Notes from Stephen Cataldo:
SpaceShare has been looking to use community building tools for our ridesharing and festival-greening enthusiasts. We break this down into two categories:
1- Community-generated news. We hope for a mix of news generated by our organization, increasingly trusted news from regular participants gaining a reputation, and a place for anyone to post their views for at least a few people to see.
Our members particularly need a sane filtration of news. There are dozens of activist organizations producing the same articles on any giving topic. It is very hard to keep up with the organizations without reading and rereading the same news.
2- Organizing tools. As people are inspired by the news about our issues, we want to help them move into activism, taking on clear commitments. We've found that existing content management systems hint at task management capabilities, but are not yet ready. The technology would make this possible, but it hasn't been a priority in the open source community.
What is the huge budget for?
Two years in the web-world is an age... how do you make sure you don't wind up like ODB (the Organizers Data Base), which was a great idea for 1995
Why should this be grant funded, rather than a for-profit effort? By having grant funding rather than advertisements, we can share (for example, with RSS), helping other organizations use the news we collect for their own community building.
Brainstorm: what is your unique value?
There are many city-site and community forums popping up all over the place, all desiring center-stage, all carving out niches instead -- and in effect, preventing anyone from really getting a broad community site going (that rampaging elephant article will not reach everyone.) All these sites desire eyeballs. What you need is a two-way aggregator, opensourcing the content as well as the code. An individual posting a restaurant review on their own site (where they have their own google ads) can have it broadcast on yours, with links back to their site and their ads. A city-site with a restaurant review guide can pick up all the restaurant reviews and have them on their site, without needing to lose eyeballs to your site. You may have a direct interface as well, but by being nonprofit, you can be very open to people taking data and running.
I would love to see a complex definition of "peer's recommendations" that encourages reading across the political spectrum, possibly even in some kind of loose trade (I'll read some Ayn Rand if you'll read some Chomsky), or "If you like Ursula LeGuinn you'll get angry about this but it will make you think." type recommendations. I get the sense that the for-profit world is inching up on various peer-review issues, but their focus is always to create an inwardly-turned community. Tribe.net is a good example of something that should not get funded, niche-market focused and drawing a lot of similar people to itself, then keeping them there.