In this selection of the book, Preece whole-heartedly embraces online communities. She acknowledges that different fields (sociology, e-commerse) have substantial arguments over the strict definition of online communities, but she accepts a fairly inclusive definition. Her definition of an online community involves four things: (1) people interacting to satisfy personal needs, (2) shared purpose, (3) policies, both formal and information, and (4) computer systems. This definition sidesteps many of theoretical complications for the purpose of practicality. For example, interactions between people are not qualified by strength or length of interactions. While these characteristics of interactions may be important to consider in designing good online communities systems, Preece does not consider them as factors that determine whether or not the interactions qualify as a community to begin with. Further, Preece's definition does not focus too much on one aspect of online communities over another (say, the sociological or the technical extremes), but is inclusive of all the major components of such a community. Ultimately, Preece has created a working defintion - a definition meant to guide decision-making in the development and maintainence of online communities.

Preece points out that "lack of physical presence online is still seen as a problem for community" (p. 8). In the prior paragraph, she provides the following quote from Rheingold about what takes place in virtual communities: "We do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind... our identities comingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or location." Although I agree that lack of physical presence online can be problematic for many types of electronic communication, I think it also simultaneously enables and/or facilitates others.

--- Beth

Beth St. Jean

This is largely an introduction to the terms online community, usability, and sociability; and is therefore essential to our understanding of community. The author briefly mentions the limitations of textual communication in these communities on page 8, and also raises an interesting point when saying, “Commercialization of the Internet is sweeping online communities along in its wake, thereby diluting the potency of the concept” (9), which I’m not sure I agree with or completely understand, especially when services like Facebook and GMail/GoogleTalk can be used in a non-commercial way even as ads pop up and the company itself makes more money. This dovetails with the echo throughout the piece for a move away or towards purity when the author suggests, “many researchers and online communities advocates resent the implication that any online communication among people constitutes a communities. They believe that an online community is more than just a stream of messages” (10). It seems unclear whether or not this resentment is caused by a (mis)understanding of the defintion of community or is a more subtly elitist view of an evolving terrain.

This chapter provides a definition of online communities and criteria that alternate definitions should cover. The author provides a four part definition of online communities, which covers the roles, purpose, policy and systems of the community. Rheingold's viewpoint of: virtual communities as a place where people interact without physical bodies using textual communication, is presented as an alternate definition. The author has explained online communities from sociology, software, 3D world and business perspectives.

Of all the definitions I think Rheingold's definition is most pragmatic. The author's and ACM's definition have very little to differentiate online and other offline communities. I think the definition should also encompass the fact that the control and coordination handled partially by technology. The digital technologies have allowed us to delegate mundane tasks like delivering the message to the recipient, to machines.

As a scholar of political theory, the question of community is central to my work.

Community is undefinable, tied up as it is in inclusion and exclusion which is a dynamic mediated by members and non-members in an ongoing process of membering, dismembering, and re-membering. Community is amorphous, ambiguous, and elusive.

This should not be taken as throwing up one's hands in a gesture of futility, however. What it does do is shift the focus of the question from "what is the definition of online community?" to "what kinds of definitions do we create? and why?" and this, in turn, provokes us to be reflective of the inclusions and exclusions that we call into being when we make distinctions and attempt to draw boundaries. Why do we make this distinction over that one? Who benefits? Who loses? How does power affect the making of these distinctions?

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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser

This chapter first highlights two important concepts of online communities: sociability and usability. Then the author summarized five aspects of online communities: shared goal/interests, repeated participation, shared resources, information reciprocity/support and social conventions. In the end, comments from different perspectives, such as sociology, technology, virtual worlds, E-commerce and SIGs are discussed.

Among the five properties of online communities, I am particularly interested in the third and fourth ones: shared resource and reciprocity of information, which are closely related with the contribution of public goods and individuals’ reciprocity behaviors from the perspective of economics. In my opinion, it is much easier for online users to be free riders as it is more difficult to make online resource excludable, further, less social pressure or social comparison between online users compared to coworkers in local place make people more comfortable to be free riders. However, it is also much easier for online communities to implement better mechanism, such as better reputation system, virtual money award, and bring efficient incentives to users for the purpose of online contribution and reciprocity.

In addition, from my own observation, one online community with strong identification would make the reciprocity between members easier and more frequently.

