Building passionate communities

So what happens when you get the job of building a community for an audience that is extremely passionate about a subject?

What do you do?

Lets face it, passionate is not a word you could use to describe all the offices or workplaces today. If you are lucky you will be surrounded by them, however this is not always the case.
Most of the work in a normal social network build is getting people inspired, proving to people that this is the place to collaborate to get things done. After all, if you suggest a social network for a company where people just "hang out" you would quickly be shown the door. The goal generally is to create tasks and goals for the social network. This enables you to focus various community members to work and communicate to achieve the goal. Now if they all work in the same office, don't bother, but if they are in different timezones and different locations then you are onto a winner.

With a passionate community you have the opposite from normal. This is that everybody wants their say. Everybody believes they are right. This is is great as you know your community is going to be full of information. Will it suffer from problems because of this? Will it be hard for new comers to come in. Will it be tough to find information? Will we have duplicate conversations? Will we build a community or will be just build a place where lots of people say things?

We need something to answer these questions. I find the best place to study a passionate community would be a new community based around an existing on/offline interest. We need a place full of passionate folks who have just been let loose with some Social Media tools. Well it just happens that Star Trek is producing an Massively Mutliplayer Online Game (MMOG). Lets follow this over the next months to see how it builds. It is also a great case study as it it essentially a community talking about how they want their online community to exist.

I would love your feedback on this network and lets see if we can get some distinctions for our communities.

Tony

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Update as of 4th September.

As the site does not have a document store, members are having to use posts as their main document store. This can work, but it does make it difficult to find information.

As these a passionate folks it means that there is going to be a great deal of external information that is going to be referenced. This means lots of external information. Some of these external sources are huge.

What it means is that there is a great deal of information, but really no way to find it. So this site remains a topical discussion site. With the main topics driven by the facilitators.

Is this what you thought?


Site watch: The site now has 5,172 threads with 111,314 posts with one forum having 68,046 posts. You have to assume that many more view than post and this is born out in that with some having 2,000 posts with 31,000 views.