Technical solutions to kickstart a community

Question

The buzzword of the internet today is "community" and everything related... folksonomy, collaborative editing. We are an example of community.

My question is: what are the possible technical solutions to start and maintain a community? For example, google, when introduced gmail, made two smart moves:

• generated buzz by launching the app the 1st of April (something that attracted "fool's day" jokes that quickly became confirmed as the real thing)
• the "invite" feature, which generated a strong network effect.

However, the last point appears to fail with google Wave. I don't see much enthusiasm for it, although I was astonished when I first saw it.

Another example is StackOverflow. I guess that, without the strong initial atomic commit of developers made possible by CodingHorror (Jeff's blog) stackoverflow would have had very hard life. In this case there was a huge initial community mass, but without the stackoverflow technical solutions, probably it would not have turned out in the same way. Points and rewards, easy login, badges. These are technical solutions.

Probably there's not much to say on this question, but I think it's relevant to ask it. Technical solutions are the ones we look for, and knowing the available palette is important. I also think this question does not have a clear answer, so I put it CW.

Answer 1

For a somewhat comprehensive and documented opinion on the technical and social incentive mechanisms in online communities, I suggest reading Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing, an article by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Besides the authors' points of view, the article also contains interviews with 22 Wikipedia contributors, making it easier to understand what drives different people to contribute to an online community.

Also there's an interesting publication cited in the References section of the article,

Kim, A. J. (2000). Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

After looking into studies such as these you could synthesize a list of needed means to grow a community, by providing both initial and continuous incentive, as normally people get bored after a while with what they initially found motivating. In the same manner an enterprise may die because of a lack of innovation, communities need continuous sustaining in terms of innovation, novelty and progress, otherwise there will be a natural decline after a while. The technical solutions are just a means to an end.