Empty Spaces make for Long Faces

This place feels very empty all the time.  I spend a bit of time watching the trackers and the page visit logs, trying to find out where the users here focus their attention.  It really looks like people spend a lot of time tied into what I call 'propaganda pages', and very little time on the core function pages like ideas and missions.  I also note that this site has about the same post to reply ratio as a fat aspie kid on myspace posting blogs about his distaste of some Naruto Fanfic communities new administration.

It's really hard to keep motivated on this community when there is so little community interaction.  In many cases it's understandable of course, the site is still EXTREMELY hard to navigate and there isn't any kind of useful guide to help people learn to navigate the site.  I've done the best I can, emailing all new members and telling folks that I'd be glad to give them a tour and answer questions.. but of course this very RARELY nets an interested party.

Like most communities online, participation levels are less than 10% of the registered user levels.  This is to be expected, even in a community with the types of messages that are floating around here.  I fear we have a hard case of 'too high a bar set' here at the moment.  People maybe don't think that they are competent to make ideas, missions, skills and the like postings because they really don't want to be responsible for a less than perfect post.  I think that this is a big part of things.

As I posted in the idea "Locations Vie for your Presence", there are innumerable webcommunities out there that desperately request for each and every one of our participation.  I'm a big chief enough to even get emails sometimes nowadays asking for me to become active on this website or that forum or some wiki over yonder.  Each community of course is going to be THE DEFINITIVE community for something or another and all they need is just ONE MORE active member to really get things 'started'.

I have lost count of the alias' I've used and the number of communties i've assisted in starting up.  How many wiki's have I had to make posts to and watched one day an administration fight lead to the loss of the database?  I have no idea anymore.  In fact, just in the Wog community there has had to be at least 4.  Hundreds of hours of labor spent and wasted entirely for no real benifit but to give the founder(s) of the community in question a nice high article count to look at and think 'behold, look what I have done!'. Of course, i've also had to deal with innumerable well meaning individuals who feel that they are the ONLY person who can make things happen, and thus feel that nobody can do anything without their ok and interference.  I don't know how many times I've seen a founder interfere with the natural growth of a community by demanding that they be involved personally with every aspect of a community.  It never turns out well. 

Is that what I think is going to come of THIS site?  No, it is not.  What I worry most about is the tone of things.  I have never trusted a community that says that they get things done that members of the community have never even tried to do before.  I see a lot of that here.  Instead of seeing people trying to preform social, kit, or network experiments I see.... nothing.  Which means the problem in tone stays.  A community of inactivity naturally breeds problems, very easy to define problems, and it's almost time for them to start cropping up.

What needs to happen?  Well, I have a pretty good idea.  Followups, guides, a chatroom, a voice confrence room, and who knows what else.  There really needs to be a social spot here that isn't reliant on any one person here.   I do know one thing that needs to happen though, We can no longer promote the site as an all inclusive social movement that has SO MUCH to offer the world when we only really have 2-4 active participants.  It's a lie, which can be made truth with only a lot more activity.

Comment on things people!  Post ideas and skills!  Post casual discussions in the forums!  PARTICIPATE.

This empty space is getting old for me, and the emals I am getting promising me that THEY will create the SOLE resource for self empowerment, productive activism, urban resource provisioning, web2.0 user dashboards, metacommunity organizing, decentralized learning, and so damn many other things are becoming more and more interesting.  I wish I had the time to work on multiple projects, but I just don't.  It's been 2 years for me here, and it feels like we aren't much more developed then we where at the start.

As of today, projects that seem more interesting and more social to me:

RantMedia's Second Life outpost

Warren Ellis' metacommunity

CouchSurfer university

rentacoder collective

hackthissite ( always :| )

and of course my own baby Viralink Industries