At the start of the conference everyone asks the question they’d like to walk away with a better answer for. Here is a sampling of the questions asked.
- How is social media forcing changes to corporations present themselves online?
- How do folksonomies change how people find and organize information?
- How do you stand out from other social networks?
- How do you balance corporate needs with that of the community?
- Meta communities – How do things that grow organically get recognized in the larger community so others can learn.
- How can you build communities for smaller groups in a limited geographic region? Can you do that or leach onto bigger communities?
- How do you grow a new community?
- How can you use communities to impact social and government policy?
- How do you balance the needs of a professional services firm with the needs of the employees of the firm. Use for employees to find meaningful communities.
- Online community versus online? What’s the difference for most people?
- Want to collect guidelines and best practices for online community managers.
- How do you grow the size of communities that lead people to action?
- What is the motivation for online super users?
- How can communities mobilize people in the real world?
- How does sharing data with communities change their behavior over time?
- Best practices for building online communities?
- How can a social benefit organization connection with people online that could benefit their causes?
- Crowdsourcing from online communities.
- As you build multiple communities when do you build new versus expanding existing?
- How are people using mobile handsets to extend or interact with online communities?
- What about building online communities in china or other emerging markets?
- Trying to measure the perceived value in different features online.
- How do you grow the participation and involvement over time so that the community grows the communities?
- How can rich social media get embedded into existing communities?
- At what point do comments turn into a discussion?
- How can social anthropology methods get applied to online communities?
- How can research and science information get leveraged in social tools?
- Once novelty wears off what happens in a community?
- How can face 2 face and online communities feed each other?
- How do you make it easy for people in organizations to push why they are and what they want to get out of the community?
- How can < 500 people create and grow a community online?
- How do you measure the effectiveness of online collaboration?
- How can social science tackle design problems?
- How can you create user evangelists for the community that bring in more people?
- How can you have an online community that talks about something controversial, but keep it public?
- Super user knowledge++?
- Collect stories from community people about their communities that help illustrate best practices.
- Mobile communities++?
- Mobile communities++?
- Intersection between traditional communities and linked in social network?
- Personal identity systems for use in online communities?
- Where are we going to be in five years?
- Off the beaten path ways to measure community health?
- How can online communities improve an organization?
- How can people port reputation between communities across the web?
- Moderation, safety, and health of online communities?
- Reputation management?
- Interested in communities that have existed for a long time and they’ve become insular?
For attendees this has also been posted to the wiki here:
http://www.socialtext.net/ocs2007/index.cgi?conference_questions_what_people_want_to_know
Onto the meat of the show now. Enjoy!