Happy birthday, Stack Overflow!

If you're not a developer, you may not have come across Stack Overflow. It's an online community devoted to programming self-help, and a couple of days it celebrated its first birthday.

I haven't been a developer for twenty years, so much of what happens on Stack Overflow is as beyond me as Berlusconi's antics are to a student of the Roman Emperors (which is to say, it's all very familiar but in a very odd dialect). What makes it fascinating, though, is that it is a splendid example of a successful community. It's seen over a quarter of a million questions asked and nearly a million answers provided, It is stupendously open - you can ask or answer anything you like without registration - and very efficient to use. The users clearly love it, and it's solving a hard problem with aplomb.

So how do they do it, when the seabed of the Web is littered with failed communities sunk by apathy, flame wars or accretions of sludge ? As it's open, there are no secrets - and half the answers are provided in the main FAQ.

The first is focus. The site is purely for programming questions, nothing else. That's all you get. There are sister sites for IT admin and hardware issues, and for discussing the site itself, but that's a far as diversity goes.

The second is focus. It is extremely easy to categorise your question so that it lives naturally alongside other questions of a similar nature. Tagging, that great question-disguised-as-an-answer, is easy to do and easy to make precise. You don't spend any time having to deal with things that aren't immediately important to getting your question answered - or providing an answer in your sphere of expertise.

The third is focus. Everything about the site is designed to answer your question, and that includes the user interface, its impressive speed, its search and its community rules. If it doesn't help, it's not there.

This focus comes through in everything. The site pulls off what I think is the single most important trick in self-sustaining communities: it relies on its users. That means as you get a better reputation as a member, you get more power to edit the site and shape discussions. This is via a beautifully gradated set of privileges that accrue as more of your answers are voted up - and as the FAQ notes, there's practically no difference between the power wielded by the higher echelons of users and that of the site management proper (who you could fit in a phone box).

The result is a community where everyone who takes part, from the first-time neophyte with a really simple question to those who've been glued to the URL since it launched, is devoted to making it work. They value it, and it values them.

These key facts are ones I've seen work again and again in various forms, from my early days on BBS' and Cix (ask your granny) to places like PPRuNe, the Professional Pilots Rumours and News site. Stack Overflow has the inestimable advantage that the people running it are their own consumers and have a great deal of expertise in the technical details necessary to make it fly, but there are a lot of bright, motivated experts out there. You need that obsession with focus to turn those skills into true magic - something that Steve Jobs understands even better than how to wear a black poloneck.

(In fact there's another parallel between Apple and Stack Overflow, in how to manage incremental improvements over time, but that'll have to wait for another posting.)

Can these lessons be learned by anyone? I hope so. I've been sold on community as the key to online success since those early days, and it's a big part of ZDNet UK's plans for the future. Stack Overflow hopes so too; it's open about its plans to roll up all of its goodness and market it as a product for anyone who thinks they'd like to create their own community.

I really hope they succeed. And I hope we succeed in applying those lessons ourselves. We're certainly up for it. Hope you are, too.