Managing Online Communities Course

Posted by Angela Beesley on October 28, 2006 (Community, Wiki)

In collaboration with IBM, The University of Arizona is launching what looks like a very interesting course on Managing Online Communities. Rawn Shah writes on the course’s wiki that it will cover “the needs, issues, and operations behind running social software systems in a business environment”. It would be interesting to know how managing a community in that sort of environment differs from the public environment of running a Wikia site. Wikia are trying to build up best practices on the Central Wikia, with tips for wiki founders on building, promoting, and maintaining their wikis, but it’s based only on our own experiences with Wikipedia (Wikia staff now have over 40 years Wikipedia experience between them!) and not on any formal courses such as this one.

The reading list for the course in interesting too - there’s no one set textbook, but instead includes books I’ve been meaning to read and not gotten round to yet, like Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds“.

Unlike Harvard Law School’s course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion” where virtual attendees can participate via blogs, wikis, and Second Life, (related post), you’d need to be in Arizona to participate in this one. Hopefully Wikimedia’s newest project, Wikiversity, will provide something similar in the not too distant future. Wikibooks has a very rough beginning to something like this in its “Wiki Science” section.