|
The cynical way to say it is to "Fake it til you make it." The nicer way would be to say "Be the change you want to see in the world." When we launched MuckRock, a user-generated FOIA request site, we had about 50 early registered users who were dying to use the site. Then we set them loose, and after 2 months, absolutely no one had filed. So I started filing a ton of requests on my own, got back really good information, and all the sudden users started filing. When I went back and asked why they hadn't filed before, they said they simply didn't know what filing should look like, so having some examples was helpful. We also found a few power users who were already doing this on their own, and gave them free premium accounts. We lost hundreds of dollars on them for the first year, since we covered cost of stamps, scanning, etc., but it more then made up for it in helping model the kind of community and content we wanted to have. So the short answer is, find ways to bootstrap it yourselves, whether that's just you compulsively dog fooding your own site or paying users to ask questions (it's almost always harder to find good question askers than answerers, and the latter comes naturally to sites with good questions), or, like Wikipedia, intelligently and ethically scraping some bootstrapping material from existing resources. |