Facilitating community activity on Cloudworks

Cloudworks was launched some 15 months ago now, and we are starting to see some distinctive patterns of activity on the site. We believe that this open space, which facilitates discussion between different communities of interest or practice, has the capacity to promote dynamic, evolving and potentially transformative networks. Our position is that ‘community’ on the site is likely to evolve through many forms and that it can be seen as a process or lifecycle, rather than an absolute state.

We are also able to begin to make some fairly clear recommendations about how best to go about facilitating community activity and discussion in this rather unique space. The following framework has come out of our observations about what seems to work and what doesn't on the site, and is well supported by the literature. We hope to empirically validate this framework over the next year or so and would value your thoughts and feedback.