How much do you need to know?

Great question. I am not really sure if there is any one way to measure how much a given person may know about a particular subject, as it seems to be a matter of opinion. John Doe down the street may believe that he is the supreme ruler in one particular field, but his neighbor, Joe Blow, may believe that John knows nothing, and that he himself is the preeminent scholar in the same field. Not the greatest example, but you can get the gist. Short of bringing in a seasoned and professionally qualified individual to determine who may know more than the other, there is no real way to determine exactly how qualified a person may be.

I'd say that in order to launch a successful community, you should have a more than adequate understanding of the subject, along with a great deal of previous (or existing) experience in the field or topic of discussion. Focusing on the latter should be a priority. For the most part, I feel that first-hand experience speaks more loudly than anything.

I knew absolutely nothing about the subject of my first forum. It was windows programming related and I had just switched from Redhat where I did perl and C++ programming to Windows and started to dabble in Windows programming with Visual Basic.

I used the community as a learning tool. The site did much better than I expected and I accomplished my goal. I later sold the site when I moved on to other ventures.

So my opinion is you don't need to know or be an expert in the topic as long as the topic is of interest to you and you want to learn more about it. Forums are a great place to exchange ideas and learn from other people.

I'm of the opinion that you need to have a general understanding of the subject first, rather than just going in blind.

For example, I have a general understanding of how Servers work, however I'm not a Guru (command line gets me everytime). So, I would be comfortable with starting one, and learning from the community as AWS said.

With AWS' example, though, in my opinion that's a "general understanding." He knew programming, but it was a different language, so it counts.

I knew nothing of parrots when I started mine, I had just got my first bird and was looking to join a forum rather than create one. I hated the look of all that I seen, I don't have anything against vB4 or SMF, but alot of parrot forums look horrid by my taste and I can't get into an ugly forum. SO I started asking questions on my forumer forum and got a few people to sign up and answer. I never intended to take it this far, I was just going to get the knowledge I needed. But as things went on and the more studying I did around the net has paid off and my forum is now a gold mine for parrot info.

Passion first! I think we all know about loads of sites every day happening because everyone wants to get into the Forum or net site band wagon...but this is never enough. Anyone can just buy any software out of the box that will do practically everything regarding functionality, but it's always missing one thing... people.

Unlike POpulous, there is no "populate" button.


I'd say passion first...passion drives interest and when you're hot into anything you quickly make friends, and anyone else into your hobby as much as you are will instantly recognize you as a fellow fan and want to help or point you out to the best resources.

Passion will give you everything because it will keep you asking questions and make everything that happens on your site personally connected to you.





gogo

I wouldn't say i know everything about my forum topic, most of my knowledge comes from actually owning the breed my forum is based on.

Bob, a pal of mine decided to give Toastmasters a try. He said one of the principal points they drive home is that anyone can speak on any topic, but only those who are passionate about the topic will speak well.

I think that is true. People only need to be passionate about a given topic to become involved in discussions about it.

I see this around on other forums to i think i've seen it on both taz and mybb.

We're seeing this at IPB as well. I know I've seen a few topics and statuses asking what kind of forum to start.