Monday, 12 May 2008

Developing Successful Communities Online - Part 1

This series of posts is about ways of facilitating user-centric collaboration and helping people engage and learn from each other over the web, through creating community spaces specifically to contain and develop peer-to-peer user-generated content.

The key high level goals you will need to consider are as follows

  • Information sharing
  • Take-up
  • Personalisation
  • Peer to Peer networking
  • Visual Differentiators

Finally if you're looking to create scalable and non-regional community spaces, you will need to consider

  • Local customisation
  • Repeatability / Re-use

From a design perspective your site should focus on the following:

  • User-centricity - simpler and easy to use interfaces
  • User-driven – better evolution
  • Findability
  • Relevant content and search
  • Folksonomy driving Taxonomy
  • Peer-to-peer communication
  • Rich interactivity
  • Personalisable content
  • Flexibility for Local Variation

The next few posts in this series will discuss how these fit into the goals above.

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