IYBITWC is a phenomenon of online communities, too.
IYBITWC is more of a myth than anything else. Why does this myth arise?
There's an interesting parallel with FreeSoftware projects. The myth of Free Software posits the hero working in obscurity and creating a fabulous product, then springing it on the world to universal acclaim and acceptance. The reality -- that projects don't just become miraculous successes the day after the first release, and that most free software project creators have to spend years fine-tuning, fixing, and enhancing a program before it becomes an Apache, a Linux, or a perl.
The conventional wisdom is that "If you Build It, They Will Come" is bad thinking.
I disagree strongly, and it's been a recent theme lately, hence the new page.
Meatball already has such a page, but it doesn't represent my ideas and/or thinking.
Once we have a bunch of perspectives in here, we can integrate them together, and make a final perspective.
A wiki is "needed" if:
I posit that if a wiki is needed, and you build it, then they will come. Eventually.
This is InternetConcentration in motion.
You can speed along the development of a community by:
However, I don't think you have to do many of these things. If the wiki is needed, people are likely to eventually find it, and connect with it.
I believe we should encourage people to build wiki. There are still TooFewWiki. There are many cases where IfYouBuildItTheyWillCome is true.
Oh, look. I type "robotics wiki" into google. And I find one! On February 5th, somebody made the robotics wiki. DavidCary and I were talking on the phone the other day about wanting to see a robotics wiki.
Some context might help. For instance, I believe that if a group of people can be called a "team", and 1 person would find it helpful to have a space to document his own work, then he should have a wiki.
HeatherJames just relayed such an experience on IRC. oh, and MurrayAltheim was talking about that too; he couldn't manage to get a group of people online, even though the in-person meetings they had were not doing the job well enough -- there was clearly a need, but no action resulted from presentation of other options. IfYouBuildItTheyWillCome might only work (without extra effort) with people who're already ready and eager to involve themselves in something new.I agree it's hard. My point is that fewer people need "To Come" than might be "ideal" and you can still get some benefit. One practice is to answer a question with "it's on the wiki" (if you want to be nice you can tell them the specific page-name). A WikiWithOneUserIsBetterThanNoWikiAtAll?.
Yep, we agree on that. My further point is that having a wiki already-in-operation can be a stronger method of pulling people in than doing a generic demo and abstract discussion.
So, I think I'm the "conventional wisdom" here. I just want to defend it for a second.
It's really easy to think that setting up a space is enough to build a community. I don't think it is. I think it takes effort to promote the space, to attract a community, and to make it happen. I've seen this in meatspace and cyberspace too many times to think it untrue.
It's pretty magical, the way people will drift in from the Internet and make a community for you. But there's a point at which you have to make some effort, nurture the community, find fellow travelers in netspace, and kickstart things.
Would it help saying that the builder's metaphor does not work here?
I mean ....: to achieve a community - in building metaphor terms - would imply that a subset of all types of (possible) dwellers of what is going to be built are allowed to mess around the construction site from the (T zero?) very beginning, would it not?
I would also challenge the community achievement purpose of this page ... by suggesting something like, e.g.: ... if you want to achieve (say ..) cross-platform/cultural interoperability .... you've got to be (a member of) a (multilingual) community ....
but ... the community should be assembled by the sharing of the objective ... not by the availability of a community building platform ....
which turns everything upside down : IfWeGetTogetherWeWillBuildIt? ??
maybe the ... neutral territory ... mentioned in FracturedDemocracyBuilding could help achieving the upside down turning effect ?? Can we share a perception of a .... neutral territory ... ?? I am still believing something like it may shape up (also) from a TranslationGateway type of work in progress ..
Maybe this is just a difference in degrees of emphasis.
I want to say, "Great! You've set up your space. Now call up your friends, and tell them about it. Post a note to mailing lists where people might be interested, and post a note to usenet. Write about it in your blog. Then engage people as they come in."
Everywhere I go, I see people making communities. It just seems to be a thing that people do. I would like to preserve a feeling of naturalness in our write-up.
Actually, I think the main thing I wanted to say with the Meatball article was that the magic really does happen. I can't express how blessed I feel that people from all over the world have taken my and Maj's idea of having a free, user-edited travel guide and breathed life into it. Yet at the same time, it's not magic -- it's the outcome of some real legwork. There's an opportunity on the Internet for making communities that can change the world, but you have to take that opportunity and make it work.
Anyhow, I copied over the Meatball article, since I wrote it, and removed the See also.
I think we want to say:
[