Bradshaw online journalism lecture: Communities

Submitted by Ændrew Rininsland on Wed, 11/09/2011 - 00:00
  • 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.
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