OSS Watch team blog

So, you want to build a community around your project. How do you do it?

I’m afraid this post will not answer that rather large question. What it will do is point you at a useful web tool you can make available on your web site. It’s a tool that will help visitors find information related to their interests and will therefore encourage them to return to your site frequently.

This tool works because all your visitors have something in common. You need to identify what this commonality is and capitalise on it. The initial temptation would be to say that the common ground is your project, but I suggest that this is a little narrow in focus. It is true that visitors have a potential interest in your project, but that potential may not have been realised yet. I suggest that the real commonality is in the problem domain your project is interested in. For example, if your project is an XML publishing framework, your community is probably interested in topics such as XML schemas, XSLT and publishing formats. Making your site a valuable resource for people with this common interest increases the value of your project site and therefore your project brand, thus increasing the your chances of converting a visitor to a community member.

Most readers will now be thinking “yeah, that would be nice but we don’t have the resources to build such a resource.” Sure you don’t, and I’m not about to suggest you waste time building content not relevant directly to your project, but I do argue that you should encourage your users to see your project site as a hub of information about related topics. It is highly likely that there are existing sites that provide information of interest to your visitors. You need to provide access to those sites from within your own.
You could embed RSS feeds from other sites, that’s good, but you probably already do that (if not, why not?)

Another, less well known way of expanding the information base available to your users is to provide a search engine that provides more accurate results than a typical search engine? That is, provide a highly focussed search engine that uses a subset of the Internet rather than the whole Internet. The good news is that you can leverage the mighty Google search engine for just this purpose.

Enter Google Co-Op:

Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.

The idea is simple:

1. identify keywords of interest to your community
2. identify the web sites that are of most interest to your community members
3. decide if you want to limit searches to these sites or to prioritise these sites in a whole web search
4. link to your Google Co-Op search engine from your community site

That’s only the start of it. You can now add other people as collaborators on your custom search engine, they will be able to add new sites to search. You can embed the search engine within your website, add refinements to results pages, change the look and feel and even make money through Googles AdSense service (if your project structure allows you to do so). See the Google Co-Op site for more details.

I’m setting up such a search engine for OSS Watch, it’s not embedded in our site yet, but may be in the near future. If you have a favorite OSS resource we should include in our CO-OP search engine please let us know.