Week 9 Blog Post

What are some of the challenges in starting an online community?

Starting an online community is a wonderful idea, but there are some challenges in place. There needs to be a central goal between all the community members. If some want to focus on one topic and others another then the cohesion of the community is compromised. When the community has and maintains a similar goal, there is potential to grow. 

Something that is important but possibly challenging is creating a community where members not only pay attention to the happenings on the site, but also contribute. If only a few people are contributing to the online community, there is not much of a community to build. The purpose of these is to create a place where people feel heard. There needs to be participation from different people with insights and thought about different things. Wikis in public libraries can be very useful to get information to and from many different branches. This is not how it works many time though. From my experience, the administrators or other designated people edit the wiki and the rest of the staff simply read it. This defeats the purpose of an online community. 

Starting something is always difficult because people resist change. Many may say that it does not make sense to have an online community when there is a personal community already established. Getting people to "buy in" to the process could be challenging. Once they are in, the community could easily thrive.