Bradshaw online journalism lecture: Communities

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.