When the weekly market or bazaar opened in a town, the owners of the stalls who were selling their wares anticipated that people would come into town from all over the region, so they would have a large customer base. The last thing they wanted to do was to stand around and have coffee with the other stall-owners all day. It's the same thing with an online community. A NOLA community is not about a bunch of established bloggers reading and commenting on each other's blogs; that's going to happen anyway. A community site is like the market; the goal is to attract a wide audience.
A more modern metaphor to the bazaar would be the shopping mall. Even established stores with other locations will open up in a mall, because the concentration of options for the buyer means (hopefully) a lot of customers. Again, the store owners don't want their employees standing in the entrance chatting with the folks who work down the mall, they expect the location to attract a wide range of customers. A shopping mall offers a number of options for a business owner. You can open up a very small storefront, or lease enough space for this to become your primary location.
The "stall owners" in an online community site have the same options. They can maintain a minimal presence on the site, say one blog entry every couple of weeks. Perhaps they'll go further than that and post every few days, or even post the one-per-day blog entry maximum. Unlike the mall, there are no financial limitations here; everyone can post the maximum if they choose. The site's FP bloggers may even post more frequently, depending on scheduling.
Who will occupy the stalls in the bazaar? Initially established bloggers will share their content with the community. Think of this as the restaurant that opens up a small outlet in the mall food court. They cook everything up at their main location and bring it over for sale at the mall. If "business" picks up (indicated by the number of recommendations and comments received), a blogger will no doubt put more time and effort into the writing they do for the community.
The hope here is that others will come into the community to read and comment. There's nothing that says they have to blog themselves, just come in and participate. As a reader's interest level increases, no doubt they'll be inspired to start blogging. For example, if an established blogger does a post on Da Saints, a community member might realize that they have enough knowledge to chime in and be as credible as the blogger. Eventually we may even see Front Page bloggers who have "come up through the ranks" in this manner.
It's not about bloggers, it's about people. With a platform and structure that facilitate community participation, non-blogger users of Teh Internetz will discover that the community site is more attractive than the foulness of nola.com.
March 2008 Archives
If you've ever worked on a group project, you know how difficult it is to produce a quality product when everyone is an equal. Even on a jury, someone is elected foreman, to facilitate communication with the judge. Successful developments in many fields are solo efforts, dual-partnerships at best. Development by committee rarely produces a quality product.
This project will be a sole proprietorship from a business standpoint. That doesn't mean this is will be a top-down dictatorship, mind you; I see two roles of the site owner. The first deals with the legal/financial aspects of any business. Because I'm using my bandwidth (seashell software's business account with Cox), and my server, initial startup costs are small. This is one of the reasons I can move forward quickly. I'm going to continue to lay out the vision I have for the site in more essays, but the short version from the business side is that I'd love to see it make lots of money from blogads/adsense/whatever, as well as contributions from the community. The ultimate goal here is to generate the revenue to be able to do what Markos does, sponsor paid fellowships for FP bloggers and have a paid tech support person.
The second role is the whole buck-stops-here thing. Again, I don't see this role as a top-down dictatorship, but rather as an ultimate arbitrator for the community. There will be times when decisions will have to be made, and I'll be the ultimate court of appeal in those circumstances. The goal here is for me to be the ultimate appeal; hopefully the decisions will work themselves out at the community level first.
To return to the bazaar metaphor, I'm the guy who owns the property where the bazaar is set up. You own your stall, and the contents in side it. The rules of the bazaar are worked out amongst the various stall-owners. They also (for the most part) set the standards for conduct amongst themselves. When they cannot work things out, they turn to the owner of the property.
In terms of site management, I welcome input. The process will always be transparent.
(x-posted to Keyboard Networking and YatPundit)
Since the NOLA Bloggers Bazaar project is definitely moving forward, I want to lay out some of my thoughts on, as Bush 41 would say, "the vision thing."
Initially, I thought it sufficient to say that I wanted to start a community for New Orleans that was based structurally like Daily Kos, MyDD, or RedState. I was surprised to see how many experienced bloggers did not understand what I have in mind.
One of the ideas being floated by local bloggers was to build a site that would serve as an aggregater to make it easier for folks to read and comment on the blogs participating. It's an ambitious and worthy project, but it's not a community. It won't give those coming to the site a sense of ownership. That's the goal here, a dynamic community where members feel they're part of something.
One of the things that makes a community like DailyKos so successful is that the platform, the Scoop software package, allows members to do several things:
Comment on the "Front Page" (FP) stories.
Create their own blogs (called "diaries" on Scoop sites), including their own online polls.
Rate the quality of individual blogs by "recommending" them.
Allow site managers to "promote" individual blogs to the FP.
Rate comments posted by users, positively and negatively.
There are many Content Management Systems that have the first two features, but the others are crucial to building a solid community. If the only people able to recognize the good work of a diarist are the site's managers, the hierarchy created discourages participation. Invariably, personality issues will pop up, accusations of favoritism, etc. When a blog entry is positively rated by the community, it goes on the "recommended list," and becomes featured. (That entry can still be promoted to the FP as well).
Allowing community members to rate comments is also crucial. The nola.com website now has a number of blogs, and comments there are often pretty nasty. The levels of racism and personal attacks on that site are some of the reasons that many bloggers won't participate there. This has created a divide, though, between the non-technical user and the more tech/blog-savvy users. A community that contains a policing function that will remove comments deemed inappropriate by the community will catch on fast.
That's basically my vision for the structure of the community. To this end, I'm going to set up both the drupal and Joomla Content Management Systems on YatBazaar so folks can offer feedback.
