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Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

Does anyone see a problem with that? We have the URL all picked out and the technology that will drive the site. But we're not sure HOW we would use it, or IF we would use it.

Go check out the thread, and you'll see that the major themes in the comments include:

• We debate Google Forms vs. other methods of collecting data.
• A huge debate over the merits of JomSocial. (This debate also raging on Twitter.) The debate is focused on JomSocial vs. other social networking plugins, as well as JomSocial's history as a non-GPL extension.
• A few people pointing out that a strategy might be a good thing to have first.

Once again, let me shamelessly self-promote Chapter 1 (PDF) of my book, titled "I Want a Website and I Want It Blue, How Much Will That Cost?" I strongly encourage the Joomla leadership to read this carefully and think about the problem they're trying to solve with this website. If they can't come up with answers to the questions posed in this chapter, maybe the site should not be built until they do.

As many of you know, I teach at the Marlboro College Graduate School. My students in the Master's of Science in Information Technologies program complete a master's thesis project (we call it the capstone). Many of them plan and build a website as part of that process. If one of my students proposed to create a social networking site for Joomla for their project, I wouldn't let them go forward until they could adequately answer a bunch of questions.

1. Joomla has social networking channels across the internet, both official and unofficial, including Google groups, Joomla forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, ICQ, and more. How do those channels integrate with other methodologies of communicating with the Joomla community? Get a scope on what these channels are and why they exist. What problems are they solving? How are they being used? Are all channels required, or could they be boiled down to fewer channels? How do these channels compete or collaborate with the social site that's envisioned? Prepare a statement for each official communication channel, stating the purpose of that channel, who has access to it, and what kind of information is communicated through it. Look for redundant, outdated, and trivial channels -- can any of the channels be eliminated or combined, so the message is more efficiently communicated to the community? How does the social networking site fit into general Joomla communications?

2. The Joomla forums have uncounted posts. People are talking to each other there. What does the social networking site offer that the forums are not currently addressing? How does one differentiate between a post in the social community or a post in the forum? Presumably the forum posts are about tech support. Does the social community compete with the forums? Does it draw attention away from them or toward them? What do you do about posts in the social community that belong on the forums? Or does it make more sense to integrate the forums into the social community? How will the difference between the forum and the social community be explained to newbies so it's easy to understand?

3. Spend some time looking over the Joomla.org family of sites. Developer.joomla.org was last updated in October 2009, when Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2 was released. The other sites are updated semi-regularly. Presumably sites are not being updated due to time constraints. So how will adding to the family of Joomla.org sites help solve that problem? How does the social networking site fit into the joomla.org site structure as a whole? Is it a simple addition to the Joomla site network, or will it take information from other areas of Joomla.org?

4. I hear a lot about not enough moderators in the forum, not enough people answering questions in the forum, not enough people helping with Joomla 1.6 development. I imagine that there will be many volunteers to help build a social networking site; there are bragging rights involved, after all! But once the site is built, who is going to be the moderators and maintainers? How do you attract and keep these volunteers?

5. The first few months of this site's life post-release will be absolutely critical, as people arrive and try out the site for the first time. Who are the people we want to attract to a social networking site? How do we keep a positive voice? What do we want to guide them to talk about? You can post a general social networking site -- and you will get general social networking outcomes. Or you can focus the site to discuss something in particular.

All Together As A Whole is a great example of how this was done. It's not just a site devoted to general social networking around Joomla (which this proposed site appears to be). ATAAW focuses on how collaboration happens to create the Joomla Magazine, user guides, and other information for the Joomla community. There are many valuable lessons to be learned from this community, its formation, and the people it attracts.

6. How does success or failure of this community get measured? What is a recovery plan if the site is deemed a failure? How does the judgement get made, who judges its success or failure, and who determines what happens next? Where is the accountability surrounding the site?

Finally, some truisms about any website project, particularly those with two-way communication.

• If you build it, they won't necessarily come.
• If you build it, sometimes they come, but "they" are not the people you anticipated.
• It's so easy to build it. There are predictable problems and solutions to building any website. But people are wholly unpredictable. Even if you guide people to contribute to the site in specific ways, they will still surprise you in other ways. Some of those surprises are good, and some are not. How do you deal with the unpleasant surprises?

Note to those debating JomSocial: I totally agree that it's a worthy debate to have, what message Joomla.org sends to the community by adopting an extension that was not previously GPL, having made such a huge deal about GPL in the extensions directory. However, I believe the debate is premature. Note all points above have little to nothing to do with technology. They are larger strategic questions that need to be answered before we can even start discussing what technology would drive such a website.

Indeed, I think that we should debate whether this site is required at all. I would argue this site is not required, needed, or desired, though I would be delighted to be convinced otherwise. The "cool" points are high, but I worry about the life of the community long-term. I worry this is another ego-driven project within the Joomla community, in which people want to develop a high-profile project they can have associated with their name, without a thought of what comes after launch.