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Subject: 
Re: Perspectives on a Lego Community Website
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.general, lugnet.org
Date: 
Fri, 19 Sep 2003 17:31:50 GMT
Viewed: 
912 times
  
In lugnet.general, Paul Hartzog wrote:
   I have been architecting/building a website for the lego community for over a year now based on principles of bottom-up organization. We, the community would run the site, a site FOR us BY us.

At BrickFest of 2002 I even spoke with TLC about the scope of such a massive and diverse project. One goal of the site would be to promote iteroperability and interactivity among all lego fan sites. (This is the same concept as the .space Moonbase standards created by the .spacers at the 2002 Brickfest)

Why do it this way? Because no one maintains a Lego train site like Lego Train enthusiasts, and no one gets into a .space site like .space enthusiasts. In the quest for a generally useful site (like lugnet) the burdens falling on the “managers” can be overwhelming and they don’t have the level of interest required to produce really exciting content. This is one of the reasons that specialized sites like FBTB or BZPower can become so interesting. As a community we don’t need ONE central site that does everything, we just need to create interoperability to facilitate all our sites working together to enhance our online experience.

I would love for us to start a thread here on lugnet to discuss how we could all work together to implement a community-run effort and a web-site organized around that effort. Articles, Calendars, Newbie info, shared databases, etc. can all go into the mix.

It seems to me that if areas of the website could be editted/updated by individuals who don’t necessarily have permissions to the overall format, the website would have a lot more of a community feel, and the burden on any one particular individual would be minimal. (Similar to curators on LUGNET.) This would help a lot in helping the website gain support from all corners of the community.

On the topic of Calanders, I have an idea that I think would be really useful. Imagine a place where every club could announce their events in a central location. And they hand out the url to people who attend their events and visit their website. So a person goes to this website, gets a login (perhaps) and tells the system that they would like to recieve (in their email) announcements of LEGO events within 100miles (or whatever distance) of whatever zip code they choose to give. That way a person is signed up for only one list but gets notices of NILTC, Michiana-LUG, & MichLUG (1) events, assuming those events are close to them.

As someone else mentioned, this would also be a good place to take over the “everything Lego” links database. Again with the “curators” note, I think having the option for multiple people to maintain that area would be useful. (Also would it be possible to code something up that would automatically check (maybe once a week, or once a month) to make sure all those links are live? Then, if they aren’t, move those links into a non-public area that the admins could go an find the new and updated link before moving back to the public area. Or maybe I am putting the cart before the horse.)

Anyways, so there are a few ideas. What other ideas can this community come up with? Only people posting will tell. ;)

Jason Spears | BrickCentral | MichLUG

(1) Clubs listed where just examples.



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Perspectives on a Lego Community Website
 
(...) So far, the architecture supports multiple levels of access to areas of the site, including various administrative areas for statistics, and management of content. It is my hope that much of the back-end reporting can be made useful to TLC, (...) (21 years ago, 19-Sep-03, to lugnet.general, lugnet.org, FTX)
  Re: Perspectives on a Lego Community Website
 
(...) I have more on the whole concept coming up in a later post, but just want to bounce off of this idea. Calendar links could be entered in a central spot - that would be good. But, taking it a step further (and underscoring that the central site (...) (21 years ago, 19-Sep-03, to lugnet.general, lugnet.org)

Message is in Reply To:
  Perspectives on a Lego Community Website
 
(...) I'd like to chime in here. The issue of community websites really concerns issues of the community as a whole. Is it democratic? Is it a despotism? A technocracy? In my experience, the online lego community IS the example for other online (...) (21 years ago, 18-Sep-03, to lugnet.general, FTX)  

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