COMMUNITY

My research notes, not yet edited or summarized, on building community online.

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Howard Rheingold (howard): The signal:noise ratio is what the social expertise is about

Summary

The term community is used today to describe a wide range of services on the Web. Not all of them emphasize or provide for conversation or interaction between their users. Not all invite users' contributions of any kind. Such services won't realize the benefits that can be gained through nurturing relationships between people and involving them in their site's content development. In this book, those relationships, contributions, and involvements are central to our working definition of community on the Web.

 

    According to that definition, members of a community feel a part of it. They form relationships and bonds of trust with other members and with you, the community host. Those relationships lead to exchanges and interactions that bring value to members. It's that value that draws them back repeatedly to your site where, over time, they build shared histories of experiences and events. This reliable traffic and the members' contributions of information, ideas, and feedback are the major benefits you'll realize by fostering community on the Web.

 

 

 

cliff figallo:

I decided early on that the first thing I'd do in the book was define "community," if not for the ages, then for the purposes of the book at least. I needed to distinguish a "community" from a "marketplace."

My four "attributes" are:

Together, these attributes bring certain benefits that we're all familiar with:

 

 

  12:28) 06-MAR-1998 0:51 Hugh Pyle (hughpyle)

Cliff, (FWIW) have you seen the "Call Me Back" button? In a sentence: you're on someone's Web customer-support page; there's a button which says "Call Me"; you press it and their rep calls you on the phone right away. And, the rep knows which Web page you were at.

OK, it's not really to do with "communities"; but this melding of "pull" Web and "realtime" one-to-one communication is an interesting spin on the technology.

Also, Business Week did some decent introductory articles in their special report on "Internet Communities" (5 May, 1997).

Another good resource might be the January 1998 issue of Web Techniques, which features an article called "9 Timeless Principles for Building Community: Erecting Social Scaffolding" which is written by Amy Jo Kim who happens to teach Online Community Design at Stanford and is author of a (in press) book called Secrets of Successful Web Communities

 

pub page for cliff's book:  http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/figallo/

 

Amazon.com: Why are so many online sites calling themselves "communities"?

Figallo: The Web is a good environment for creating multi-user gathering and conversation places, but for many, "community" is used for lack of a better word to describe what the site providers hope will develop. "Community" offers potential visitors the attractive connotation of acceptance, cooperation, mutual support, and conviviality. It seems to promise that they will find meaningful or at least entertaining social interaction through the convenience of a personal computer. In actuality, fostering what can accurately be termed "community" takes a lot of work and stubborn intention. Sometimes it just happens, but more often it does not. And even if it does, far from being a social Shangri-la, an online community turns out to be a mixture of all that can be good about human interaction and much that is not so good.

 

Amazon.com: What are the biggest mistakes people make in trying to build an online community?

 

Figallo: Perhaps the most prevalent mistake is thinking that group-interactive software plus people equals community. Putting chat rooms or a message board on a site is often seen as a "cheap fix" for the difficulty of attracting and keeping a loyal audience. If too little investment--in terms of planning, hiring, and infrastructure--is made in the beginning of the effort, the reliability and features for attracting and keeping that audience won't be there. Loyalty won't have a chance. This is especially so today with so many choices of places to go on the Web. Building a home for a community requires adequate early investment and continued commitment. A community can make it through hard times when the software and hardware break down, but it's much better to build a reliable, well-designed system in the beginning if you want your users to make a habit of spending time there.

 

 kissing frogs for a .3% prince ratio.

 

How to Build Communities

virtual communities:Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group's collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community.

http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

 

The three kinds of collective goods that Smith proposes as the social glue that binds the WELL into something resembling a community are social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion. Social network capital is what happened when I found a ready-made community in Tokyo, even though I had never been there in the flesh. Knowledge capital is what I found in the WELL when I asked questions of the community as an online brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise. And communion is what we found in the Parenting conference, when Phil's and Jay's children were sick, and the rest of us used our words to support them.

 

chapter 10

Prodigy is modeled on the old consumers-as-commodity model that works for mass-market magazines. You use the services and contents of the magazine or television network (or online service) to draw a large population of users, who give you detailed information about their demographics, and then you sell access to those users to advertisers. You tailor the content of the magazine or television program or online service to attract large numbers of consumers with the best demographics, you spend money on polls and focus groups to certify the demographics of your consumers, and then advertising agencies buy access to the attention of those consumers you've "captured." This is the economic arm of the broadcast paradigm, extended to cyberspace. With a reported one million users, and both parent companies in trouble, it is not at all clear whether Prodigy will reach the critical mass of users to repay the investment, but this notion of online subscribers as commodities isn't likely to go away. It's based on one of the most successful money-making schemes in history, the advertising industry.

