These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software.

Community-building tools

The early twenty-first century has brought us some excellent tools for building more sophisticated and responsive communities around peer production projects. Few projects need to deploy more than one or two of these technologies. However, a greater consideration of the community atmosphere and electronic landscape can make a huge difference in the success of your project.

Free software has played an important part in this technical revolution. As a result, there are free software tools for every one of these categories. In many cases, in fact, the free software tools lead the market. Which particular package you use will depend on what sort of CMS, portal, or hosting you have available to you.

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