The reading aims to define the term online communities also introduce and define two important concepts: sociability and usability which apparently are the major concepts in her book. The primary definition revolves around four basic pillars: people who form the community, a shared purpose, explicit and implicit policies and customs and Computer Systems.
Previous comments have summarized most of these so I’ll concentrate on some other interesting observations. The reading starts with some really interesting observations including the fact that communities are neither designed nor emerge organically. This leads to an obvious question. How does a designer design an online community or control how it evolves? The answer of course being that while they cannot design communities, what they can do is design mechanisms of interaction which determine how community members interact with each other. Since the patterns of interaction of community members shapes how the community evolves in the long term thus the design decisions on means of interactions to build into the online community will directly affect its long term evolution.
Another interesting observation in the paper is that “physical presence online is still seen as a problem for community”. Attempts to solve this problem occupy technologists and produce generations of ever more sophisticated avatars, video images, virtual environments, and ingenious graphical representations. This reminds me of a most interesting argument made for CSCW systems by Hollan and Stornetta where the primary focus for a large amount of research is the grand aim to replicate the experience of “being” there when there is a huge opportunity before them to provide an experience “beyond being there”. I think some of the most successful communities now and in the future will be those that use the affordances of the medium to provide an experience that may not replicate the experience of being there but provides features that provide more than what physical co-presence can provide.

The rest of the paper deals with the various working definitions of online communities with each discipline that uses the definition lending its own flavor to it. Personally I think the best way to define communities is not from the perspective of any field of study but rather in a way that the Powazek reading does – from the perspective of a single person and how it can make an experience richer.

I think one of the more interesting parts of this chapter (aside from the OCR hiccups) is the distinction between communities, groups and networks. The idea that communities are defined through the strength of the relationships of members makes communities more dynamic, and thus, harder to study. I think it's an important distinction to be made, and I point it out since the three terms really are often used synonymously.

In this article Preece tries to define what online communities are and then goes on to demonstrate why this definition is historically and currently so difficult to pin down. Preece begins by defining online communities according to a rigid definition. The definitions for communities are shown from a variety of other perspectives including, sociological, technological and virtual worlds and Ecommerce.

More than anything reviewing these other definitions served to show how the different interpretations of community are influenced by the needs of the group generating the definition. For instance, eCommerce sites have a very low bar for community and include any comments on a bulletin board to indicate community. This broad definition serves their interests by contributing to a sites ability to market itself, so the large the ‘community’ the more opportunities to advertise.

Preece begins the discussion on defining “online communities” by presenting two underlying concepts; sociability and usability. Sociability is simply “the collective purpose” of a given community, or in other words, what the community cares about, how individuals interact within the community, and etc. Usability on the other hand, is much more straightforward.  Preece then presents 4 defining criteria for “online communities”, 2 of which are similar to the core attributes identified by HCI professionals during a workshop at an ACM CHI Conference in ’96. Although I haven’t yet read the later chapters by Preece, I already find the 4 proposed high-level criteria to be extremely well-framed.

However, I did have one concern relating to Preece’s 2nd criteria, which states, “A shared purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or service that provides a reason for the community.” To me it seems that often times, “e-communities” form for specific purposes, but after the specific purpose is complete, the community continues on. When combined with Preece’s 1st criteria, this idea leads to other potentially interesting characteristics of online communities.

One example would be a forum set-up primarily to build hype and promote a product that is currently under development. One could imagine how after such a product is released, old forum users may leave because they have satisfied their “need” to belong to the hype, while new users may join to satisfy their “need” to obtain first hand accounts of the product’s current users (who are now satisfying a new “need” by lingering on the forums).  It is interesting to think about whether to credit the extended life of the online community to its evolving “shared purpose” or the fact that as long as people develop “needs”, "shared purposes" become identified. In that case, the remaining criteria for online communities would simply reflect such "needs".

Preece does a good job in this excerpt of explaining the complexities and intricacies of defining such an amorphous term as 'online communities'. I agree with her that the term is easy to understand (we all know an online community when we see one), though hard to define. Her working definition is broad and encompasses four facets, one of them importantly being the fact that the communication is mediated and supported by computer systems.

Preece goes on to contrast her definition with that of others in the same and different fields. For example the ACM group's definition included the criteria that members engage in repeated, active participation. In my opinion, this definition would exclude many of today's popular online communities where people might post once or get the information they need and never or seldom return. The sheer number of online communities makes it harder for each community to sustain this level of interaction - people only have so much time and attention.

One other last point - I found Preece's remark at the end of the first paragraph interesting - "In short, if you are not on the Internet, you don't exist." It would be interesting to study whether, and how much, people miss out by not participating in online communities. 

In addition to providing various useful definitions of Online Communities, the paper introduces an interesting concept of Socialbility.

I gather it is imperative for community designers to not only focus on individual human behaviour, but also to understand community participants' and owners' 'collective' purpose and consiosuness (goals, roles, limitations, etc). It is also important to consider the social and political environment the communities operate in.

It will be interesting to see how can different explict policies be manifested in the design (more specifically in the interaction design) of different communities having differing goals (such as providing a free public good, or a paid business or entertainment service.)

I agree with Preece's assertion that online communities are "slippery to define," despite their being fairly easy to understand. I asked a friend studying with me whether he considers the online chess site he frequents a "community."  Without so much as a millipause, he tersely said "no, not at all." When I inquired what would make it a community, he said "it's just not," suggesting that it was easy enough for him to determine what an online community wasn't for him personally, but a little tougher to elaborate on where his gut reaction came from. 

