Creating a Group Blog and Open Buddha
by Al
At this point, I am pretty willing to admit that Open Buddha is a failure as a web forum or community site. I’ve had it up for over five months now and it just hasn’t gelled. To really get a web forum going, you need a critical mass of interested parties and it just hasn’t really happened. Part of it is undoubtably my own fault but it really is not easy to build a community from scratch.
Loden Jingpa, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Australia, is making a go at a similar effort with his Buddhist Forums site. Perhaps by gathering a different crowd of people using software specifically designed around forums, he can make a better effort.
I still have the OpenBuddha.* (com, org, and net) domain name though. I’m thinking of trying to do a group Buddhist blog there. Ideally, I would get a small group of Buddhist bloggers to try to blog on Buddhist matters as a group. I’m thinking that if I could get a total of four or five other people (plus myself), we could make an interesting go of it. It would be ideal to get a diverse mix, such as a Tibetan Vajrayana practitioner, a Zen practitioner, a Theravadan practitioner, a Shin Buddhist, and maybe one of the Chinese or Korean traditions of practice or something like a Shambhala or Vipassana practitioner. Everyone gets an account and agrees to generally try to work together and follow Buddhist standards of conduct. It seems like it could work.
The idea would be to cover items of Buddhist interest. This could be current events, news, book reviews, essays, discussions of practice, etc. A diverse group of people would bring, inherently, a diverse perspective, one that was not always entirely in agreement, even. This is healthy and these differences could help the group blog be interesting, along with the variety of perspectives.
If you are a Buddhist blogger and interested in something like this or have someone to suggest, please feel free to leave a comment or forward this post to other parties. I think it would be a worthwhile effort to bring a group of people together and it would fulfill some of the ideas behind the “Open Buddha” name.
Comments
thx for the plug Al.
I wish you luck with your idea…which I think it is great idea btw :)
Hey Al,
I think it’s a good idea, but agree that the critical mass never happened with OB. Another thing, though, was that OB seemed to be in part a reaction against the conditions on e-Sangha, which probably wasn’t the most auspicious possible motivation. Resurrecting it with regular bloggers could be quite interesting, as long as they’ve got something interesting to say. Getting enough interesting people to do that, with a diverse enough background, should probably be your condition for going ahead with it. Good luck; I hope it works out!
W.B.
Hey Al,
This sounds like a good project. I know of a couple of other “group Buddhist blogs” out there that are either terribly one-sided or virtual ghosts towns. Your idea of having a true diversity of opinions sounds interesting. Would love to know more.
Best,
scott
Well, Scott, you were one of the people that I immediately thought of when I conceived this project. Rev. Harry and I have been casually chatting on Livejournal as well.
I haven’t seen any very active group blogs for Buddhists really. The BuddhistGeeks podcasts are often pretty close but they are not really focused on the blogging end of things.
As to the “more”, well, I just thought it up so I think it would be an evolving thing. I think that posting general thoughts on various Buddhist topics, about current events, book reviews, discussions amongst the group bloggers on topics on occasion as a group, etc. would happen fairly organically. I think that if there are five or so people, convincing everyone to post at least once a week would be a good place to start.
Once a week, huh?
I’m game.
Cool. Well, that’s one or two then. Just need a couple of more. I want a Zen guy though ’cause I do. Maybe a Nyingma practitioner or a Theravadan one (or both!).
How about a Dorje Shugden practitioner? :D
That probably wouldn’t go over well since my Tibetan practice was pretty much Nyingma and Kagyu based. That particular figure doesn’t like people like me (not Gelug).
Interesting view. For I have also received many Nyingma and some Karma Kagyu teachings and empowerments, while being and remaining a DS-practitioner. I never had any dislikes, and I’d guess neither did the Protector.
So I don’t see why it wouldn’t go well.
Although I’ll admit that it might be too shocking a thing for the “general public” to see that Buddhist practitioners (or Buddhas, for that matter) do not necessarily dislike each other’s lineages. Heh.
I would be interested in this collaboration. You are welcome to visit my blog and see if you think my style would work with what you are looking for:
ambud.org