The Guardian published an article I wrote about the National Theatre Wales Community today in their Culture Professionals Network. Here’s the link – it’s called “The next step to social networking is to build your own online community” and looks at how the community, which is built on the Ning platform,  has been used by the theatre to develop as a company.

One of the most important ways in which the community has affected the growth of the company has been to enable them to invite participation in their development of policies and initiatives. Everything that they do is communicated through the community, including the framing of their approach to commissioning, casting and theatre criticism. The community site allows the to throw the virtual doors open and invite comments and debate about their work and the direction of theatre in Wales.

Encouraging people to participate in an online community isn’t easy – it’s not just a simple matter of ‘build it and they will come’. It takes commitment from the people at the top to set participation in online discussions by the staff as a clear priority for the work of the company, something that John McGrath the Artistic Director has given in spades.

John is one of the most committed bloggers on the site, regularly sharing his thoughts and reflections about the work of the theatre, responding to people who seek his views. We trained their staff to administer the network, to blog and to help people to feel welcome and encourage them to participate in the debates and discussions held online/

One thing is certain – setting up an online community for a major national institution has been an exciting process and has brought some changes to the way that the company operates – it changes the demands on the staff team, requires training and guidance and it changes the feeling that people have about the institution – hopefully people have felt more involved and listened to.ask for his thoughts and leading debates about where theatre is going – see for example this recent discussion on the shape of political theatre.

There is still a lot to do for the company to realise all the opportunities to connect and communicate with the arts community in Wales that this resource offers them, but they have made a tremendous start and we wish them all the best as they continue to develop their online community, and the theatre community as a whole in Wales.

Google Docs is one of our favourite collaboration tools. I use Google Docs nearly every day now. It’s perfect for notes and planning as a simple wiki – and good enough as a word processor (no more cumbersome email attachments back and forth for multiple authors). You can publish a document to the web, download and view the history – give it a try. I also use it for my personal to-do list with a direct bookmark in my browser toolbar.

My rule of thumb is: email with colleagues should be for alerts and updates. Now I don’t blame anyone for relying on email for things it wasn’t designed for, it’s usually because they haven’t been shown anything better. But if you’re doing the nitty gritty of work inside email then there’s probably a better, quicker, more sustainable way to do it. Google Docs, particularly the word processor, is one such way. (We at NativeHQ also recommend project blogs, wikis on PBWorks and live notetaking on PiratePad, depending on what you’re trying to do.)

The truth? It is possible to have healthy, rational and polite discussion online. It just needs some very careful planning.

This very insightful post by Chris Applegate takes the example of the BBC Have Your Say forums and offers some observations of where they go wrong.

In an age where every company is a media company, this will go far beyond news organisations like the BBC.

Read the whole of Applegate’s post if you’re interested in how and how not to create spaces where people converse about your company and your projects.

Last year we built the community side of NTW’s website on Ning, with graphic design by the folks at Elfen. (Hoffi made the front page and listings pages.)

It’s worth noting that members of the community have the clear choice of making their posts public (open to be read by anyone who is looking) and many are doing so. The community is open to anybody on the web who wants to sign up.

But obviously with the web as it is, people are publishing their own stuff about National Theatre Wales and its productions around the web – not just on NTW’s community. We want to encourage this, it’s part of what NTW wants to achieve.

In fact, with NTW we have purposefully assigned a short tag to each production for use around the web – of the form ntw01 for production one, ntw02 for production two and so on. People are starting to use these tags already, in order to make their thoughts and posts more findable.

We also want to help the community to be aware of this other interesting stuff – videos, Twitter posts, blog posts, photos, audio – where relevant. “Online conversation” is a metaphor that has become popular on the web – and it does have some explanatory power. We want to give that conversation the best chance of being seen by groups of people who might be interested, so they can take part if they wish – wherever they choose to post their responses.

Here’s Tom’s post on the NTW site about the production tags and how posts, photos, videos and so on are collected on the NTW group for each production (and also a Netvibes page):

http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/profiles/blogs/talking-about-national-theatre

Take a look at the group for ntw01, A Good Night Out In The Valleys for an example of live search results from around the web. If you’re wondering how the live searches work on the groups, we made them with Yahoo Pipes. There is a chance of a few false positives turning up, as with any web search. But on the whole we like the way they’ve turned out.

We’ve included the services which seem to be the popular ones for discussing theatre. In theory more publishing services, e.g. Audioboo, could be added to the results if those services start to become popular.

So there you go, one small part of NTW’s online strategy which we’ve been working on.

They’ve opted to release their new book The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon, in paper-based version, electronic book reader versions and a free PDF of the whole thing.

In the words of the author it’s intended to be a “solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities”, which is right up our street of course.

The contents are released under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike in this case). It’ll be interesting to see how people adapt it and how that boosts attention for O’Reilly and the author.

(Thanks to @zambonini for the tip.)