2006-03-09
Building a Community -- my first try
So I had an alterior motive when I created an area for people to "talk about Sun Fire benchmarking and performance":http://sunfirefan.com
It was to see how easy (or hard) it was to start a community from scratch.
My initial experiences over the last 4-5 days (and about 800 page views) has been interesting.
First of all my "django forum":http://feh.holsman.net/articles/2006/02/15/starting-a-new-django-project-need-volunteers isn't ready yet (I've been busy porting it to the Magic-Removal branch I promise it isn't dead), so I chose a popular PHP one (phpbb) to get the site up and running quickly to see what it was like to actually run one (so I can build one which matches those needs better)
So far my basic decision points have been:
* *The Structure*.. do you start it big with lots of different areas and try to prompt people into things they can discuss, or just have a single 'chat' area and see how things progress. I chose lots of small areas.
* *Advertising* .. Should I/Shouldn't I. and how blatant should I make it. at the moment I've just put a little ad on the top right corner with google.. This was partly because the default template didn't really lend itself to putting in ads easily. So far zero clicks, but I'm guessing that is because the ad it's showing is for 2nd hand sun hardware.. too much of the word 'Sun' on the pages I'm guessing.
* *Letting people know about it* .. I've gone for a slightly spammy approach, posting comments on people's blogs who have said they are benchmarking a T2000 to let them (and their readers) know the area exists. It hasn't really worked... most of the refererals are from my own blog, and when I posted it to "open solaris performance forum":http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=26 I'm guessing not many people actually read comments of blog entries.
* *How do you make it inviting enough for people to post?* .. This really is the critical one a community is only as good as the people who contribute to it. So .. do I overload the forum with my own views in the hopes that good natured people like "Mads":http://soulfood.dk/ and "Yusuf":http://blog.goolamabbas.org/ who know solaris 1000 times better than me answer them, or do I wait for a newbie to start the ball rolling (which one or two have)..
If you have visited "SunFire Fanatics":http://sunfirefan.com what did you think of it? did you think of posting then gave up? or just didn't think you had anything interesting to say?
and for all you experienced community builders out there.. and words of wisdom?
Running something like (a trial by fire so to speak) is a great way to spot annoyances .. the good ol suck it and see does work.