Ken Smith had two recent posts (“For the team” and “Or maybe not“), discussing the ideas of forming a community, collecting information on a topic, processing information as a group, and providing a summary of that information. I think the collection and processing tasks are attainable and occur on a regular basis. The task not being performed well is the curate/share/maintain steps.
As an example, I started collecting information on the topic of personal book lists in a Github repo. I provided a chronology of recent posts on the subject, collected tools and techniques, and also created some tools of my own. The recent Github repo for Drummer stuff would be another example, as well as other “awesome-fill-in-the-blank” sites on Github. A mega example of this is a tech guide put together by Stephen Downes on resources for creating an online community, class or conference.
Perhaps the main thing is to start a “beach-head” of some sort where people can collaborate, then publicize and support that beach-head. Thoughts, anyone?
(cross-posted from my Drummer blog)