Community as a Self-Expressing Organism

[AuspiciousEight]

Steve,

You've mentioned a few times that the kind of person that is attracted to personal development has, by nature, attained a certain degree of maturity, intelligence, or consciousness level. I believe that the quality of these forums, the interesting discussions here, and the number of users who are dedicated to helping one another grow is a good reflection of this statement.

With that said, I am curious as to your thoughts on taking the user interaction to another level. Specifically, I am curious as to your thoughts as they pertain to the following...err...thoughts...

Community as a Self-Expressing Organism

-Some additions to encourage community self-expression.

Chat Rooms to correspond with the major forum topics. Discussing a specific topic at depth, or focusing in on a specific person's life/situation/problem, etc, may be easier and quicker to do in a chat room than in a forum. These could be used for a number of things:

-Hosting Q&A sessions with Steve and/or Erin Pavlina.
-Problem Resolution-Exploring someone's real life problem/situation and offering possible solutions/suggestions in real-time.
-Psychic and Paranormal...Well, let's not get started on the number of things you could explore there in a chat room.

Hosting Member Blogs -I could see many people taking advantage of this. Reading about how other people have handled certain problems/ life situations and what the outcome was may better help others to handle similar problems/situations in their own life. Why reinvent the wheel?

Many members already have their own web sites and/or blogs anyway. This would basically be a way to centrally locate all of these blogs, thoughts, ideas, etc and allow the user to search out and find these writings.

Member Article Submission-Steve, you're an extremely intelligent, passionate, creative, charismatic, energetic....man, writer, speaker, blogger, programmer, person, etc...But there's only so much that one man can do and explore in one lifetime. Unless, of course, we had a cloning machine...

This would give others a chance to elaborate on the lessons and things that they have learned from their life experiences/studies/experiments/etc...And it would give the reader a more diversified base of literature to read, not only in style, but in content as well.

Of course, you would only want the best of the best to be included on your site. Thus, you would probably want to have all articles be reviewed for approval by a small group of people. And then, of course, you would have to put the final "Steve's stamp of approval" on the article before you post it somewhere on your site("User submitted articles" section?)

Conclusion - Yes, completely and utterly random thoughts/ideas which I'm sure you've either thought of before or had someone mention to you before. But, alas, there was the urge to express them.


Steve Pavlina's Community

-The Self-Expressing Organism

God Bless,

[Brutha]

Many members already have their own web sites and/or blogs anyway. This would basically be a way to centrally locate all of these blogs, thoughts, ideas, etc and allow the user to search out and find these writings.

Most members with blog intent to make money with them. If you want to make money with your blog it's best to have your own website.

This would give others a chance to elaborate on the lessons and things that they have learned from their life experiences/studies/experiments/etc...

You can already do this in the forum.

-Hosting Q&A sessions with Steve and/or Erin Pavlina.

You don't need a chat to do Q&A.
It's something that Steve did already with his short question format and could do again.

-Problem Resolution-Exploring someone's real life problem/situation and offering possible solutions/suggestions in real-time.

Realtime reduces reflective thinking.

Having a realtime chat expecially encourages people to go into the chat without focusing on something. I'm no fan of realtime mediums whether TV or groupchats.
You also shouldn't forget that the community doesn't share a timezone.

Discussing a specific topic at depth, or focusing in on a specific person's life/situation/problem, etc, may be easier and quicker to do in a chat room than in a forum.

There no point in quick and easy fixes. Hard and effective is a lot better.