Help Shape The Next Big Online Engineering Community

Solidworks released today, the second part of a survey they are conducting on what community means.  The second part seems to focus heavily on on-line content like forums, blogs, and social networking sites.  It comes across as a survey meant to help shape the 'perfect' on-line community.  Is Solidworks trying to create a one-stop on-line engineering community site?  Lets all contemplate a combination of Myspace, Youtube, Flicker, Solidworks Forums, and blogs, all in one place.

One of the survey questions asks what blogs you frequent, so I am sure you will give me some help there!  To complete the survey, Visit The Survey Site, but allow yourself about 10-15 minutes to complete, its a long one!

Comments

[Matt Lombard]

Richard Doyle, the great duck hunter (try to fly an idea past him someday and see how quickly it gets shot down) sounds like maybe he might get his tune changed for him here. All those questions about personal websites? Is this a back door for user groups to get their own SW hosted website finally? Or what about all those questions about online user groups? Richard consistantly shoots down the quietest flutter of each of these ideas. We'll see what happens, I guess.

I agree you can't force it. SW might do one thing well and completely blow it on others. It would work better to use areas of existing sites that do certain things well. I never saw a mention of CADJunky. Wassupwiddat?

[Matthew West]

Hey Mike,

To answer your question simply--no.

SolidWorks users are actually a quite diverse bunch, ranging from college students to seasoned vets. They're also very opinionated, which should come as no surprise to you or any of your readers. There's a lot of conversation that goes on related to the apps that never makes it to the product teams because it takes place in all kinds of different places. So one of the things we (me in particular) want to know is where you guys hang out, what do you read, what matters to you? How can we learn from what's going on out there, and what are we doing that's better(or worse) than the competition?

Personally, I have no desire to try to create artificial community. I've seen it tried and fail numerous times. I want to find out not necessarily where we're needed, but where we might be able to listen and contribute. If there are a lot of users on Facebook, it might be a neat idea to create a massive SolidWorks group that Facebook members can use to talk to one another. If lots of people enjoy uploading videos of their projects to YouTube, maybe we can put together a real SolidWorks channel where everything can live, rather than being scattered. Those are the kinds of things we're looking for.

Feedback is always welcome.

Matthew West
Social Media Manager