What do Seun Osewa and Linda Ikeji have in common?
Very popular Nigerian online communities? No. There are
both fighting to hold on to what isn’t theirs. Or what is
no longer just theirs.
I’m sorry if some of this annoys you. Feel free to write a
rejoinder.
Building a community is just like spreading a religion. In
the beginning, you have to be strict such that new
converts don’t change the core tenets in their bid to
practice the new religion. This is enforced by a set of
rigid laws which are open to interpretation only by a
select few who were instrumental in the religion’s birth.
This is taken further by imposing one language on the
religion’s literature. This ensures there are no heretics,
willing or unknowingly, who bring in foreign concepts in
their bid to translate a new found religion they love.
Now, after a while, when the religion is old enough that
every situation a human might need to deal with has
been interpreted by the religion’s initial laws (or when
you find a golden rule to apply to all situations), you
will then have to open up said religion. This is done by
relaxing the initial rules (as the spirit of the law has now
been understood) such that the letter of the law can
then be interpreted by everyone correctly as defined by
the situation (or by the golden rule) so that growth and
evolution becomes possible.
There are more examples outside religion. There is also
music which starts out with a set of rules for a genre
and then morphs to other creative brilliance. There is
also language and the birth of English (from Anglo-
Norman roots), creole and pidgin.
In technology, there’s Twitter listening to its community
about Mentions, Facebook and their concessions to the
African market (login with phone numbers and tweaks
for ease of use on low bandwidth). And to cap it up,
there’s the StackExchange group of sites which in my
opinion treats its community the best.
So, what do Seun Osewa and Linda Ikeji have in
common? In the words of Jeff Atwood :
“…in a nutshell, I was telling the people who loved Stack
Overflow the most of all to basically … f**k off and go
away.”
Cases in point – @pystar getting banned by Nairaland
for building an unofficial API, and Linda branding people
haters for copyright issues.
These two communities are old enough to suggest
things on their own, but their previous sole owners
refuse to let this happen. This is how things are done if
you DO NOT want them to last. As they stand right now,
Nairaland and the Linda Ikeji Blog will not survive the
exit of Seun and Linda.
Once a community of people arise around a product they
love, those who gave birth to said product have to listen
to the community. This does not mean doing everything
they say because “ acting too directly on community
feedback is incredibly dangerous, and the reason many
of these community initiatives fail when taken too
literally”.
The web is littered with the requests of the Nairaland
and Linda Ikeji community. Better designs, respect of
intellectual property, the list contains more. What is left
is to listen to the them and work on the underlying
issues behind these requests.
Arguing about whether the sites are making money or
not isn’t important because we already know (or think)
that they are profitable. What is left is to give the
community some of the voting rights for the future of
said platforms.

Stephen Olibenu
http://techcabal.com/2014/10/31/owns-nairaland/

Who send me message to open this kind thread?

I ask myself d same question.

Meself just dey wonder maybe op never hear say nairaland is no man's land

See dem! Lol