Official Geographic communities

[radiantsoul]

Title
Official Geographic communities

Short, concise description of the idea
All new members are automatically subscribed to an official, moderated community that represents their geographic area.

Full description of the ideaThe idea is that there will be several geographic communites; say UK, France, Germany, Russia, etc. These would be moderated

Comments

[pauamma]

There are already a number of country-based communities. Somehow, I don't see them taking kindly to LJ either creating a new one and calling it official, or (worse) leaning on existing ones (or some of them) to become "official". Both issues should be carefully considered before implementing that scheme.

[radiantsoul]

I would suggest new communities are created. The problem is newbies cannot easily find these country specific communities.

[jai_dit]

That's a problem that should be addressed by better search functionality and better spotlighting, not brand new communities.

[radiantsoul]

Well LJ has been talking about better searching and spotlighting since I joined(August 2001). It probably isn't happening soon, if ever.

For a new user from the UK they will first need to discover what communities are, then they will need to search for UK communities. They will get a list of 384 communities - many of which are of limited interest and have few members(oddly the LJ "official" Independent sponsored community doesn't seem to appear in the list).

[mskala]

Where would the moderators for these communities come from? A huge number of them would be needed and there'd be a serious issue of how to recruit them and manage disputes should bad ones make it in - especially because they'd have special status over other community moderators, being "official." Quis moderat ipsos moderates, if you'll pardon my Latin.

[charliemc]

Where would the moderators for these communities come from?

Good question. Good moderators do not grow on trees, for the record...

[diziara]

Totally unrelated to how to handle existing geographic central communities and how to work out the making official, or the competition of creating an "official" version, but I object to the automagical auto-join of new members into communities based upon location

[danceinacircle]

This I could get behind. I have my own reasons for wanting geographic communities with large numbers of users, and having LJ suggest specific ones would make my job a lot easier. =P

[radiantsoul]

I quite like the auto suggest idea. An LJ newbie community would be interesting too.

Another option I would like would be details of community usage on the community search pages. The problem I have is that as a newbie I join, her about communites, decide I am from the UK and search for UK. I then get 384 communities sorted only by the most recently updated.

[rizzo]

that's not a bad idea at all. you should make your own suggestion. ;)

[halo_of_thorns]

I don't know about this one. It is easy enough to find or make communities about a specific area if you want it. Although I do like the comment above this one that suggests that livejournal could recommend communities, but I don't like the idea of it being automatic.

[ex_uniquewo]

No. Where I live isn't the reason I'm here on LiveJournal and has no relevance in most of my 'circles'.