As I stated in the Developer's Page thread, one of my main goals for the site is to increase community interaction and involvement. I believe the site has the potential to be even more active and vibrant than it is now, and the best way to accomplish this is to give members more responsibility and control over the site. I have spent some time thinking about the different areas that make up the community, and broken them down into individual tasks:
- welcoming new visitors and members (including creating a new introduction thread for a new member, if they don't after a set period of time, and creating their associated member page)
- this should be a community effort, and as many people as possible should be welcoming them to the site and providing assistance
- regularly posting new topics, responding to posts, and asking questions in every post (to keep the discussions flowing)
- ensuring new topics don't fail (there should be no threads with only one post)
- encouraging inactive members to get involved (send a private PM to members who were posting in the last year, and asking them how's it going and mentioning a particular thread they might be interested in)
- acting as a mediator when heated arguments and problems arise (handling them calmly and with respect)
- choosing forum content to highlight on the main homepage (such as a popular forum thread, featured project, and a featured challenge/brainteaser)
- clearing up spam (it occasionally happens)
- delete, edit, or move content around the forum when appropriate (such as posting a 68k topic in the TI-83/84 section)
We have several active people in the community, so I don't want to simply assign people to particular tasks as that is rather unfair and counterproductive. Instead, I believe that each person should step forward of their own volition to do what they feel like they are best capable of handling. I realize that multiple people might want to have ownership over the same tasks, in which case they can simply work together on it. I also would like to come up with some creative names for the different community roles to take advantage of the functionality that Timothy is building into the new forum.
What do you guys think? Any things I forgot to add to the list? Any creative community role name ideas?