Just finished my session on Building Powerful Online Communities: Best Practices. The panelists included me, Ian Bogost talking about gaming, Matt Lewis of Townhall.com, James Rucker of ColorofChange and Heather Holdridge of Care2 who served as our moderator.

I gave an overview of how to move from hierarchical, controlled interactions between institutions and individuals to side-to-side conversations between and among activists. The best practices were very interesting. The presenters are building communities of thousands, in the case of Care2, millions, of people who are learning, doing, and sharing. And they held themselves to high standards. Matt Lewis used an article, YouTube: The Addictive Must-Play Game, as criteria against which he can measure his groups success at engaging and empowering his participants.

It caught my attention that even with these great examples of community building there were still limitations, cautions, concerns about unleashing participants fully and connecting them to one another. And these concerns echo even louder for activist organizations that aren’t best practices, for sure. No question it takes time and money to nurture conversations and communities. As a community ourselves we need to continue to push institutions to rethink their work to ensure that the conversation is a top priority, not an extra burden. And we didn’t even talk about the challenge of creating new models of leadership within activist organizations, particularly mature ones, that emphasize pushing power out to the edges!

pdf2007
Allison Fine's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati