Building and maintaining a community
Jay Watamaniuk from Bioware (a games company) has a lot of interesting things to say about building and maintaining a community.
You can watch this one hour long presentation at:
http://www.pqhp.com/cmp/gdctv/
It’s free to watch, they’ll ask if you can register, but if you use an email adress like asdf@asdf.com that will work just fine.
From their site:
“How Bioware Makes Game Communities Work
Jay Watamaniuk
Length - 59:06BioWare recognized the inherent value of online communities years ago and used this grassroots approach to foster a new way to communicate with fans in support of the company’s early games. While the audience and the complexity of the delivery of communication has grown by leaps and bounds from those casual chat room talks with gamers the basic foundation of open and honest communication remains the same.
The bottom line is that to build and maintain a community you must address both the needs of the developer and the needs of the fans. The presentation will cover the key methods BioWare has developed to achieve success with an online community and important pitfalls to avoid.”