Preparing the Soil

Let's talk a little bit about what it is not. There is no magic trick, no voodoo, nor shortcut for building an electronic community. It requires the same type of effort as building any community...a sports team, church, or political group. It takes care and feeding much like a garden. You plant seeds, and at first it looks as though nothing is happening. In a while, the very first shoots begin to come up. If you've prepared the ground right, planted good seeds, and cared for the garden, then you'll have a harvest that goes beyond what you might have imagined.

Preparing the soil: In some ways, this is the easiest part of the task, but it does take planning. In this early phase of things, we need to figure out what we want to grow, and prepare the soil accordingly.

My experience has been that few people are looking for an alternative to Yahoo, they already have a favorite news portal. What this community will want to do, if we do our jobs right, is to talk, learn and share about your specific area of interest.

Part of preparing the soil is figuring out what type of software and server platform is most appropriate. There are good tools on every platform, but good is a very relative term. It really is a question of what you want to do, and how you plan to grow your crop. Here are a couple of things to consider: Hosting yourselves, or outsourcing: I have no idea what your current network is like, there may be advantages for you to host the application internally. My experience however, is that there are many very reliable hosting companies out there whose business it is to make sure that the servers stay up and accessible. How much control will you give your members? Try to imagine a year from now, and see what that might look like. You may have a thousand members, and 20 member/moderators who will help you. Make sure that the system you choose allows for some granular user access. Who is your audience? This should of course be the first question, but we'll cover it separately. For the sake of this discussion though, it is a crucial part of deciding how to prepare the ground. Finally, a crucial issue is the internal support for an online community. My experience has been that it absolutely must be supported at the very top of any organization to really work. Building a valuable community is a process, not an event. Like a garden, it is sometimes a whole season before there is a harvest...but there will be a harvest, that I can promise you.