theme park or naturist reserve

Picture credit: annachock

Cyberspace is a pretty strange environment for building communities but why do some online community builders make it so hard for themselves, and prospective community members, by making such a hash of publicity and access control?

The web makes it very easy for prying eyes to happen upon supposedly private gatherings, while public attractions may be incredibly hard to find.

Serendipity plays a big part in the success of online groups; some communities are clearly complex adaptive systems, displaying self-organization and emergent properties, which are pre-requisite for sustainability and maintaining relevance.

But other groups are manufactured – and these are the ones that need to be very carefully designed, if they are to be accessible by the intended community.

Sadly, though, too many group organizers follow the ‘Field of Dreams’ approach of “build it and they will come,” instead of asking a couple of straightforward questions:

• If we build this, who will come?
• How will they find us?

Of course these questions are really about purpose and marketing; fundamental strategic issues that seem to be lost in the excitement of ‘doing something’ – as opposed to doing something meaningfully.

One way of cutting to the chase could be for online community builders to ask a truly revealing question:  Are we building a theme park or a naturist reserve?

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