POETREE

Hello all! I’m J.J., the founder of poetree and one of our two current admins. Today I’m going to give a brief overview of POETREE’s history, and then open up the conversation in regards to a topic of importance to both this community and any online community seeking to increase participation.

In a post earlier this week, Plunge magazine founder ailelie mentioned the importance of defining any idea, or really any organization, in three to five words. Six months in, I define POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’. The community was originally envisioned as a supplement to the higher volume poetry, another Dreamwidth community that specializes in published poetry not the poster’s own, but quickly began to morph into something more interesting than that: a place where poets amateur and professional and poetry enthusiasts could share and discuss poems and poetry culture. Rather than being just another poetry mailing list, POETREE could take advantage of its host platform to facilitate conversation and and build up an archive of resources available free to anyone interested.

That dream is very much a work in progress, and the journey to realizing it has been alternatively humbling and exhilarating. For the first six months, I focused primarily on recruiting people to write content, and assumed that the audience for that content would materialize over time. The community has certainly grown a great deal -- we’re now at triple the number of members and subscribers that we had in December -- but the amount of discussion going on in the comments has been much more variable. This in turn makes it more difficult for the Hosts to gauge how many people are reading their posts, and (I worry) makes it less rewarding than it might otherwise be for people to Host in the first place.

This is not a guilt manifesto, but rather a place to begin. Earlier I defined POETREE as an ‘online poetry discussion community’; it’s worth asking ourselves, what makes us a community? Is participation a requirement for being part of the community? Where does that leave the lurkers, those who might be reading avidly but by preference or default tend not to comment on posts or have time to Host? ( Read more... )

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What do you think? If you left the occasional ‘kudos’ comment, what format would it take? Do you have ideas beyond those already mentioned? What would you like to see in the comments?