those out there that have the drive to be leaders but have no idea how or where they should start, especially in creating strong communities. I can see a forum working for this, but the topics could get out of hand and I see these features/points as needing to be more focused.
Just a thought.
Cheers, David
Jono: I would look into installing the BackType plugin for WordPress. Obviously, this blog is already receiving Pingbacks from other blogs linking to its stories, but it will add that extra “something” to draw from Twitter, comments on other blogs pertaining to said pingbacks, etc.
It can both bring outside readers in AND cause readers of the site to expand their reading outside, from whence they will hopefully return with new and fresh ideas to share with all.
I know I am a little late getting my feedback in, but I just realized what feature is missing from this blog. It would be great if you could install a plugin that would allow me to subscribe to a certain post, so that I would get email notifications whenever somebody replies. Another feature that would be nice to have would be the ability to reply to specific comments.
Nathan: The website is powered by WordPress, so if you simply use a feed reader (e.g., Google Reader) you can safely subscribe to http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/comments/feed and see all comments that are submitted. Or, if you wanted to subscribe to this post, you could just append “/feed/” to the end of the post’s URL to subscribe to comments on it (so this post’s feed is feed://www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/05/08/website-feedback-needed/feed/).
Make sense?
You could also use a system like BackType to keep track of your comments (see http://www.backtype.com/home/subscriptions to get started).
Hope that helps!
Whoops, once that last comment of mine goes through, please note that the second URL should start with “http://”, not “feed”. I copy n’ pasted from Safari which appears to append that in lieu of leaving the http alone.
Doug, I would prefer not to subscribe to any more blogs than necessary. However, I just looked at backtype. It looks very interesting. I have not had the chance to experiment with it much, but it appears that it should meet my needs and allow me to easily follow the comments posted on this blog (as well as others that I read). Although I still prefer the one click email subscription buttons that many blogs have, I think that this will work. Thanks a lot for pointing this out to me.
good site!