Coming off the interactive sessions at SXSW and Community 2.0, Lee LeFever highlights some of the best points made about building online communities. The two extracts that follow will resonate with government communicators considering how to integrate (or expand) their community and stakeholder outreach to include online communities.

 ”Don’t start with technology: This is true with almost any web site. Keep the technology options open while you define what you’re trying to accomplish with the community. Talk to future members, understand their goals, figure out what goals your site will accomplish and then how you can use technology and features to facilitate the accomplishment of those goals.”

 ”Know your pain threshold: Organizations are often not used to seeing negative comments from customers on their web site. In online communities this is inevitable. Your organization will have to learn your level of tolerance for negativity and criticism (each one will be different). In many cases, it is a bad idea to remove critical or negative comments (unless they violate the terms). Often, negative comments will be balanced by the community itself who can become stronger through building consensus and debate.”

That last point will be the most difficult for government communicators: how do you take an effective measure of the pain threshold in our context? It differs from organization to organization, and bureaucratic sensitivity differs greatly from political sensitivity.