Hi all, I’ve gotten very busy and I don’t post in this thing nearly as much as I used to. But I thought it would be interesting to note, for people in the Virtual Communities class, that my own virtual community project is finally starting to develop. I have been working on the SUNY Fredonia Campus Greens site for a little over a year, and for most of that time it has had a discussion board, recently that discussion board has been getting some use. It may be an interesting case study for people working on similar projects.

Over time I kept updating the site and pushing the discussion board more and more to the forefront, until there were three links to it on the home page (one of which was big and purple), and about 100 throughout the site. Still there was little to no activity. I had sent out e-mails to every listserv or friend I could think of, the e-mails sometimes led to a surge in visitors but few messages. I even got the WNY Peace Center to send out an e-mail to its 1,000 members, hoping the discussion board could be a regional meeting place, that effort led to about 300 visitors in 2 days and about 5 new messages, then nothing. You could find the site on Google or Yahoo, and the Fredonia website, it still didn’t take off. The site got an average of 5 visitors per day, sometimes 15 or 30, but people weren’t posting on the discussion board.

Recently I completely redesigned the site, I had to stop spending time on it but I didn’t want the site to sit idle. My idea was to make it as easy as possible to update, no HTML skills necessary, no bureaucratic nonsense trying to gain access to the code. The idea was interesting yet simple, I put the discussion board on the home page.

I changed the entire layout to use frames, converted all the pages, which was much easier than I thought, and let it fly. After a short delay there is now more activity than there has ever been.
I learned a few things through this experiment, and one very good lesson from the Virtual Communities class and Rheingold. That lesson is that you need hosts, more than one, it is very much like hosting a party as Rheingold mentioned, you need people to help keep the guests comfortable and entertained or they’ll just get bored and leave. I couldn’t really get anybody to help me host the discussion, and I think that was a major failing. Currently two other members are hosting the discussion (though I’m not sure they completely realize it).

A more obvious note is that the easier you make your discussion board to find and use the more people will participate. I think having the discussion board on the homepage has had a significant effect on participation. I had tried to figure out how to set up an RSS feed to send the headlines of the discussion board to the home page, but I didn’t understand how it worked. Now the discussion board is the homepage, and for a community like the Fredonia Campus Greens, I think it is working well.

Please feel free to visit the site and see for yourself, make comments etc…

http://www.fredonia.edu/sa/campusgreens/