Community Central ideas
Created | Updated Jun 26, 2011
Here's a collation of the discussion about a Community Central from Recovering from Stockholm Syndrome - h2g2 after the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F19585?thread=8029882&skip=0&show=200
>>
Well, the Aces could post some sort of message to the initial conversation, maybe. Not the full-blown smiley-fest, of course, but just a simple one directing them to their personal space, maybe?
This is one reason I've always suggested having a 'community central' page. I've always felt it should be one of the focuses (foci?) of this site.
>> Icy
>>
Quite at the beginning of this thread Icy North suggested a 'Community Central' page.
I don't know what exactly he meant by it but we should maybe have a page where all (active?) societies are listed. It should be somewhere where it can be easily found be newbies.
<< Tav.
>>
I don't know what exactly he meant by it but we should maybe have a page where all (active?) societies are listed. It should be somewhere where it can be easily found be newbies.
<< Tav
>>
There is already a section like that in the Post. The trouble with a place like this is that things change and become out of date. Wasn't Terran attempting to do a 'who's still active' campaign a little while ago?
<< Vip
>>
Re Post 501: "Quite at the beginning of this thread Icy North suggested a 'Community Central' page."
Glad to see someone's bitten on the idea of a Community Central. Without going to far down the road of designing it, I just feel that h2g2 lacks focus to what is its greatest asset - its community.
I'm not saying that we haven't all learned to live without a community central page - far from it - I just feel that we are hijacking other areas for the purpose, whether it's Askh2g2, or the h2g2 Post, or any one of a thousand conversation threads on all sorts of forums that we subscribe to so that we don't miss what's going on. It's a very muddled way of staying in touch and it must be very confusing to the newcomer.
I can see a community central page being a bit like the front page, but focussing not on h2g2's content, but the people behind it. I'd like it to be the place where anyone can direct a newcomer. It would describe h2g2 in a nutshell, and link to help pages, popular (rather than wholesome) threads, the h2g2 post, meet-up pages, volunteer groups, links to interesting sources of information, etc. It would feature campaigns (like the h2g2c2 consortium, for example). It would be entirely independent of editorial control: the yang to the h2g2 editorial's yin.
* * *
What normally happens at this point is lots of volunteers post to say "Fine, but the Aces/Scouts/Post Team simply don't have the time to maintain yet another page". Well, we can always create another volunteer group to do it if we need to - I don't see it being anything onerous.
I'll shut up now.
<< Icy
>>
I could have sworn something used to exist called "Community Central" but I've just checked everywhere I know to check, and can't find anything. Maybe I'm thinking of another organization or website.
I like it though. I don't know about creating a volunteer group to maintain it. That seems clunky. The days when the community had the most focus, it seemed to me, were the days when we had Community Editors (Peta, Mina and Abi were the ones I recall). Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to let the community pick someone willing to serve in a Community Editor sort of role (though obviously with a different title, if that even was the title Peta, Mina and Abi went by). Ultimately, I believe that the new h2g2 is going to need firm leadership of some kind. Surely bottom-up rather than top-down would be the model. I know that in its early days, the UG elected its editors successfully.
Sorry, I don't mean to draw attention away from the Community Central idea, which I do think is worthy of further discussion. But I do believe that for something like that to have credibility and be successful, it should be maintained by a person or a group of persons with a global view of the h2g2 community, or a mandate to represent them, rather than just by a few enthusiastic individuals who, through the force of human nature, will favor a few corners of the community.
<< Jordan
>>
If it was designed right, it may not need much in the way of maintenance.
A group can be submitted to the page. The most recent conversation is tracked (whatever that is). The page creates, on the fly, the list of groups in order of the most recent conversation activity.
Those that are active remain at the top. Those that are not drop down the list. It keep itself up to date.
Obviously help pages would need a hard link.
<< Vip
>>
Just read the backlog (seriously). The thing that jumps out at me most is that this enormous thread is focussed almost entirely on the EG. I love that Icy has come in at the end with the Community Central Idea (which I like alot).
In the middle of the thread there was some debate about whether the future direction of the site is the social side or the EG side. Firstly, the h2g2 community is much more than a social networking site (I really want to write something about the differences). But more importantly it's not an either/or dichotomy, or at least I don't think that dichotomy is useful in this context (it may be useful when designing the FP).
