- Community management becoming more and more important
- Makes sites:
- sticky and engaged
- Makes information collection:
- distributed
- Community content becomes:
- editorially valuable
- Things that impacted helpmeinvestigate:
- The 1% of content creators have a very real effect on crowdsourcing
- Modularity is important -- being able to break down tasks
- Two types of crowdsourcing:
- MechanicalTurk version
- Guardian MPs expenses crowdsourcing project
- Not a lot of diversity in a population, just a lot of people
- Investigative version
- Ability to get specialists to work on projects
- Visibility is key
- Mistakes:
- Don’t mistake Twitter/forums for a broadcast medium
- “Field of dreams” approach
- “Build it and they will come” doesn’t particularly work.
- Don’t start with the technology; start with the people and the networks ⁃ The “Post” process ⁃ People ⁃ Objectives ⁃ “Get a good story” isn’t an objective the community will care about ⁃ Strategy ⁃ Often you won’t be managing a community, but are rather just a member needing to establish your own clout. ⁃ Technology ⁃ “Otherwise you’re walking around with a hammer and everything looks like a nail.” ⁃ Remember copyright ⁃ The “second visit problem” ⁃ How do you get people to return? ⁃ Problem of expansion and scalability ⁃ Give people explicit tasks and project inputs ⁃ Allow creation of groups ⁃ “The Wikipedia Revolution” ⁃ How Wikipedia dealt with the scaling problem ⁃ Easy-to-use tools ⁃ Don’t assume one tool will be the easiest for everyone. ⁃ ToS, culture of site ⁃ Newspapers experience difficulty because they start with big groups of people and can’t create a specific user culture ⁃ Shirky -- communities need tools to defend themselves. ⁃ Reward those who are helpful, hinder those who aren’t. ⁃ Karma systems, etc.