Avoid the tool trap when building communities

Over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many different organizations attempting to build successful communities inside and outside the open source world.Many of them quickly fall into something I call the tool trap.

Meaning, they immediately jump into a conversation about what tool or technology they will use to support the community:

“Where are we going to put the wiki?”

“Should we build the website using Drupal?”

“What should we call the mailing list?”

“We should starting playing around with [new technology X].”

This is no huge surprise. Great community-building tools are now available to us that never existed before and it is very hard to resist the urge to start nerding out on new technology.

And tools are important. But tools alone do not create community.

People create community.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]