In general, I'm not a big fan of coming up with "working defintions" for concepts that span such broad turf.  They strike me as a cop out of sorts, occupying a neutral area that might be better described less definitively.  

Definitions aside, I appreciated the section of the introduction where Preece breaks down different perspectives on what constitutes online communities and the various lexicons they use to describe them, ranging from the mention of the "geek speak" of the technology perspective (p.10) to the E-commerce "stickiness" concept (which I find creepy).

 I do think this multitude of perspectives presents a major road block in any attempt to pin down the concept of online communities.  I resonate with Preece's argument that researchers studying online communities face a "real danger of wasting time reinventing the wheel (p.10)."

Having spent time in a lot of different departments at U of M, I've frequently noticed that even at a University in strong support of fostering inter-disciplinary connections, different fields research the same concepts sometimes redundantly.  I wonder the extent to which researchers from one community of scholarship are in pursuit of answers that have already been discovered in another field, in a slightly or even very different context.

Lisa McLaughlin

John Blair

Did anyone proof Preece's writing before publishing? - or was it a bad job of translation.  The article is filled with missing or wrong words, misspellings, etc.  My favorite is at the very end of the reading "keep one eye oil these core values while they strive to slap human needs with technology".

Foregoing that, this chapter is focused on an introduction of communities, in their varied contexts, and sets up many other topics for discussion in later chapters.  I espcially like his quote from Rhiengold ".... We do everything people do when
people get together, but we do it with words on computer screens".  I think this does the best job of summing up what an online community is.

I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the term "online community" and the way it is often used. Preece's definition is remarkably inclusive, and could be read to include nearly any community in which the members use computer systems to communicate at least occassionally. My personal preference would be to reserve the term online community for situations in which the computer systems provide the community's primary sense of place, and perhaps extend that to include place-less communities whose primary communication is online (for some more of my malformed thoughts on this topic, see this week's blog post).

Even these, though, are inseparable from off-line contexts (or other online-contexts). Miller and Slater, in their study of Internet use in Trinidad, write that the Internet experience is "continuous with and embedded in other social spaces" and that the Internet "cannot escape" everyday life. This statement lumps a lot of different experiences together (which I often object to), but I think it's a fair generalization of many online experiences.

I don't mean to be too critical. I think that as a definition the captures what Preece talks about in her book and what we'll talk about in this course, the four criteria work quite well. In terms of describing an actual category of experiences in a way that would have meaning to participants in those experiences, I am less convinced.

Like all these interesting discussions here have indicated that Community is difficult to define, the only thing we can do is to list all properties it has for providing the perspectives of analysis. These properties, are comprehensively describing the major shape of the so called community, but not necessarily exclusive to other concepts or entities.

There are going to be more than what we have mentioned during the in-class brainstorming. This chapter by Preece raises two ideas that I thought try to conceptually conclude the hyper-properties of properties. There are usability and sociability of community. In my sense, it is good to perceive the ideas using the metaphor of hardware versus software. For community, hardware is all resources we could exploit, such like a public place, an available application; the usability is just the efficiency measure of how those resources have been organized and extracted values. On the other hand, software is like all the process in which subtle value flows among the connections/interactions over these resources; this particularly leads to the sociability of the community, for examples, the growing friendliness, evolving culture, or common identity.

As the metaphor, hardware is largely shaping the way making up the sociability. For example, previous communities were largely constrained by geographic distance, and later on text-only bulletin board, people can only perceive one another through their pennames. Sociability is the ultimate evaluation on the configuration of all available resources, which is largely depending on the software design in a giving hardware constraint set.

It seems that the author is simply trying to define online community from a variety of perspectives while actually he is trying to compare and analyze the fast growing online communities from different aspects. For example, how it differs from traditional physical communities and how different scientists see it like from sociology and technology perspectives, things could be different in some ways.  I quite agree that actually today online community has already become a generic term to describe any collection of people who communicate online, regardless of the necessity, forms or purposes. It is very helpful to learn these different ideas in order to study online community more insightfully.  

This paper presents several definitions of online community, from different perspectives. A general definition is:

A online community consists of: people, a shared purpose, policies and computer systems.

In the class, we came up with several properties of the metaphor "community":

" People: who share something (purpose, interest, place, topology)
" To get sociability, support, info, belonging, identity
" Boundary/membership.
" Sustained (people who shared bus cannot be counted for community)
" Focal point
" Participation
" Shared meaning, shared understanding.
" Reciprocity (intent to give, receive)
" Social norms (accountability)
" Freedom to come & go.
" Non-authority based connection
" Incentives for participated belonging.
" Affective ties
" Accessible to members
" Rituals and traditions
" Artifacts