FLIRTing with the community

I found a great blog post by Sami Viitamäki recounting the outline of his Master's thesis on the topic of customer collaboration.

In an earlier post, I dismiss the value of crowdsourcing. What I really was dismissing was the form of crowdsourcing that doesn't take what Sami is talking about. A major tenent of the FLIRT model that he's outlined is the idea of concentric rings of ever increasing membership, but with less involvement. He defines them as:

• Creators: those users who create original content
• Critics: those who criticize, and evangelize the work of the creators
• Crowds: confirm the work of the creators and critics through simple interaction (voting, comments) making the information accessible to the community at large
• Community (not in the diagram): everyone else

In trying to foster a community and grappling with the challenges of a collaborative website, I found this model to ring true. As I look around the web space and see a ton of UGC websites trying to make a buck off by leveraging the work of the crowd, I realize that without considering the true nature of collaboration, most will fail....