collective action on the AP exams

two related problems here. serendipity takes a lot of time, and it doesn't have a neat precise ROI. some systems manage to inject enough ambient random interestingness - e.g. facebook, twitter, delicious - where you view a stream of things that are related to people you know, but not necessarily things you were searching for. alas, only non-serindipitous search has been precisely monetized.

Additionally, there remains a gap between those who are good at community development but not good at information and communication technology and those who are good at information and communication technology but not good at community development. There is also a misperception in much of the field that it is the technology side that is really complicated, requiring a great deal of mystical expertise, while running a community meeting to plan a project requires no training at all. It is, in fact, quite the reverse. The reason so many community informatics projects operate with only small numbers of community participants is not that community members don’t care about such projects, but that those of us organizing the projects are so bad at recruiting, involving, and empowering them. If you can’t get 100 people involved in a community informatics project then you probably need training in how to organize, involve, excite, and empower people.

santa barbara luria library - community bulletin board for fire resources and recovery

Sounds like you have a community up and running and want to get others in the company more engaged. Three things I’d recommend:

* Harvest some customer opinions from the community and pass them around the organization — most people really want to hear what customers are saying.
* Communities are often one of the largest drivers of traffic to the company website — do some analysis on your site’s web traffic to show people how much traffic your community drives.
* Publish a weekly report that…

Last summer, posters grew so "aggressively rude" at Brooklyn blog Brownstoner.com that founder Jonathan Butler began requiring every user to register with the site before they could post. "It got to the point where I couldn't leave my desk for half an hour," says Mr. Butler, who deletes inappropriate posts on his site.

OpenSolaris.org Community Statistics as of August 1st 2008 NB. These metrics do not relate to activity on OpenSolaris.com

typical example is the upstream report in Launchpad which we are readying for beta right now - I will have more details on this soon when it is complete. The upstream report shows a bunch of upstream projects, the number of open bugs, the number of bugs with upstream activities (this means the bug is likely to be an upstream bug), and the number of bugs with upstream watches (a known upstream bug that is linked to the Ubuntu bug). This provides us with useful data for which upstreams need most focus. We are currently getting some additional features into the report for colour coding, sorting the results and removing dupes. Bugs are a metric, they are a mechanic - they are the nuts and bolts of the software development process, and we measure them closely.

So, let's return to the concept of the community manager. Whose "community" is it to manage? The people in your organization may be a part of a community, may have even participated in birthing it, may even be trusted members, but to think they occupy any special super-node is nothing short of delusional. Does making someone responsible for these functions absolve others in your organization from active participation? It's not a community if everyone doesn't feel free to participate as an equal. As soon as you make this someone's job you devalue the contributions of everyone. I'm thinking the whole concept of a "community manager" is a very bad idea.

community news blog/forum run by an autonomous collective; mostly informed and informative dialog of issues of the day around town.

What every successful community requires is community leadership. Community leadership can be organic and emergent or they can be hired in the form of online community managers or facilitators. A strong leadership — people who have skin in the game — is more important than a good web application; also, these community leaders are often the main draw to the community and can be the difference between keeping or losing your members when a competitor comes to town.

they too serve who only sit and lurk

Because the map shows networks rather than hierarchical standing, it is innately more community-enabling than a list, which automatically orders people into rankings or disconnected categories.

Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) coordinators for Michigan

nancy white on online learning communities, communities of practice, network building around shared interests (vs. specific goal-directed activity w/central coordination)

he is part of a community of folks, i.e. the cooperative, with a common and shared mission and a set of goals (i.e. Earn their living as beekeepers), who work collaboratively in getting the job done while contributing to the well being of the environment

on the behavior of people within online communities which have very low bandwidth user to user communications channels

Why is it that the strongest advocates of a networked economy fail to see the importance of communities, which they wrongly equate to social networks?

html version via google of 1960s look at the rise of automobiles as a way of expanding communications space, via barry wellman

these rules go well also for any other kind of ad hoc social groupings - lunch groups, book clubs, etc

CRE students use the Community Resource program, which is housed at Community High School, to schedule all their classes. The Community Resource program offers all secondary students in the Ann Arbor school system an opportunity to earn credit toward grad

this is the talk I'm at at SI. will be bookmarking things as I go, hopefully the suggested tags will identify the community I'm engaging here.

a great blog on how to build online community (at a large scale, for brands)

One of our greatest assets was establishing a partnership with Community Housing Services and its "Tool Lending Library". We were able to borrow over 60 tools such as wheelbarrows, shovels, rakes, and paint supplies.

twitter does not have a way to share your stream of favorites, or at least the obvious way to do it didn't. pity, i can see recombinatorial approaches of great utility. lolcats 404

"Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation". Wonderful analogy of bird flocking behavior to online participation - how the community learns to incorporate newcomers.

Neighborhood Walking Guide Are people not walking in your neighborhood? This guide will help you figure out why this may be the case.

posit that one well-oiled Front Porch Forum can do more for environment and community than whole collections of sidewalks, solar panels and official open space. Our neighborhood, I’d guess, would score well since it was laid out in the 1920s… dense, m

Libraries are frequented local destinations. Urban Institute researchers repeatedly found that public libraries are highly regarded, and are seen as contributing to stability, safety and quality of life in neighborhoods. Among private sector developers

Outside.in is a play for the territory that sites like Yelp, Craig’s List and others have circled, but Mr. Johnson thinks he can do it differently. Right now he’s focused on building up a critical mass of users attracted to the site’s one-stop-shop

interview in a hair salon where everyone uses Myspace!

new contributor to Orlando downtown neighborhood blog hosted by the Orlando Sentinel

bkerr says slicehost++, notes wiki as a sign of community

more results of my "neighborhood" nightly clip from google - a walkable neighborhood has a cafe that people walk to

"People made time for what they wanted their street to be like and the group started to take care of it," May said.
Members of the neighborhood began holding meetings that attracted 20-30 people and putting on events such as block parties, neighborhood c

and sometimes those public conversations happen in delicious and twitter

some kind of social network thing based around locations? hard to tell so far.

eric pulls off a brilliant page aggregated from flickr of the most interesting photos of the ice storm. new blog.

on UpMyStreet and neighborhood information systems

project to map out community informatics projects around the country and around the world. an experiment so far.

selective use of technology as an indicator of group identity. you are what you don't do.

"People have lost the art of conversation."

Jim writes about new forms of human gathering that don't depend so much on The Planning Committee

Kids, postcards, pictures of Ed and Mike catching big fish, people smiling

a bulletin board with empty space is a bad sign

Thanks Nancy for starting this tag!