Appropedia now has an active community page on LiveJournal - join or watch us there, and check the updates - often snippets of content from Appropedia, for your interest, and application, and for sharing. You can post there as well.

Looking forward to your ideas and feedback!

Appropedia gets 2500 visitors per day. But only a couple of dozen editors are active on the wiki in a given week. How do we engage more?

As the site improves, it will draw more in, but that's missing the point... why aren't people seeing the potential? What does it mean to sell the sizzle? Why do we here so much praise

I have to say that it aggravates me to see sites hyped, marketed, even funded, that have almost nothing. But as ever-pragmatic engineers and scientists, we may have gone too far the other way. Perhaps more important is a lack of active, ongoing community engagement. Some places where we've put much energy into attempts at engagement have yielded almost nothing, and at the same time we neglected people who had actually edited and created pages. (Lesson: most people just don't edit wikis.) Things that we thought would spring up (e.g. a newsletter team) have not, and the pump will have to be primed.

I'm still working on Appropedia many hours a day, and there is a small community of hardworking people putting in a lot of energy. Much of that energy is putting more content on the site, some of it excellent. I rather like Principles of development, these fantastic wetlands pages and I like the idea of pages like Principles of clothes washing and washing machine design, even if that model of wiki page still has to be developed.

We hear a lot of enthusiasm for what we're doing. But you can't eat enthusiasm, and inactive enthusiasm doesn't build the site. Some changes in focus needed.

We've been talking* about how to make Appropedia something that the community as a whole takes greater ownership of.

See the ideas, add yours and give feedback at "A community-owned wiki" on the Appropedia Foundation blog.


(That's a new joint blog, and I plan to move a lot of my blogging to that blog in time.)