CommunityBuildrs

Was: Thursday August 30th, 2007at the Rich Media Institute

Meeting Notes:

As always, I want to thank those who were able to attend for coming and sharing your thoughts and experiences with the rest of us. For those of you who couldn't make it this time around, we look forward to seeing you at the next meeting!

I think this meeting was even better than the first and I believe the group is starting to find its direction. There is a lot that goes into building a community and while it is easier perhaps to look at the nuts-and-bolts of how a website functions for things like forums, wikis, profiles, etc. the success of a community will depend even more on the "squishy" things. PR, Marketing, Consistent Follow-Up, Customer Service, Participation Level, etc. It appears the group is developing into a place for developers to learn more about the business of a building a community, business people to learn more about what is possible, and in that mixing to spawn new ideas and perhaps even new communities.

The bullet-point method of getting some thoughts down seemed to work well for the last recap so I will do that again here:

• The meeting location at The Rich Media Institute was a marked improvement over the Santa Monica Library.  (Which is a very nice place in its own right.)  The cafe-like reception area was great and the room was excellent.
• A special thanks to Chris for stepping up in front of the room to talk to us about his experiences with the www.LAflash.org site and group, the experience of getting www.electrofly.com off the ground, and how the differences in the customer-base of the two affects the decisions that are being made.
• Some nice tips on generating social-networking traffic and exposure using tools such as www.gigya.com and www.addthis.com.  Nice!
• We talked about starting to collect some resources together for a potential "CommunityBuildrs Starter Guide" or similar document in the future.  It was wisely suggested that a wiki format be used to gather/organize thoughts and ideas.
• We were fortunate to have in attendance a couple of gentlemen who have been active in starting and organising several other technology related groups in the LA area and were willing to share their thoughts on organizing volunteers, the importance of consistent communication, and the types of users/community members that are typical.

In the spirit of following some of that advice, I'm looking for volunteers for the following projects:

• Help in implementing a captcha system with internal messaging for this site.
• Help and suggestions on setting up a wiki for sharing thoughts on a guide.  Can be within this site or perhaps hosted elsewhere?
• A volunteer to take notes at the next meeting and hopefully aid me in doing a better job of capturing the essence and content of the meeting on behalf of those who were unable to attend in person.

If you can contribute on any of these please let me know.  Also, what am I forgetting that needs to be done?  Probably lots!  Why not post a note to remind me?

Hope to see many of you at Drupal Camp!

Kirk Eisele