Plant, Nourish and ...

Last night we spent a long time talking about the many facets of a community. how to plant one, how to grow it, what it needs, what we can charge for, and how we defend them. I was a little surprised at how aggressively capitalist my partners in crime were - they cited a lot of really valid reasons why capitalizing as much as possible was good. but I'm nervous about the gardening. I think its a pretty hard crop that we are trying to grow. and while I have every faith that given a garden to flourish in they will do exactly that, its just that its a hard crop to grow. I apologize for this analogy shit - but really, truly, community shit is hard. its fickle. and you have to give a lot of damn good reasons to attract and keep users. and if we cant defend these guys, or give them a good enough tool-set to keep them, then we are really just baiting them to failure and in doing so walking down the gang plank ourselves. As time goes on I'll give more specifics, I want to - I just think it would be bad form to handcuff the business into living with what I slap together on my blog. and I'm sure this will be a discussion in more detail as time goes on, both on my blog and between my partners and I. But right now, not knowing what it all means I want to give the world to our users - I'm afraid that we need to. the world is a big bad place and I think it will try and take advantage of them, try and steal their good ideas, and try and humiliate the others. If anyone has any ideas on how to beat back the scary wolves, stop the Chinese from stealing every good idea my community has, or what they would need to feel safe and secure - please let me know, but otherwise I'm sure I will be picking your brain in the days to come. Other than last nights big discussion things are pretty good. I'm in a bit of a war that we foresaw concerning these guys leaving their jobs, workload, contribution, etc. And I guess I'm just at a bit frustrated. and though I don't blame them for it, the guys are being a little self defensive (and they really have lots of valid excuses). I'm just of the opinion that if you don't risk big, you cant ever win big. and excuses and valid reasons aren't whats gonna make us successful - its doing everything possible to get fingers to keyboard that will make make or break us. but this is all part of the experience! and so far everything is still squishy enough that this is a good thing to work through now.