Last Friday I attended a meeting of people who are interested in creating a web presence for a local 20/20 group. As I have made sites for several non-profits, I was invited to attend and throw in my two cents worth. I did. My main contribution was to say that until people came forward who were committed to making the site go it would be a waste of time.

That sounds harsh, but the truth often is. There are all kinds of community building programs for the web. Many of them are excellent. But software doesn’t make a website successful. People do.

The web is littered with unused and un-updated sites that were built with the best of intentions. But either nobody claimed the site as his or her own, or it was assumed that because there was an organizational chart, and people were assigned the responsibility of keeping the site going it would happen. Dream on.

Effective web presences are not fueled by PHP or Perl, but by passion and people. Until this project finds someone who passionately wants to create a community web site and is willing to constantly urge others to participate, it would be a waste of time to put in place. As you can imagine that opinion was not well received.

People power websites, people who are willing to put in a lot of time and effort. It is so easy for designers and developers to get caught up with the technical parts. They’re fun. The challenges are straightforward and solvable.

Creating content, week after week, month after month, year after year is a lot of work. Sometimes, when the ideas flow or when there is a lot of positive feedback, it’s easy and fun. Sometimes it is sheer grind-your-teeth effort.

Cajoling others to contribute is a delicate and thankless job. Manage an organization site and see how people avoid you around deadline time, even good friends.

That’s not to say that maintaining a community site isn’t rewarding. If it were, there would be no sites at all. If a site can be integrated into an organization’s structure, with people participating and enjoying the experience, then yes, it can be very rewarding as well as successful. But without the spark-plug of at least one enthusiastic person, the engine just won’t run.

Possibly related:

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.