Causing online communities to form... how?

[rivenwanderer]

As far as I can tell, better history and background research makes alternate history/fantasy-inspired-by-history better--both richer and less likely to unquestioningly gloss over the not-so-nice bits of the past without realizing who you're leaving out.

I posted a while back in a steampunk meta(ish) comm about wanting a blog or something rounding up useful/inspiring history for people interested in doing steampunk worldbuilding. I got a bit of "oo, that would be neat to read and I might contribute a little to it"... and I think I want to read it also. But it doesn't exist yet, and I am an extremely distractable non-historian geek with too many potential-projects already in the works. So if I want this to exist, I'll definitely want help. I have a few options for what format to go with, each with pros and cons:

-Start a (wordpress? something?) blog that I post in and seek out guest posters for
Pros: this would probably be the option that got me the most cred with the Greater Steampunk Internet, I think. Cons: I'd be the single point of failure unless I could coax a co-author to join me.
-Start an LJ or DW comm that I moderate and post in
Pros: This seems like a good blend of participation and editorial control. Cons: less Greater Steampunk Cred, I'd have to figure out whether to have it be on DW or LJ, sometimes communities have Teh Dramaz, maybe people would show up and Not Get It and I'd have to figure out how to moderate, maybe if I spend too much time talking to myself at the start, nobody else would start posting and it would effectively just be a blog?
-Start a wiki of some kind
Pros: best option for organization of interrelated information across time, maybe has some internet cred, lots of open-feeling opportunity for participation. Cons: seems like the hardest thing to get started without an active team of moderate-to-very excited participants--less easy to get something interesting/useful if I was the only one working on it.
-Some blend of the above options, like a blog that synthesizes/unifies/pretties up the stuff that's brought up in discussions in a (linked, of course) LJ comm. Or a blog with an attendant forum where people could bring stuff up (even though I haven't listed forums as a possibility so far).
Pros: the indecision monkey is happier! Internet cred *and* community! Kittens and ponies! Cons: I could be a single point of failure for migrating things between one place and another, and maybe spreading people's attention among multiple services would be too complicated and asking too much.

Oooorrrr I could just decide that this is too hard and should be done by someone with more research and writing skills who can pull it off singlehandedly without needing as much help as I will...

Comments

[naraht]

This has just reminded me that you PMed me a while back about your comm and I lost it somewhere in the depths of my inbox and never replied. Sorry about that.

Responding to that... it's actually hard for me to single out books that would be useful to the aspiring steampunker. Possibly I like history too much because I think any book relating to the period and country of interest would be relevant. "There is no royal road to steampunk"? But I will have a think about the most relevant points.

As for format, I think that a DW comm would probably be best for the sake of flexibility, although it would obviously have to be tightly moderated. I run a sixties music history comm called denmark_street that might possibly be the sort of thing that you're thinking of doing? I can't commit but I would likely post in something like that if it were set up.

[talia_et_alia]

Given the amount of work it sounds like there is to do--nigh-infinite sourcing, tagging and organizing, moderating, perhaps topic-related challenges to keep submissions rolling in--plus your lack of personal historian chops and pants (and I say that in a loving way!), I would want more than a few "uh, that sounds neat" before jumping in. In fact, I wouldn't bother until I rounded up a few people you trust who know stuff and have time to devote, so it's not all you.

That said, is there already a space where people discuss their worldbuilding? If so, discussion of actual history seems like it would fit there (assuming the inhabitants aren't jerks); if not, starting one with that slightly wider focus would be a way to get readership up early, since I think more people do some worldbuilding than back it up with history. The early days would probably be full of "uh, I do this inaccurate thing", which is tricky to moderate such that they don't get all flouncy, but hmm.

As for your actual question, I think a comm where people discuss, and a wiki where resources can be listed and organized, is the best way to go about things, but starting both at once might be really hard. So second best would probably be a really well tagged comm.

[rivenwanderer]

Good points. Your comments dislodged some other clarifying thoughts for me--namely that the stuff I'd like to do actually has a few different directions it could take and is not as clear a goal as I thought. I guess that the two main options I see are "make better history-based worldbuilding easier to research/talk through online" and "give people ideas for making 'steampunk' as a trope/genre encompass a wider range of stuff besides just British aristocrats with airships". A lot of people "doing" steampunk don't think of themselves as explicitly worldbuilding or creating alternate history, even though they kind of are... they just think of it as using a pre-existing trope. Whether the trope-dabblers are part of my intended audience is something I really really need to figure out before I start something..

Some amount of history discussion happens at steamfashion on lj, but it feels like it gets lost pretty easily among all the other stuff. It may be that making some historical-reference posts there would be a good place to test the waters and also look for others interested in helping out.

[Also I really should have my chasing-pants userpic on my dreamwidth account]

[rivenwanderer]

That denmark_street comm is definitely in the same genre of things as what I'm thinking about! I am not even interested in music from the sixties and it makes me want to read it and think about stuff :)

[naraht]

I get the impression that the steamfashion community is not too amenable to the ideological side of historical discussions, so they might not be the best hosts for the sort of thing that you have planned (at least if I understand it correctly).

[naraht]

Thanks! That's very flattering. :)