On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
Thanks for sharing this, giving me an insight into an area where I myself have little first-hand experience
[..]
But what about the key issue: What are the parameters that makes a active community to be created and also be sustainable? We have a lot of anecdotal stories and a lot of subjective opinions, but have there ever been done a professional study taking an analytical approach, using many different of our communities as input to find the critical parameters that creates success or hampers/disintegrate active communities?
Not to my knowledge. I explicitly state that this is a tough nut to crack, i.e. that we don't yet know how to create that sustained core of self-motivated active editors. It's very much worth studying, but I don't have a research department at my disposal. If and when research brings us some proposed solutions (we must not assume in advance that there is precisely one way in which such cores come into existence), I'll be first in line to listen and learn. For now, with so much work to be done where we _do_ have a core of active editors, we'll focus on working with those.
As stressed in the presentation, while we won't _actively_ try to make something happen where there is no active editing community (e.g. Namibia, Suriname, Botswana, Afghanistan), we remain open to experimentation with _community initiatives_ anywhere in the world, via our grantmaking programs as well as any advice, networking, etc. we can extend to support such initiatives.
Asaf