Community and commerce, part 2.

Yesterday was the second John Banks lecture about Commerce and Community, this time focussing on the idea of self-governance, and "enlisting the virtual audience".

The reading talks about two focusses of managing communities; one is the idea of knowing your audience, and managing the community to provide the best experience possible for its members, the other focus being the drive to generate more membership, which can then be sold on to advertisers, who place their banners etc on the site, and because there is a large readership, the advertisers pay more money for the space, thus generating more income for the community owners.

This may seem like a fairly cold and capitalist approach to communities, but of course if a community is generating more income for its owners, its owners will pay more attention to the community, and provide more services, thus increasing the appeal of the community, and in turn, increasing more membership. Of course, if a community owner takes the pure capitalist stance and keeps the money without increasing the services or details of the community, the community will stagnate, and not attract any more membership, and possibly lose its current members if it is too static.

The lecture focussed on the idea of recruiting community members to manage and moderate the communities, as well as retouching on the idea of fans generating content and selling it, instead of providing it for free to other members. In our second chat session, we covered similar topics to last week, but at the start we had a quick go around, and everyone agreed that if they were playing the game and being involved, and had generated some new content, they would provide it for free. However it was also agreed that if we weren't really involved with the game, and had just generated some content, we would expect payment, although it seems unlikely that someone would just randomly generate content for a game they didnt play, especially a game as niche-specific as Trainz.

We ran the chat sessions from home or wherever this week, which was okay, because whats not to like about chatting at home, but I had to shut down a few things to remain focussed :> Also, it was our last computer lab tutorial, our seminar / community creation tutes start next week.