The underground beginnings

In my previous blog I told you how i started the idea and planning process of the K2 community.  Now it is time to tell the story of K2 underground.

When we started to plan out what we wanted in a community site, and figure out how that manifested itself in a platform decision.

I had a list of technical requirement list i used at the time as follows:

1. Support Blogging functionality
2. Separate “Areas” for classes of users.  “Insiders” “Partners” etc
3. Content targeting based on based on user preferences.
4. Ability to support rating posts, articles, blogs, uploads etc.
5. Ability to mark forum items as solved, answered etc.
   1. Search through forum for unanswered questions and or posts
6. Points system, different points accumulated raise levels different membership levels amounts to different rights and status on the site.
7. Ability to establish user profiles, to provide a self overview and points accumulated.
   1. Moderators of the site should also be able to give points or take them away. 
   2. Advanced Profile support for personalization.
8. Ability to link internally to other posts, copying one post to another and giving it credit.
9. Private message support for members to contact each other
10. Reporting for:
    1. Most active threads
    2. Most popular posts
    3. Newest posts
    4. Top rated posts
11. Events Section to post upcoming events
    1. Ability to sort by time or location or type such as on line or in person etc.
    2. Ability to publish event postings for Live Meetings etc.

Overall I really wanted to enable to community on its own to adapt and grow and not have it limited by the technology we use.  Nor would i want to tell the community how to work or what parameters to use. Based on this we needed to ensure that the platform we chose had to be very flexible, and configurable.  Based on that and the above requirements we chose Community Sever over SharePoint.  It would take too long to bring SharePoint up to the point that Community Server was. Primarily in terms of membership, points, and forums.  (mainly forums)

During the design and envisioning phase we had several Primary areas of focus:

User Group Area

We wanted to establish a separate or sub-area within the site to act as a hosting area for various user groups. The goal being to allow members of the broad community to establish sub-communities on their own.  Being a part of this sub-community will allow them to have discussions, post announcements, agendas, minutes from past events and allow them to connect virtually with other members.  Members of these user groups can also post to a more general announcement board on the main site.

Presence awareness

When you hit the home page of the site, users should be able to see who else is logged on. How many others are currently on the site etc.  Future additions will allow users to IM them.  Initial version will just allow for PM.

Blogging
The site will have a Separate section for blogs, that should be easily browse able and utilize “content TAGS” for ease of search.   Initially we chose that only K2 employees and Insiders would be allowed to have a blog. In future revisions we opened this up to partners but had no takers.

File Sharing
Each individual post can contain an attachment with example code etc. However there will be a self service file sharing area where users can upload their own little creations. These will also be rated and can be fuel for the points system.

Now that most of the techie stuff is out of the way, we needed to establish some site policies, visions, rules etc.  We wanted to have a site/community that encouraged discussion and participation and have that be the driving goal. To first to attempt to get the conversation going, and encourage people to jump in.  To achieve this we came up with the following:

1) Encourage newer users--especially those who've been active askers--to start trying to answer questions We will do this by making sure that the moderators are not always the Ones Who Know All.
2) We will give tips to the community on how to answer questions
3) At any opportunity we will ensure that people know it's OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they're guessing
4) The site will Adopt a near-zero-tolerance "Be Nice" policy when people are posting to the site and or answering questions.  We will not allow other participants (especially the more advanced users) to slam anyone's answer.

So what does all this mean?  All of this boils down to a couple easy things. I wanted create the best community site possible.  A community site that people got a ton of use from, one that truly benefits those who participate.  The community also could use the site for a variety of reasons and not just for raw K2 technical discussion. But as a way to interact with others in their preferable way on their preferable topics.  This is not all there is to it, there is lots more. I love to talk about this and my experiences in the K2 community so there will be more to come soon

What do you think? What would you do differently?

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome here. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Or you can email me directly chris dot geier at Gmail.com