I love what former Editor Natalie had to say about this during the MoT, so I'll just repost that next.
The point for me is that the community underpins the guide, and they're integral to each other. That means there are really important people here who have never written an entry or been in PR. The vitality of the community keeps the EG alive. I agree we need more people here, and I think the health and attractiveness of the community is key to that. Yes we need to sort out the issues of PR, and EG qualifications etc, but reading through this thread it looks like we already know the answers to most of that.
eg How do we encourage newbies to write? Send them to the Writing Workshop. In order for that to work, we need people willing to spend time there helping them. That stopped working when the community numbers got too small.
What I'm saying is build it and they will come. And I don't mean the EG . I mean the community, which is a writer's community that is open to writers, readers and anyone who loves the place. Stop thinking of the community as separate and alongside the EG, and see it instead as encapsulating the guide. The EG is the point of the community. They're not separate things.
When we have a vibrant community, there will be enough people here to write good entries and wo/man PR and the WW etc, and volunteer etc. We already know how to do all that stuff.
The other thing that I keep thinking about is what someone (anhaga maybe) said about how much good writing is in the threads. How can we take advantage of that? (I've always thought it a shame that SEx threads didn't generate EGEs). When the site has been vibrant there has been a huge amount of untapped energy there that could feed the EG better.
Back to Icy's idea, and to get all dichotomous for a minute. I think the community needs prominence on the FP, for the reasons I've just gone into. It was making the community a second rate part of the site that led to its great lessening IMO. The FP could be very simple - an introduction to the site, and then act as a portal to the Guide Central and the Community Central. These then each have their own FPs which take someone into the rest of the site.
>> kea
>>Natalie's post in its entirety:
>>
57. At 14:52pm on 8th Aug 2009, Natalie wrote:
Although I respect the 'do one thing really well' statement in regard to the general MOT process I think that it might be a bit of a red herring in relation to this unique site. (I should point out here that I'm the Producer of h2g2).
The reason I say that is because I think h2g2's greatest asset is its community. However, a strong community can't exist without a common purpose. To have a strong community, you have to do at least one other thing really well – otherwise the community doesn't have a reason to hang around. h2g2's common purpose is the creation of the Edited Guide. Though much of activity on the site appears unrelated to this central aim, that central editorial proposition is the engine that drives the site. It's properly symbiotic: the Edited Guide exists because of the community and the community because of the Edited Guide. Even the users who don't create Entries for the Guide take part in discussions that are populated by people with inquiring and curious minds - people drawn to a site that inspires them to share their knowledge and learn something new in the creation of the Edited Guide. It's a properly collaborative enterprise: users don't just post scraps of information in relative anonymity but get to know each other and learn from one another. You can see this process in action and it strikes me as precisely the sort of thing that the BBC wants to achieve.
So, as far as community creation goes, this central proposition proved far more powerful than the more standard approach of saying 'Here's a product...please go and have a chat about it - and behave yourselves!' It's why h2g2 continues to succeed where many other communities have failed.
I'm not that convinced that h2g2 could exist in anything like its current form as a 'completely independent external community site'. Even Wikipedia (which I use an example purely because of the central idea of content creation - I believe they've evolved into substantially different sites but as I've explained, the central process of content creation is key to h2g2) has a central organisational structure and is backed by the Wikimedia foundation (powered by public donations).
So, out of necessity, h2g2 does more than one thing really well. It produces distinctive, quality content *and* has a proper community in a very meaningful sense: one that collaborates, teaches and learns, creates large amounts of quality content of different types, interacts intelligently, and, to a large extent, self-moderates. It's precisely the sort of community many companies would give their eye-teeth for – a community of a type that the BBC has struggled to develop elsewhere.
<<
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinter...mots_putting_h2g2_though_its_p.html
<< kea
>>
Thanks, all good ideas, Kea.
'The FP could be very simple - an introduction to the site, and then act as a portal to the Guide Central and the Community Central.'
This is exactly what I try to say all the time.
I also told the Editors when they asked about Barlesque, that the SEx threads have to be put in a more prominent position, but it didn't happen.
Good idea about the EGEs.
>> Tav
>>
Are there any new ideas for the community aspect of h2g2? Kea wanted to talk about it.
We already had the topic of a Community Central page where we can put all the community stuff... maybe announcements should be put there, too? Or should they be on the FP? Or maybe it depends on what is announced...
