Communities good and bad
I've been taking a big interest in online communities over the last couple of years. With a major project out of the way and networking back on the agenda, I signed up with Ryze a few weeks ago, a site that bills itself as a business networking community. Ryze uses 'pivots' defined by community members themselves in order to build the connections that make community. It's thus very bottom-up and offers plenty of potential for knowledge generation (which a top-down model would not). As Lou Rosenfeld said at the Design Council meeting last week, Ryze could make a good model of 'organisation directory' for companies seeking to add real value through their Intranet.

Today, I joined yet another community, and what a difference. The NHS Informatics Learning Network ecommunity has a forum that is run on what looks like prehistoric WebBoard software. It looks poor and behaves worse (frames, duplicate messages....). I, like many other users, stumbled upon it by accident - no word of mouth here. Apparently there's no way unsubscribe from it either - most of the few messages seem to be from people trying to get unhooked - and no differentiation between admin messages and real messages. All categories are pre-defined by the organisers, so I can't define which professional institutions I'm a member of, or what my specific interest areas are. There's no opportunity for those interested in particular areas to easily find others, and forums are defined by geographic area rather than professional interest. A prime example of how not to run a community.