Science For America empowers educators as teachers and learners as they develop and implement new themes, ideas, and curriculum. Educators are given the opportunity to learn and build networks with leaders, experts and each other.

The website is built upon the belief that educators can only facilitate the development of analytical reasoning and problem-solving skills when these same proficiencies are used to resolve the issues confronting science education today.

The Science For America web site offers resources for planning and implementing instruction, developing project-based learning curriculum, and collaborating with colleagues. Unlike other teaching-related websites, which frequently provide large lists of unranked, unsorted links and resources, the Science For America website provides submission, rating and discussion tools to allow the best resources to surface near the top of the list. This saves teachers time, and allows the best resources to develop into excellent tools which all educators will want to implement in their classrooms.

If you build it, they will come. A statement ingrained in America’s psyche thanks to the 1989 film Field of Dreams. But while the film garnered numerous awards and accolades from critics and moviegoers alike (three Oscar nominations alone, Best Picture, Best Music, Best Writing), not even Kevin Costner can save your social networking site from fading into obscurity without the right stuff.

If you build it they will come works well for building baseball diamonds in Iowa cornfields, but when it comes to social networking sites, it takes a concerted effort of seeding, promoting, and managing to get things off the ground.

I’ve been scouring the web for other authors and organizations who have addressed steps to building successful online communities. Aside from a handful of personal blogs discussing this issue, there isn’t a whole lot of official research on what factors are necessary for successful social networks.

I did, however, find an excellent resource from the KickApps team. Kickapps recently published a whitepaper titled “Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community.” They’ve put together a list of guidelines to help social networks reach their fullest potential. The nine steps necessary to promote good planning and best practices?

1. Define your community’s purpose and audience.
2. Get a Community Manager.
3. Choose the technology that’s right for you.
4. Seed your community with great content.
5. Customize your community’s look and feel.
6. Promote it!
7. Encourage active participation.
8. Manager your community with fair-mind consistency.
9. Listen and optimize.

I’ll be writing about each one of these in separate blogs in the next few weeks. In the meantime, read up for yourself here and also check out some of these links.

While I think the design of Science For America is strong, and the platform I built it on is even stronger (Joomla! CMS), I’ve learned a few things about trying to create a social network that I’d like to share with you.

One…

Creating social networks takes time. Both time on a day-by-day basis, and also time in the sense of building up the site and brand to get passionate visitors who come back for more. I would attribute the relative success of Science For America to its tenure on the web, now 18 months. I found that initial traffic and getting the word out was critical in the beginning, but that after this had started, it simply took time for traffic and users to arrive at the site.

Two…

Creating social networks takes planning. I used a 20 Questions document to develop the underlying principles for the site. Who are we targeting? What are the sites’ competitors? What type of content will be included? All of these were important in deciding the direction of the site.

Three…

Creating social networks takes organization. Proper layout is critical, because you want your user interface to be intuitive. Where can I find science worksheets? Where do I go when I want to find links to science websites? All of these questions should really be answered BEFORE you start on the site and throughout the beta phase of development. There are many platforms out there- Joomla! and Wordpress to name a couple- that make it relatively easy to rearrange content and links on websites, but it is still a critical step to develop at least a rough sketch, wireframes maybe, of where you are going to have visitors click to navigate certain parts of the site.

This is simplifying things a bit, but I believe if you focus on these three areas, you’ll have a solid site ready for visitors.

So why is this? I’m thinking it is because Science For America does not have much to offer for a returning visitor. While there are some great resources on the site for downloading, the forum is empty, the tools for uploading science worksheets and handouts is under-utilized, and the blog content is stale. I’ll be the first to admit I need to put forth more time on the project. I marvel at the level of efficiency when I read the blogs of some of the most effective writers on the net- writers like Seth Godin, and Darren Rowse at ProBlogger (there are some other great blogs out there like TechCrunch, CopyBlogger, and Mashable, but these blogs have small armies of writers)- who manage to write for multiple blogs or post two, sometimes three times in one day.

If I was to tackle these three issues- stale content, empty forum, and stagnant resource updates- would things improve? I’m willing to bet they will.