<< kea
>>
I like having Announcements on the Community page. If it's a massive announcement then we can plaster it across the site Front Page, but most announcements tend to be things that interest the Community rather than the readers.
The problem we have at the moment is that the Community is spread out in lots of places. Because the act of creating an Entry is the same for any page, it means that a lot of clubs have been lost.
How about having two types of Entries - ones that are for the Guide, and ones that are for Community. Or maybe this tagging idea could work, rather than actively having different pages. Yes, I like that better.
That way if people want to see what the Community are talking about they can pull up everything that has been tagged as Community. Perhaps even in order of the most recent conversations, if possible, so the ones that people no longer use drop to the bottom.
D'ya like it?
<< Vip
>>What is 'the Community page'? Do we have one already? (I'm subbed to Announcements and can't remember where the actual page is).
I really like how they changed the FP last year to include more of the community. I know some people said earlier in the thread that the FP should be for the EG, but if we want a vibrant community that underpins the EG I think it needs to be very accessible and visible from the FP.
I still like the idea of having a FP that introduces the site, the EG and the Community, and acts as a portal to the EG and the Community which both have their own more detailed pages.
<< kea
>>
I agree with the portal idea.
I don't think there is an offical Community page at the moment, unless you count the section in the Post.
>> Vip
>>
To sum it up:
We discussed that there should be a Community Page separate from the Front Page where all the Community stuff is put and also all the busiest conversations etc.
Of course there should be a big link to the Community Page on the Front Page.
<< Tav
>>
That's not really what I'm saying Tavaron. That sounds like shifting the community stuff off the FP and I think that's a mistake.
<< kea
>>
No, this is what was discussed earlier in this thread.
In my opinion theres far too much conversation stuff on the FP. The current FP in burlesque makes it seem like all we do is talking and the Guide is drowned. The FP in the old skins were better in this respect.
<< Tav
>>
I also like the idea of a newbie thread or forum. Automatically subscribe all newbies to that thread, everyone is free to unsubscribe if they want to, but it gives them somewhere to go to.
>> Tav
>>
Oooh, yes. And the ACEs can be permanently subscribed to it as well. How about making it a part of the Community Central concept?
<< Vip
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F19585?thread=8029882&skip=0&show=200
>>
Well, the Aces could post some sort of message to the initial conversation, maybe. Not the full-blown smiley-fest, of course, but just a simple one directing them to their personal space, maybe?
This is one reason I've always suggested having a 'community central' page. I've always felt it should be one of the focuses (foci?) of this site.
>> Icy
>>
Quite at the beginning of this thread Icy North suggested a 'Community Central' page.
I don't know what exactly he meant by it but we should maybe have a page where all (active?) societies are listed. It should be somewhere where it can be easily found be newbies.
<< Tav.
>>
I don't know what exactly he meant by it but we should maybe have a page where all (active?) societies are listed. It should be somewhere where it can be easily found be newbies.
<< Tav
>>
There is already a section like that in the Post. The trouble with a place like this is that things change and become out of date. Wasn't Terran attempting to do a 'who's still active' campaign a little while ago?
<< Vip
>>
Re Post 501: "Quite at the beginning of this thread Icy North suggested a 'Community Central' page."
Glad to see someone's bitten on the idea of a Community Central. Without going to far down the road of designing it, I just feel that h2g2 lacks focus to what is its greatest asset - its community.
I'm not saying that we haven't all learned to live without a community central page - far from it - I just feel that we are hijacking other areas for the purpose, whether it's Askh2g2, or the h2g2 Post, or any one of a thousand conversation threads on all sorts of forums that we subscribe to so that we don't miss what's going on. It's a very muddled way of staying in touch and it must be very confusing to the newcomer.
I can see a community central page being a bit like the front page, but focussing not on h2g2's content, but the people behind it. I'd like it to be the place where anyone can direct a newcomer. It would describe h2g2 in a nutshell, and link to help pages, popular (rather than wholesome) threads, the h2g2 post, meet-up pages, volunteer groups, links to interesting sources of information, etc. It would feature campaigns (like the h2g2c2 consortium, for example). It would be entirely independent of editorial control: the yang to the h2g2 editorial's yin.
