Points:

The community is secondary

Communities build around applications, not around the concept of a community itself.

Communities cannot be self-contained

They need to acknowledge the presence of others (learn from GeoCities.com’s failure to stay in front).

Study others:

GeoCities, LockerGnome, Zope.org, Slashdot, FreshMeat, CiX, TalkCity, Tripod, Mozilla.org, LiveJournal.

Frills are cute but turn out to be irritating

GeoCities’ city/street/doorNo concept was a great way to “hi, I’m your neighbour at 2243” experiences, but got irritating because the URLs were hard to remember and ugly looking when considered alongside the rest of the Internet community. Xoom.com, OTOH, never got off well with their community system because they never used familiar systems like GeoCities did. Lunateks needs to start with something like GeoCities and move out as it gets larger — to avoid the “closed-in” feel.

Small communities feel like family

As they get larger, the familiarity is lost in the confusion and less frequent visitors start to feel left-out. The traffic growth makes it difficult for even frequent visitors to keep up: they have only so much time to spare in a day. Then the community grows chaotic and impersonal. This has happened everywhere: Usenet in general (gone are the days of Kibo), Slashdot, CiX BBS in Bangalore, #UserFriendly on UnderNet, and Linux-India. Lunateks must therefore recognize this possibility and encourage the community to split as necessary (yes!). Study egroups.com for ideas here.

The user-space dilemma

Most sites give users space in the form of a www.site.com/members/user folder. While this gives users their own personal space, it does not encourage the idea of them being responsible for the site. If, OTOH, users are simply allowed to edit anything anywhere on the site, they never get the feel of their own personal space. Lunateks must therefore start with giving users their own space, then extend into letting them edit stuff elsewhere. There must also be an easy way to check credits for any content — let visitors know easily who created a particular document or how much content this particular user is responsible for.

Responsibility and openness

A community doesn’t stick together when there is a clear distinction between management and users. There should be responsibility, but everyone should have a chance to take it up (our office is an example). To keep out the cruft, make the responsibility difficult. To avoid discouraging someone who can actually do it, take unwanted load off (study mozilla.org here). Part of the requirement for this is being open about everything, including this document. If telling all at once is a problem, then spread it out but make sure it is available to anyone who looks carefully enough.

Registrations

Site users should be able to register easily. However the registration system should not be open to abuse by anyone who comes by. Therefore registration should be multi-level: (a) A one-step process that allows personalizing pages and (b) Verify e-mail address or other form of identity to be able to post to the site. Accounts that don’t reach stage (b) in a week are expired.

Objectives

1. Bring people to Lunateks.
2. Make them stay using the community concept.
3. Make revenue out of this, either using advertising, or using the yet unknown application.

What application?

Make one? Or let users just stick to their own application and use the site as a parking base? Which one is better for said objective? Which one has better chances of lasting? Is discussion itself an application?

Slashdot’s application is filtered news. But the fundamental requirement to be a contributor is that you frequently visit at least one other site. Slashdot therefore encourages core users to go elsewhere. Research this for more details on how it works.

Do not depend upon the community to give you a plan. They are here just to get what they want. Therefore just use them for ideas on how to serve them best.

An Application Idea:

Open source comparisions. Sendmail or qmail or Postfix? Majordomo or Mailman or EZMLM?

Let the community decide. Users contribute plus or minus points for each of the contenders using an input system (not via standard discussions). Editors convert these points into essays, meant for guiding people who come around looking for solutions.