Communities needs leadership

An interesting post from Creating Passionate Users highlights the issue of Collective Intelligence vs the Dumbness of Crowds.

The difference is very keen, and as a forum admin it’s something I’ve had to learn myself.

The basic gist is that Plato was right - benevolent dictators are very popular.

And, with online communities, if you’re a user and don’t like the dictator, you move on to the next community. Simple.

For community admins, the problem comes when communities start to grow so large that you simply cannot manage it alone.

For example, with chronicles, there are 500-600 messages posted daily. I just do not have the time to read and moderate that volume.

This is where moderators are required - but you can’t simply pick the biggest and best posters - you need people who can show a level of maturity and restraint, and have the interests of the community at heart.

In short, it’s trying to develop Collective Intelligence that nurtures, protects, develops, and progresses the community in all positive aspects.

Even still, it’s a collective that requires leadership - recently I asked staff to provide questions for popular SFF authors who’d told me they would be happy to do an email interview with me: George R R Martin, Raymond E Fiest, and a slew of others in the genre.

Ultimately, despite enthusiasm, it’s required myself to do all the organisation and carry out the interviews.

In other words, you can build Collective Intelligence around a single individual, and their own Creative Development for a community.

The really dumb move would be to allow committee-ism to affect community management to the point where there is no single overall decision-maker.

Then not simply would things not get done properly - but that it’s nobody’s fault either. And that’s a very corporate attitude.

All the more reason that the creatives still hold such sway over the internet.

After all, the internet itself in one regard is nothing more than a series of communities. A series of communities attempting Collective Intelligence.

Perhaps the realisation of this is the active promogulation of the Noosphere.