This article came from Nat Torkington’s great series of ‘Four Short Links’ on the O’Reilly Radar. Specifically from February 24, 2009‘s.

In it the article Online Community Management 101, a list of seven points to consider when building an online community are given which were from cribbed from a one-day workshop by the community managers of Flickr and MagCloud. A lot of software these days are building in ‘Web 2.0’ or ‘Social Media’ features so how you build the user base around it is suddenly within scope of a tester.

  • A definition – Don’t call what you do a community. Just give people these tools and over time the people who use it will call it a community.
  • Ask Why, Who and What you are building – There are a bunch of other questions, but essentially, if you cannot answer these, you shouldn’t be building what it is you are going to build
  • Paperwork – Things like Privacy Policy, Acceptable Use, etc.
  • Structure
    • Give people small, simple tasks
    • Give them to a large, diverse group
    • Design for selfishness
    • Aggregate the answers
  • Keeping things ticking over – Reward good behaviour and be transparent
  • Trolls – Identify and Stop
  • Observe the ‘ask for forgiveness rule’ – Act first, then tell the boss