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When Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, he must have been thinking about the life science conference season, which many scientists spend caroming sleeplessly from coast to coast and continent to continent. And, like the predators of the Serengeti, journal editors follow their prey through their spring and fall migrations.
At the beginning of this April, though, a pride of life science journal and magazine editors took a few days out for a conference in the west of England. Part way through the meeting, the organizers scheduled a session on building communities for our publications. As other editors mused aloud about Web 2.0 tools and the heavy labor of building communities, I realized yet again how fortunate BioTechniques is. An active journal is inherently an expression of community, whatever its primary medium. In print and online, our readers are our authors are our reviewers are our advertisers—partners meeting on a common ground to exchange tools and ideas.
Within the week, we were back on the science trail, in San Diego for Experimental Biology 2008. At one event, a long-time reader stopped me just long enough to say, “I wanted to tell you that I read BioTechniques every month and couldn't have gotten through my first post-doc without you.” This is what we do the job for, the sense of belonging to and serving the community of life science researchers.
Communities, of course, are not a function of blogs and wikis. They existed long before Web 2.0, before journals, before writing, before speech, before humanity itself. And, as the architects of the planned communities of the'50s and the housing projects of the'60s and'70s could attest, communities are not built: they grow. They grow around common needs, shared resources, and (among human beings, anyway) an emotional or intellectual bond.
Web tools do, however, make it easier for communities to grow, and grow larger. It's interesting to see what a veteran fosterer of online communities has to say about the process. “Chromatic” (the pen name of the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide and Running Weblogs with Slash) offers this advice on the O'Reilly Media web site (1):
“Exist for a reason.” This is fundamental to any communications venture, whether online, print, or personal. Wanting to have a community isn't enough. The bond of shared need and mutual benefit is paramount.
“Users draw other users.” This, again, applies across all media. People share information, and we love to guide our friends to the sources we find most useful. We hyperlink online. In print we footnote. In either case, citation draws the community to the most useful information.
“Barriers are a mixed blessing.” Communities should be open, but perhaps not too open. “The number of active community members varies inversely with the amount of work necessary for an initial participation,” warns Chromatic, but the level of participation by those who jump through all the hoops may be higher. And higher barriers reduce the amount of garbage, pornography, and vapidity filtering through. (That's why journals have peer review and online forums have moderators.) Technical barriers are another matter: “a strong community can overcome technical limitations” although “it's worth making things simpler and more consistent.”
Chromatic also says, “Users will surprise you.” What should amaze, and gratify, journal editors is the energy, intelligence, and creativity our authors, our reviewers, and online contributors bring to our community.