* * *
What normally happens at this point is lots of volunteers post to say "Fine, but the Aces/Scouts/Post Team simply don't have the time to maintain yet another page". Well, we can always create another volunteer group to do it if we need to - I don't see it being anything onerous.
I'll shut up now.
<< Icy
>>
I could have sworn something used to exist called "Community Central" but I've just checked everywhere I know to check, and can't find anything. Maybe I'm thinking of another organization or website.
I like it though. I don't know about creating a volunteer group to maintain it. That seems clunky. The days when the community had the most focus, it seemed to me, were the days when we had Community Editors (Peta, Mina and Abi were the ones I recall). Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to let the community pick someone willing to serve in a Community Editor sort of role (though obviously with a different title, if that even was the title Peta, Mina and Abi went by). Ultimately, I believe that the new h2g2 is going to need firm leadership of some kind. Surely bottom-up rather than top-down would be the model. I know that in its early days, the UG elected its editors successfully.
Sorry, I don't mean to draw attention away from the Community Central idea, which I do think is worthy of further discussion. But I do believe that for something like that to have credibility and be successful, it should be maintained by a person or a group of persons with a global view of the h2g2 community, or a mandate to represent them, rather than just by a few enthusiastic individuals who, through the force of human nature, will favor a few corners of the community.
<< Jordan
>>
If it was designed right, it may not need much in the way of maintenance.
A group can be submitted to the page. The most recent conversation is tracked (whatever that is). The page creates, on the fly, the list of groups in order of the most recent conversation activity.
Those that are active remain at the top. Those that are not drop down the list. It keep itself up to date.
Obviously help pages would need a hard link.
<< Vip
>>
Just read the backlog (seriously). The thing that jumps out at me most is that this enormous thread is focussed almost entirely on the EG. I love that Icy has come in at the end with the Community Central Idea (which I like alot).
In the middle of the thread there was some debate about whether the future direction of the site is the social side or the EG side. Firstly, the h2g2 community is much more than a social networking site (I really want to write something about the differences). But more importantly it's not an either/or dichotomy, or at least I don't think that dichotomy is useful in this context (it may be useful when designing the FP).
I love what former Editor Natalie had to say about this during the MoT, so I'll just repost that next.
The point for me is that the community underpins the guide, and they're integral to each other. That means there are really important people here who have never written an entry or been in PR. The vitality of the community keeps the EG alive. I agree we need more people here, and I think the health and attractiveness of the community is key to that. Yes we need to sort out the issues of PR, and EG qualifications etc, but reading through this thread it looks like we already know the answers to most of that.
eg How do we encourage newbies to write? Send them to the Writing Workshop. In order for that to work, we need people willing to spend time there helping them. That stopped working when the community numbers got too small.
What I'm saying is build it and they will come. And I don't mean the EG . I mean the community, which is a writer's community that is open to writers, readers and anyone who loves the place. Stop thinking of the community as separate and alongside the EG, and see it instead as encapsulating the guide. The EG is the point of the community. They're not separate things.
When we have a vibrant community, there will be enough people here to write good entries and wo/man PR and the WW etc, and volunteer etc. We already know how to do all that stuff.
The other thing that I keep thinking about is what someone (anhaga maybe) said about how much good writing is in the threads. How can we take advantage of that? (I've always thought it a shame that SEx threads didn't generate EGEs). When the site has been vibrant there has been a huge amount of untapped energy there that could feed the EG better.
Back to Icy's idea, and to get all dichotomous for a minute. I think the community needs prominence on the FP, for the reasons I've just gone into. It was making the community a second rate part of the site that led to its great lessening IMO. The FP could be very simple - an introduction to the site, and then act as a portal to the Guide Central and the Community Central. These then each have their own FPs which take someone into the rest of the site.
>> kea
>>Natalie's post in its entirety:
>>
57. At 14:52pm on 8th Aug 2009, Natalie wrote:
Although I respect the 'do one thing really well' statement in regard to the general MOT process I think that it might be a bit of a red herring in relation to this unique site. (I should point out here that I'm the Producer of h2g2).
