Six Conditions that Form Online Communities
01.10.2008
Like a tornado, online communities only form under certain conditions. If you're looking to build an online community, understand that they are very difficult to build artificially. They seem to only emerge from natural conditions. Indeed, you can help them emerge, but you can't *create* them in my experience.
Below, are the 6 essential conditions that I've observed as necessary in building online communities. I think three to four of these conditions are the bare minimum for a reasonable chance. All six would guarantee that a community would form -- probably whether their Dr. Frankenstein of a creator liked it or not.
The Six Conditions
I. The community creates a meeting place for people who didn't previously have a place to come together. This is probably the most powerful condition, as its very difficult to create a community if a larger one already exists somewhere else.
II. A sense of shared ownership between the members of the community -- something they can point to, and say "this is ours -- and its worth defending".
III. At least one strong leader to keep conversations going. They lead in the sense that they set the tone for others to follow, but do so only by example -- they don't order people directly. This person is usually willing to devote an extraordinary amount of time to the effort.
IV. A shared identity among members. The may share a love of baseball, or want to dominate the shady underworld of hand modeling insurance policies. It doesn't matter what the goal is, as long as its felt that everyone shares it, and is passionate about it.
V. Members have an opportunity for personal gain: be it career, reputation, sex or education.
VI. The conversations within the community are entertaining in itself. Indeed, there doesn't need to be a goal; there just needs to be a doggy treat to keep people coming back.
While this list isn't complete, I can't think of anymore conditions. Can anyone else?
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Very interesting post, please
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BUILDING ONLINE
BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES
There is no algorithm for community. That is, there is no step-by-step recipe that can be followed that will guarantee a specific outcome. Building community is a fundamentally different activity than writing computer code: code does not write back and code does not respond strategically to one’s actions.
What makes for a successful online community is often poorly understood. At this time (1996), the tendency of those involved in building graphical virtual worlds is to create visually compelling worlds that look good, but do a poor job of fostering social interaction. Many of these systems have more in common with lonely museums than with the vibrant communities they set out to create.
It is telling that that the most successful online graphical community at this time – WorldsAway – is also the system with the oldest and least impressive "look." Without question it is the most developed and most interesting graphical online world today, despite its stiff and cartoon-ish 2-D graphics. The community succeeds not because of flashy graphics, but because it contains many of the requisite elements for a successful community: identity persistence, a sophisticated set of rituals, an internal economy with a monetary system, property rights, a rich set of documents recording the history of the community, a coherent sense of space, casual interaction caused by the fact that one must "walk" most places, and a moderate level of risk.
WorldsAway certainly has its problems and limitations, but the lesson of its success in creating a lively, elaborated social system is that there are design elements that can have an important effect on encouraging (though not guaranteeing) successful online communities.
While there are no algorithms for community, there are some very useful heuristics. In the next section I draw from research in the social sciences as well as the practical experience of long-time participants in online groups to discuss various design principles for online communities.
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Ive wanted to form an online
Ive wanted to form an online community for a while. Thanks!
Koko
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This is extremely interesting
I sometimes try to generalize from my own experiences with online communities, and have observed the very principles you are listing. I've seen between 10-20 communities spark into existence, grow, thrive, and some of them die - sometimes because they became redundant (other channels of communication opened), other times because a number of leading members left.
It is interesting to note that points 2 and 6 will follow on their own. Once a community reaches a certain critical mass (needing only point 1, 3 and 4 - the opportunity, common interest and the leader) it will develop an off-topic niche (sometimes in the form of a "Miscellaneous" forum), and thereafter it generates its own sense of identity and conversation. The "Miscellaneous" sub-group may even grow larger than the original group - there are communities whose primary definition has changed from "people who like X" into "people who post on this forum". It's funny to watch.
Furthermore, point 2 may then lead to satisfy point 5 - the community is recognized as an "authority" by its members (as they feel proud of it), and recognition within that community becomes a currency that will fuel personal ambitions.
Well said...
That would be nice conditions of creating an effective community... me as on the field of search engine optimization I always kept that my community that i created is always knowledgeable and a good source of learning as well as sharing at the same time. for that reason i would take some of your tips on effective community and hope it will work for me. he..
non-hierarchical and ecosystems
I think I would add a lack of hierarchy, although it is possible to build a hierarchical community these are less resilient.
For an interesting talk about this check out the starfish and the spider at http://www.beckstrom.com/Main_Page
Online communities are in fact also ecosystems therefore:
-there are certain sequences of adding species that will lead to a stable system (e.g. bring in the endusers to early and your community crashes because a lack of content)
-the more niches you have in an ecosystem the more diverse species can live on it (e.g. the endless list of modules in the Drupal community)
-the more diverse species in your system the more stable it becomes (e.g. survive disasters like the disappearance of a certain user type)
There is a really interesting read on this subject at http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch4-a.html I don't know how you can translate this into online communities, but I'm sure there are some more interesting lessons in there.
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