Think about starting small.
I've been wanting to use the internet as a tool to rally people to causes. What if I started with a small project, where I personally did all the work of rallying the community, using the internet to connect us?
Start small.
This is the Craigslist method. "Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many" That's why it works. It's a community. A place for people. It doesn't happen on it's own. He is the catalyst.
This is how little technology matters in the face of community: Craigslist started life as a simple mailing list. It had no search functionality. Did that stop it?
- Start a single-serve hand-coded html page. Keep it simple.
- or, use a Backpack page
- Add as many photos as you can scrounge up
- Add a map of where it's going
- Get some short bios and stories.
- Update it
- Maybe start a mailing list, but wait until people are starting to gather.
- Forward the page to people you know. Tell everyone you know. Get them excited.
- Of course, you have to believe in what you're doing. If you don't, you shouldn't be doing this.
- Do something simple like the gently-used socks that Brandon took to India. Keep it simple, keep it small. Try it out and learn.
- From little things, big things grow.