In
my post about content managers I said that "this idea could be expanded as to take more advantage of the basic idea behind this as well, but I'll write of that later."
The second part of this idea would be what I've just titled 'experimental forums'. It would follow the same basic principle as the idea of content managers, "Both in theory and practice, the best way to motivate people is to give them a stake in their innovation and give them the freedom to follow their ideas as they see fit. Following this line of thinking, a decentralization of control of bringing content in rather than centralized control will foster more content."
The basic idea is that there would be a new section of the forum could Experimental Forums. This would be placed at the bottom posting sections (between the general forums and the staff forums) in order to avoid clutter and to have them not featured. As with the content managers someone will give an idea like "I want a music forum" or "I want a card game forum" and it would be placed there where they would essentially be the content manager of the forum (with others if the creator of the forum wishes). This would create new content and sections that could turn out to be active or they could fail. If it became obvious the forum was failing after given a decent time to succeed it could be removed. Obviously there would be limitations (such as staying within the forum rules (as in not being able to make a forum for flaming)), but there are a lot of interests that can be taken advantage of by taking a bottom up approach.
The idea is that a person will have the incentive to help the forum as it is basically their own and a person will most likely want their idea to work and will want to follow through on it. Best case scenario, there is a new forum that brings interest. Worst case scenario, some administrator has wasted 30 seconds creating a forum and has to spend.
It can be set up as a game as well in that the experimental forum can compete against each other for slot position (based on activity, new content, or some other productive thing).
Linear Mode
