I’m taking a few days of vacation to work on my proposal for the Knight News Challenge.
My request is for support for the planning and marketing of a mass tech collaboration — which would focus a relatively large number of mainly technical people for a defined a relatively short time, to make one or more projects that would either be localized or intended to be made localized.
These are the questions I need to answer (No. 1-4 were part of the original entry):
Many news companies are working on expanding in the conversational arena. Guy Kawasaki, at How to Change the World, wrote about The Art of Creating a Community. In a nutshell (with my parenthetical comments):
1. Create something worth building a community around. (Most news companies start off with a geographic community and can go from there.)
2. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately!
3. Assign one person the task of building a community.
4. Give people something concrete to chew on.
5. Create an open system.
6. Welcome criticism. (We sometimes don’t accept challenges as well as we challenge others, but we’ve been improving.)
7. Foster discourse.
8. Publicize the existence of the community. (On a tangent: We should realize that our digital offering are to varying extents ofte a different product from our original newspaper, or whatever. Different products serve different markets and often need different channels for marketing.)
The post is from February 2006, but that’s OK if you haven’t read it before. I’m trying to merge worlds, or at least expand the overlap.
