The wiki called WorkNets has a project collating a list of UK Online Communities.
UKOnlineCommunities, WorkNets. A culture for independent thinkers.
The list is young and obviously has huge gaps, as well as probably many entries which are listed more out of optomism than evidence of community, but it’s going to be well worth watching and contributing to.
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
MySociety have a nice site which lists groups and discussion forums by the their location. Emphasis on location seems like a powerful idea. When entering a new listing, it rejects it, if you try to enter a website which spans a large geographical area “we are currently only mapping small local groups, like an email list for your street or village”, which is a clever way of keeping the listings very location focused
Thanks for the useful link Harry. Geographical communities have always fascinated me because in theory, there ought to be plenty of topics and ground for productive discussions but in practice they do seem to struggle to sustain momentum rather than thrive.
Filtering out large areas seems like a good idea and I wonder if such lists could also be more useful if it were easier to filter out stillborn, defunct and non-active communities.
Harry, Thank you for the link to Groups Near You. It seems to have a lot of groups and is very relevant for our work. I include it in our resources (see: http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?AndyRoberts for links).
Andy, thank you for mentioning our directory! Here is a report that lists what we have found so far…
We’re now engaging at least 100 communities as part of Mornflake cereal’s http://www.mornflake.com rebranding thanks to Leon Benjamin http://www.winningbysharing.net The idea is that it can make more sense for Mornflake to fund our Minciu Sodas lab members to reach out to UK online communities and that we help each other and promote each other rather than Mornflake promote itself. We’re wearing Mornflake’s jerseys, so to speak. I include some examples…
Andy, you have such wide interests, it would be really great to support your work with our outreach. Some of our sites include My Food Story and Shop With Us and I would gladly link to you from there, including your cider websites. I appreciate your thoughts.
Andy, an update. I’ve made a report of the most responsive UK online communities we found (including yours) Now we’re focusing on them. We’re offering, for free, 20 hours or so of online assistants for help with your online projects, especially to help build bridges between communities, thanks to Mornflake. Please let me know if we might help you and your websites, or if you might suggest communities. In particular, online video communities, as Mornflake has an online video contest http://www.mornflakecompetition.com
Here’s also some of our research results: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/voiceful/message/285
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