Matt Haughey talks to Derek
Matt Haughey talks to Derek Powazek about designing and running community sites [excerpt from Derek's Design for Community book]. Many of the conversations ring very true for my relationship with Barbelith, including this one: "Don't underestimate the commitment required. Done right, a community site will take a lot of your time, and the payoffs, in whatever form you set for yourself as goals, may not come for a very long time. I put in hundreds of hours and nursed the site along for six months before anyone really noticed. Looking back at the start of MetaFilter, if I were as busy then as I am now in my personal life, I doubt I would have had time to properly launch, build, and maintain the project. If I knew how much personal free time I'd give up for the site going in, I probably would have had second thoughts about it. Also remember that once you get the site going, stopping it is almost out of the question."
