Laissez-faire community building

As community becomes the currency increasingly driving cash in the technology industry, there's a lot of pressure to force communities to bend to corporate desires. This, as community evangelist John Mark Walker suggests, is perhaps the best way to kill the goose that lays the golden community.

Sting sings that "if you love somebody, set them free." Walker applies a similar principle to online community-building:

[T]he way forward is much the same as with the search for happiness: take care of the community building blocks, like your choice of web platform, community governance principles, interesting conversations, and a sense of purpose, and the rest will take care of itself.

Walker goes on to say that a lot of focus needs to be given to feeding the free-loaders, those pesky people that hang around and don't pay your company a dime. "Freeloaders help to add 'activity' and 'center of gravity' to your community," Walker writes, which might well provide the ambiance would-be paying community members need to feel comfortable sticking around.

"Community" can be a squishy concept at times, simultaneously important yet very hard to quantify and qualify. Even so, Walker's suggestions point to ways to get the most value from communities by giving the most value to those communities.

Funny how that works.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[vdimauro]

Great point about the importance of organic community and the need to *always* keep the members' needs front and center! The members are the reason for the community and if they are not vigilantly served the community often fails to thrive. Communities with active member cultivation programs - efforts dedicated to serving the member engagement lifecycle - from orientation programs thru to supporting their intellectual needs are often found to have the strongest community footprint.

As we see increasingly more vacant communities on the internet, I imagine much of the emphasis on marketing to members and "creating viral" campaigns may be contributing.

Vanessa DiMauro
http://www.LeaderNetworks.com

[pentest]

Corporations are always trying to bend communities to its will. Another laughable example is the conglomerates trying to co-opt the local food push.

[jordanwillms]

Solid post. Your idea of "community building blocks" is one that maps quite well to our thinking. You might also like our "Art Gallery" metaphor that we successfully use with clients to help explain effective community building.

http://think.workatplay.com/content/healthy-online-community-art-opening

Cheers

J