The reason I say that is because I think h2g2's greatest asset is its community. However, a strong community can't exist without a common purpose. To have a strong community, you have to do at least one other thing really well – otherwise the community doesn't have a reason to hang around. h2g2's common purpose is the creation of the Edited Guide. Though much of activity on the site appears unrelated to this central aim, that central editorial proposition is the engine that drives the site. It's properly symbiotic: the Edited Guide exists because of the community and the community because of the Edited Guide. Even the users who don't create Entries for the Guide take part in discussions that are populated by people with inquiring and curious minds - people drawn to a site that inspires them to share their knowledge and learn something new in the creation of the Edited Guide. It's a properly collaborative enterprise: users don't just post scraps of information in relative anonymity but get to know each other and learn from one another. You can see this process in action and it strikes me as precisely the sort of thing that the BBC wants to achieve.
So, as far as community creation goes, this central proposition proved far more powerful than the more standard approach of saying 'Here's a product...please go and have a chat about it - and behave yourselves!' It's why h2g2 continues to succeed where many other communities have failed.
I'm not that convinced that h2g2 could exist in anything like its current form as a 'completely independent external community site'. Even Wikipedia (which I use an example purely because of the central idea of content creation - I believe they've evolved into substantially different sites but as I've explained, the central process of content creation is key to h2g2) has a central organisational structure and is backed by the Wikimedia foundation (powered by public donations).
So, out of necessity, h2g2 does more than one thing really well. It produces distinctive, quality content *and* has a proper community in a very meaningful sense: one that collaborates, teaches and learns, creates large amounts of quality content of different types, interacts intelligently, and, to a large extent, self-moderates. It's precisely the sort of community many companies would give their eye-teeth for – a community of a type that the BBC has struggled to develop elsewhere.
<<
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinter...mots_putting_h2g2_though_its_p.html
<< kea
>>
Thanks, all good ideas, Kea.
'The FP could be very simple - an introduction to the site, and then act as a portal to the Guide Central and the Community Central.'
This is exactly what I try to say all the time.
I also told the Editors when they asked about Barlesque, that the SEx threads have to be put in a more prominent position, but it didn't happen.
Good idea about the EGEs.
>> Tav
>>
Are there any new ideas for the community aspect of h2g2? Kea wanted to talk about it.
We already had the topic of a Community Central page where we can put all the community stuff... maybe announcements should be put there, too? Or should they be on the FP? Or maybe it depends on what is announced...
<< kea
>>
I like having Announcements on the Community page. If it's a massive announcement then we can plaster it across the site Front Page, but most announcements tend to be things that interest the Community rather than the readers.
The problem we have at the moment is that the Community is spread out in lots of places. Because the act of creating an Entry is the same for any page, it means that a lot of clubs have been lost.
How about having two types of Entries - ones that are for the Guide, and ones that are for Community. Or maybe this tagging idea could work, rather than actively having different pages. Yes, I like that better.
That way if people want to see what the Community are talking about they can pull up everything that has been tagged as Community. Perhaps even in order of the most recent conversations, if possible, so the ones that people no longer use drop to the bottom.
D'ya like it?
<< Vip
>>What is 'the Community page'? Do we have one already? (I'm subbed to Announcements and can't remember where the actual page is).
I really like how they changed the FP last year to include more of the community. I know some people said earlier in the thread that the FP should be for the EG, but if we want a vibrant community that underpins the EG I think it needs to be very accessible and visible from the FP.
I still like the idea of having a FP that introduces the site, the EG and the Community, and acts as a portal to the EG and the Community which both have their own more detailed pages.
<< kea
>>
I agree with the portal idea.
I don't think there is an offical Community page at the moment, unless you count the section in the Post.
>> Vip
>>
To sum it up:
We discussed that there should be a Community Page separate from the Front Page where all the Community stuff is put and also all the busiest conversations etc.
Of course there should be a big link to the Community Page on the Front Page.
<< Tav
>>
That's not really what I'm saying Tavaron. That sounds like shifting the community stuff off the FP and I think that's a mistake.
<< kea
>>
No, this is what was discussed earlier in this thread.
In my opinion theres far too much conversation stuff on the FP. The current FP in burlesque makes it seem like all we do is talking and the Guide is drowned. The FP in the old skins were better in this respect.
<< Tav
>>
I also like the idea of a newbie thread or forum. Automatically subscribe all newbies to that thread, everyone is free to unsubscribe if they want to, but it gives them somewhere to go to.
>> Tav
>>
Oooh, yes. And the ACEs can be permanently subscribed to it as well. How about making it a part of the Community Central concept?
<< Vip
