YWAMKnowledgeBase:Creating a functional community

From YWAMKnowledgeBase

If this project is to succeed then it needs to grow beyond Steve and Kevin making contributions!

It requires, users and contributors!

These combined and overlapping sets of users need to form a functional community. It is very possible to have a nice on-line hi-tech tool but not have any real sense of human connection; for example the http://www.ywamconnect.net site does not work for this author, as there is no real sense of community or purpose in community. The same in essence for the http://www.ywamconnect.com site which is really a blog site for our supporters not for YWAM as a community together.

What can we do to foster a FUNCTIONAL COMMUNITY?

• Ensure everyone who logs in gets a personal welcome via email within 48 hours? Not a machine response!
• To be very open to new ideas and welcome a newcomer in and not shoot them down
• To quickly offer a newcomer some tasks to do that are at whatever level they feel ready to contribute
  • Advocacy of the site to other users
  • Janitorial tasks: Harmonising style, grammar and spelling changes. Tidying pages up etc.
  • Organising tasks: Categorising and sub-categorising pages, making jumping off pages.
  • Linking tasks: Creating links between articles, helping users find helpful routes through the mass of ideas
    • We could implement a cloud of categories tags à la flickr.com
  • Editorial tasks: rewriting and clarifying texts
  • IT tasks: general Wiki maintenance, extensions and robot work
  • Commissioning tasks: Seeking out people to write articles to fill in our gaps.
  • Authoring pages: this can be full articles but could be case studies and writing from experience too.
• Set a target of users to form a core; we will probably experience what Wikipedia did in that a core group wrote a very large part of the project (Normal distribution curve?)
• WHAT ELSE???? Put your ideas here for a good community!