What if you built an online community and nobody showed up? You can help prevent this with Common Craft, a company run by Seattlites Lee and Sachi LeFever. As 'social designers', their firm specializes in working with you to get online communities started on the right foot.
Social Designer is a new term for a role that has been a part of the Web since it began. It's grounded in taking purpose, technology and people and combining them to create a social environment on the Web that enables people to work together and accomplish their goals. In many ways, Social Design is the step before community - it sets the stage for community to develop.
Social Design is a hot topic in the online world now. And Common Craft's web site (on a Bryght VPS) is a key online place for news, views and practical tips and advice in this emerging field.
One focus of Common Craft is communicating complex ideas essential to online community in a simple format. One recent example is a video they produced called "RSS in Plain English" (the first of many videos that are part of the forthcoming "The Common Craft Show"). The show is being built on Drupal's flexible taxonomy system combined with FeedBurner and blip.tv.
Common Craft also blogs consistently about community-related subjects such as:
Their link to the recent JPG magazine online-community kerfuffle. Or online community pioneer and head of Metafilter Matt Haughey's musings on managing online community. Or Lee's master list of what your community can look like beyond forums. I could go on but you get the idea.
Check out the site. I've learned alot about building better more social online communites; I am sure you will too.