Comments on: Knitting an Online Community Together

By: kola bear

kola bear — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:02:52 +0000

there’s a theory of design which is that you design for a really specific group and if you do that well, it might be adapted by others and changed in different ways to fit the different needs of other groups of people.

one of the best examples of this is the wheely bags that everyone uses o planes these days. They were originally designed just for cabin crew. but then others realised that they were really useful and did things to make it better for general public (like adding bigger wheels – better for travelling over rough surfaces like pavement). Facebook isn’t a bad digital example. And frankly it was better when it was more specific.

By: uber

uber — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:21:01 +0000

Facebook didn’t start out as an undirected social network, but as a way to gather communities interested in each other by school / workplace. It’s only relatively recently that they have taken a leap towards a MySpace-style mass.

By: Cathy Tyree

Cathy Tyree — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:32:17 +0000

I am an avid knitter and a member of Ravelry. I applaud your insight and hope lots of people read it – knitting is as old as … well as people … people had to find a way to clothe themselves, and absent leather, created a method to weave / bind fiber together to make a garment or blanket or …
I also knit in a regular, weekly group – our members range in age from teenagers to grandmothers to great-grandmothers – I don’t know of many hobbies that attract such a dedicated following… it is international, interracial, intergenerational. Others could learn from the concept.

By: dixie

dixie — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:40:06 +0000

You make an interesting point when you say that social networking doesn’t have to mean everyone in the world has to sign up. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be so sour about the concept. I’m tired of being told I have to sign up for Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace in order to be a Citizen of this Modern World. I wouldn’t have joined Ravelry if people had described it to me as Facebook for knitters. The idea of networking, after all, is about meeting people and finding something in common FIRST, then using your network to take over the world. What better way to start than to organise a networking community around a hobby?

(It should be noted that it was not intended to be a networking site, though that’s what it looks like from the outside. It’s meant to be a database. At its heart, it is still a database.)

It remains to be seen what the community will look like when everything shakes out — we’re up to 40,000 users and still not out of beta. Things in the community have changed a whole freeking lot, and they’re going to change again when the doors are thrown open. It remains to be seen whether it stays a nice, cozy community.

The rest — people being helpful and all — is a knitters’ thing, not just a Ravelry thing. This odd tendency to like a person just ’cause they’re unhealthily obsessed with wool seems to come with the territory.