Community Building
Today I attended a presentation by Doug Seven and Sergey Baranovsky. Sergey is creator of devcity.net, and Doug is one of the creators of dotnetjunkies. They were giving a presentation about the challenges of running a community portal site, their respective communities’ dynamics, and thoughts about community in general. It seems like the community around .NET and XML technologies is quite vibrant and dynamic, with these two portals, and others such as TopXML being prime examples. It reminds me of the early days of Java and Linux, before Gamelan started consolidating all of the sites (and before the “politics” sites like JavaLobby and Slashdot emerged as the most popular sites among these programmers).
It was a really interesting presentation, with some thought-provoking Q&A after. I had no idea how much was involved in running a site like that. Of course, I was aware of the logistics challenges, but I was surprised by the “strategic” challenges that these guys are faced with, and the crafty ways that they devise solutions to problems that would otherwise harm their communities.