intothefuzz

Community informs everything we do here at Mozilla, so I was fortunate to be able to attend (along with Mary, Sarah and Tara) yesterday’s Good Ideas Salon on that very topic. The seminar, moderated by YouTube’s Mia Quagliarello, featured three experts – Jen Burton from Digg, Heather Champ from Flickr and Matt Stinchcomb from Etsy – sharing their thoughts on what it takes to build, develop and maintain successful online communities.

The session was interesting in that a lot of what was said both validated the methods we use at Mozilla and also helped me think about some things in ways I hadn’t before. During the Q&A portion, I asked the panelists (with the Creative Collective in mind) what advice they’d give to someone building a new community…their answers were all really good, so I thought I’d share them here:

* Heather from Flickr emphasized the importance of having clear community guidelines to serve as a framework.
* Jen from Digg stressed going to where your audience is…be active in reaching out to them and finding out what their needs are.
* Matt from Etsy recommended identifying community leaders as early in the process as possible and finding ways to get them more involved (such as creating a community council).

Of course, the main message of the whole event was the amazing power of online communities to do pretty much anything. That’s certainly been the case at Mozilla, and I can’t wait for the Creative Collective to go live so it can become part of our overall community activity. It won’t be much longer now…more details coming next week.