create a social-networking site to support learning languages

My firm sponsors an open source javascript toolkit called Dojo—http://dojotoolkit.org. Some guys involved with it are interested in creating a collaborative localization framework. I’m encouraging Alex (dojo project lead) to expand the scope of thinking about the nascent project beyond just collaborative localization of software, to collaborative “localization” of all sorts of works. That then bleeds over into the idea of a social-networking site to support learning languages…

http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=534

So one important topic to begin brainstorming/outlining is the cultural framework that fosters healthy society on our site. I.e., what explicit and implicit incentives & disincentives will encourage the community members to really be helpful and interesting to one another.

We can presumably learn a lot from how 43things has been successful. At the same time 43things does not provide infrastructure for collaboration on actual products, it’s all talk. Not to disparage it, it’s obviously a wonderful site, but there’s a fundamentally different set of use cases that immediately emerge when collaborative document creation is part of the fun and purpose of the site. Roughly, it’s something like multilingual wikipedia married to 43things.

To stay grounded in reality as we think about this stuff, it’s probably helpful to discuss, early on, our own actual, meatspace language learning interests and habits, and those we’ve seen in others, then figure out how they’d relate and translate to what we’d love in a collaborative language-learning community… what would really be helpful and sticky (compelling to the point of minor obsession the way 43things can be).