It’s just… anything that ever gets done, is started by someone doing it first and hoping that other people will join later. If you wait until you gather people, you will never start.
Actually no. A lot of communities get started by a person who already gathered enough people to provide an initial seed to get the community rolling.
At least that was the general idea of how things work at a community building barcamp I attended.
But we do I believe this task is hard?
Look at other projects at general purpose personal development community building:
lifehack.org didn’t succeed in creating an active forum despite two attempts to do so. I wasn’t directly involved here but someone asked me for recommendation about how to make the second attempt successful a while back.
The productivity stackexchange has relatively low traffic despite being started with people who committed to the project and now existing for quite some time.
On area51 there were two personal development proposals. One written by me titled “Lifehack” and the “Productivity” one.
The official quantified self forum where I’m one on the moderators did never got much steam.
The interesting question would be whether in a parallel universe, where these people started by asking people to create a community, they have better results.
Maybe some ideas are unlikely to succeed even if one chooses a good strategy. (Like, a good strategy could increase the probability of success from 1% to 20%, but there is still a big chance to fail.)
I don’t think that gathering support before starting a community project is the only thing that important.
For a lot of websites split testing reveals that small changes of the website can have a substantial effect on the success of a website.
On Amazon a 100ms delay in the speed in which websites display causes them 1% of their sales. I think it’s pretty clear that execution of ideas on the web matters a great deal.
I don’t think that questions like the of the rules of the community are straightforward. Does Brendon Wong want to lead it as a benevolent dictator?
By going through his posts I didn’t found anything written about personal development expect the fact that he mentioned that he learned speed reading. Learning speed reading is certainly a good sign because that takes deliberate practice but doesn’t demostrate that he has the necessary experience to lead such a project.
Especially when it comes to excluding people for perusing personal development from a spiritual angle and excluding people who are just there to add links to commerical projects.
Doing something under the header of LessWrong has the advantage of not having to discuss the issue of control of the website.
Actually no. A lot of communities get started by a person who already gathered enough people to provide an initial seed to get the community rolling. At least that was the general idea of how things work at a community building barcamp I attended.
But we do I believe this task is hard? Look at other projects at general purpose personal development community building:
lifehack.org didn’t succeed in creating an active forum despite two attempts to do so. I wasn’t directly involved here but someone asked me for recommendation about how to make the second attempt successful a while back.
The productivity stackexchange has relatively low traffic despite being started with people who committed to the project and now existing for quite some time. On area51 there were two personal development proposals. One written by me titled “Lifehack” and the “Productivity” one.
The official quantified self forum where I’m one on the moderators did never got much steam.
The interesting question would be whether in a parallel universe, where these people started by asking people to create a community, they have better results.
Maybe some ideas are unlikely to succeed even if one chooses a good strategy. (Like, a good strategy could increase the probability of success from 1% to 20%, but there is still a big chance to fail.)
I don’t think that gathering support before starting a community project is the only thing that important.
For a lot of websites split testing reveals that small changes of the website can have a substantial effect on the success of a website.
On Amazon a 100ms delay in the speed in which websites display causes them 1% of their sales. I think it’s pretty clear that execution of ideas on the web matters a great deal.
I don’t think that questions like the of the rules of the community are straightforward. Does Brendon Wong want to lead it as a benevolent dictator?
By going through his posts I didn’t found anything written about personal development expect the fact that he mentioned that he learned speed reading. Learning speed reading is certainly a good sign because that takes deliberate practice but doesn’t demostrate that he has the necessary experience to lead such a project. Especially when it comes to excluding people for perusing personal development from a spiritual angle and excluding people who are just there to add links to commerical projects.
Doing something under the header of LessWrong has the advantage of not having to discuss the issue of control of the website.