 

 

 

 

 

Everywhere you look on the Web there seems to be online forums, chat rooms and listservs, not to mention Usenet and MUDs.

 

This fire has crossed the line into online learning communities as well. Online learning communities defined here as email listservs, online forums, MUDs, chat rooms, etc. are being used as tools in a school, on/offline class, or online training. Distance learning is all ablaze and Web based classes with online forums and email listservs, are popping up like mushrooms after a hard rain.

 

All too often however, the valuable lessons learned from the successful online communities are not being applied to online learning communities.

 

You can create an environment and plant some seeds, but it's the members of a community that grow that community. Even the big companies who are said to be "building online communities" are really growing them by giving, or selling, the tools with which people can grow their own.

 

What the Globe, and other Web ventures, from American Online, to Santa Monica, California based GeoCities, are doing is not so much creating community, as providing tools for the creation of community. And people are beginning to use those tools in large numbers. (Weber 1997)

 

Amy Jo Kim, head of NAIMA, a well known design firm specializing in designing commercial online communities, has a set of guidelines for development.

 

 

Give and Get Give!

 

Online learning communities grow best when there is value to being part of them. To have value, members must give and take information in a delicate balance. Communities like the WELL are known for the amazing willingness of the members to help anybody that asks, making for what has been discussed as "gift economies", and the exchange of "public goods"

 

Growing online Forums:

 

For an online forum, the environment can also be controlled by the naming of the forums and treads. Since most online forums now have a Web browser interface, all the tricks of Web page design can be used to create a unique place with a specific tone. In terms of the topics themselves, the first post is the most important for setting tone. On the Netscape Professional Connections forum, hosts write a short first post about what the topic will cover, and then write a second post that states the host's point of view on the topic. Every word is an opportunity to control the environment

 

 

Online learning communities need leaders. Leaders are needed to define the environment, keep it safe, give it purpose, identity and keep it growing.

 

Call them coaches, facilitators, teachers, or what ever you want. When you get right down to it, it all means leaders. The virtual world is a mediated environment (Donath 1997) and mediation needs mediators.

 

 

 leaders in online communities, in yet every group needs leadership to facilitate the group's growth. Peter Kollock and Marc Smith (1994) wrote of Elinor Ostrom's work studying terrestrial communities rich in public goods. Here's what she found to be some commonalties:

 

1. clearly defined group boundaries

2. rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.

3. individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. external authorities.respect the rights of community members to devise their own rules

5. community members themselves monitor member behavior

6. a graduated system of sanctions is used.

7. community members can resolve conflicts cost-effectively.

 

 

Imagine all of these things getting done without leaders to do them!

 

 

 

Caleb J. Clark

Leaders mantras:

 

My mantras for leading any online community:

 

- All you need is love

- Control the environment, not the group.

- Lead by example

- Let lurkers lurk

- Short leading questions get conversations going

- Be personally congratulatory and inquisitive.

- Route information in all directions.

- Care about the people in the community. This cannot be faked.

- Understand consensus and how to build it, and sense when it's been built and just not recognized, and when you have to make a decision despite all the talking.

 

 

 

Leading forums:

 

Hosts in online forums are like the host of a party. You set up the decorations, the bar, the food, and get people to come. You greet people at the door, make sure they can find the bathroom, and introduce them to folks they might like talking to. If there's a fight, hosts have to deal with it. Good parties usually have good hosts.

 

Hosts in online educational forums define the tone of the forum from their personality and writing style, just as they do in other communities. Hosts need to welcome all new members, achieve stale topics, define and start new topics, keep topics on topic, and read all posts. Hosts start and maintain topics about where to find help and help those in need.

 

 

Personal narrative is vital to online learning communities. Personal stories and experiences add closeness, and provide identity, thus strengthening online communities.

 

 

Research on communities, on and offline, supports the need for establishing identity. Stories are a powerful way for humans to anchor identity. Members individual identity is critical to the formation of any close group. Online you have no identity by merely existing and being seen, as we do offline.  trust

 

NOT.

 

 

"Community" is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry. True community -- the ability to connect with people who have similar interests -- may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections, the most minimal interactivity. The presence of a bulletin board with a few posts, or a chat room with some teens swapping age/sex information, or a home page with an e-mail address, does not mean that people are forming anything worthy of the name community.