More than anything else, Powazek's chapter on closing a community was one of caution. Written in an extremely straightforward way, he first gives reasons to end a community: the site isn't meeting personal or community needs, no one is interested, money, or there's no need for it to exist anymore. He then offers pedestrian dos and don'ts to closing, including: do be honest, don't take it lightly, do provide warning, don't just shut off the servers, do enable alternatives, don't blame users, and do encourage closure (248). He finally gives a technical section on deciding whether or not to archive--and as always--says it's a personal choice that should be thought out first.

While all of that information was pretty predictable (I think any of us in this class could have come up with the same lists), he drove into design alternatives when he says, "the most important design consideration in this proces is the initial annoucement" (253). This struck me as very important, especially when compounded with the final interview section in which a community adminstrater commented on not only that people feel like they're a part of the community, but actually OWN it too. This lead me to a design claim of a kind of "false" or shadow power that you can give users so that giving users a sense of power in deciding the closing of a community may help it end successfully. While I'm not advocating lying, a clandestine poll or invitation of feedback, followed by a resolute statement of authority annoucning closure may make users feel that even though their site is closing, they did all they could do. 

This chapter discusses the reasons to close a site and how to deal with this process properly.
Several appropriate reasons list below
1. The site is not meeting your personal needs
2. The site is not meeting the community’s needs
3. You’re just not interested anymore and no one else is ,either
4. Money
5. No one says communities have to last forever
In the process of closure, we need to be sure about several things below
1. Do be honest
2. Don’t take it lightly
3. Do provide ample warning
4. Don’t just shut off the servers
In addition, whether we need to archive community content or not depends on the property of this site, for instance, whether it is based on chat /email or web discussions.
I think these guidelines are very clear, but I have problems to track down these principals. For instance, how do we know the time that a site doesn’t satisfy every user’s need any more?  Through a survey or other specific approach?

I don’t 100% agree with the natural life cycle of mailing lists. Steps 1-4 seem true enough, but discomfort with diversity puts too much blame on the individual.

As message quantity goes through the roof, information overload generated by the group may make it too costly to search for and discover valuable conversations. Like Wenger et al wrote, “When a community widens its boundaries, it risks diluting its focus.” (Ch 5 p 109) This could help some members realize their niche. Close relationships are less likely to develop when there’s so much noise. Person 1 can always create another mailing list to discuss his “pet topic”. And division can be the right solution when “members may develop such different interests over time that there is no longer enough commonality to hold the community together.” (Ch 5 p 109)

I guess you can’t make everyone happy, but when people voice their discontent, at least it shows they’re invested in the community.

You may have noticed that I replaced my 0 points thumbnail with a picture of my head photoshopped onto Professor Resnick's suit. That's because I have an important discussion to start, and "this is probably the most important post you'll ever make - it should look like it." (Powazek Ch11 - p13)

Reading this article made me realize that our course blog is shutting down in less than two short weeks. I've learned so much from everyone's posts over the semester and hope I was able to contribute something meaningful into the conversation.

I wonder if our community would continue even without a 6pm Sunday deadline. From all the messages on the si mailing list that discuss current events to the feedback we give each other about coursework, etc. - I think there's a need for an ongoing community platform that connects SI students.

But as far as 684 goes - do other people feel the same way I do? Would it be worthwhile to create a Yahoo group? Should we use other alternatives to keep our community going?

The author has explained how to graciously shutdown a community. Informing as early as possible the imminent death of the community is a take away message from this chapter.

Many communities cease to exist simply because no one participates - like the flash groups in Facebook, college friends networks. As the mean time between activities in the community increases, the chances of community shutting down increases. There is no authority shutting down the community. This would be an organic death, when the community ceases to meet its objectives.

On a different note, dataportability.org is a special interest group of Internet companies. As the name suggests, their objective is give users the capability to move and share their data across systems. Major Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Digg and Microsoft are members of this group. The project was started only in Nov'2007 and is very much in its infancy. If the objectives of this group is even partially realized, users might be able to export their data and continue the community or start a related community elsewhere.

On Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 8:39 AM Linden Labs(owners
of Second Life) sent a notification to its SL members letting them know
that they were closing down several of its highly trafficked forums. 
What attracted me to this story is the way that they went about
informing their members.  It was very much by the book (literally), it
was almost as if they took Powazek's 7 rules to closing down your
community (pp.248-9) and implemented it.  The results were of course
very positive from the community with most members agreeing that it was
time to move on and closing certain forums would in fact benefit the
community at large.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/10/forums-take-a-new-turn/

On another note and interestingly enough, Powazek (I believe he might still work for
Technorati), who also moonlights as an amateur photographer, started a magazine(jpg) and his own site

http://www.ephemera.org/

to showcase 1
photo per day and opened it up to the community to discuss.  He started
this site January 1st, 2004 and closed it 3 years later on the same day
by simply saying, "So I think this is the end of Ephemera. Thanks so much for coming
along for the ride. I'm still shooting, when there's time. You can find
me on Flickr and JPG if you'd like to see what I'm up to now.— Derek"

I would imagine that his community members knew it was coming given
the name of the site(ephemera), though I can't really see any proof of
this from his archives or that he provided his community with the
requisite 1 month advance notice of closure?? 

It seems that the site owner is the main person making decision, and there is little room for members to voice before the decision has been made. Although Powazek encourages site owner to create a forum where members can disclose their feelings about the site before it close, it’s more like a healing process. Even in end of the chapter, Grey said “don’t be afraid to put yourself first.” In addition to top-down decision making style, I wonder if there is any case showing that the decision of shutting down a site is made by members directly.

There has been some interesting discussion so far, for sure, but I thought I'd say something in a different direction.

I think that when a community reaches that shifting point, when they alternate between 4 and 5, there are more options than those listed for mailing lists; as Amy Jo Kim said in a chapter we read much earlier in the semester, it's important to give people a home, a place with common ground, a way to connect with people.  One of the problems with forums, often, is that they continue to grow and diversify and complicate over time.  You can keep splitting off new forums when you identify new needs, but the process can't go on indefinitely in an environment like forums where it's all simply serial.

What Kim suggested was to give people an opportunity to form groups.  So essentially, give people a way to form a topic-oriented community within your (potentially topic-oriented, though broader) community.  I think that this is a potential solution if you can find a way to support in in the design of the site.

To use an example, there was mention in the Powazek chapter about a community based around web design that, when it shut itself down, pointed to several communities that would hopefully fill the gaps left.  These included a place where people would discuss design and a place where people would share examples and critique each other's work.  If the site owner had been up to it, they could have instead created the support for these various functions to be served, essentially as separate subcommunities, within the single site.

So, my design claim is this: by creating subcommunities that fulfill a growing community's various diverse needs, you may be able to prevent growing out of control.

This comes with the acknowledgement that more "communities" equals more maintenance, but I feel that this sort of strategy could often be used to prevent a site from having to just plain shut down. 

As a few others have noted, I think there are some more nuanced alternatives to closing down when you realize your community is at an impasse of some kind.

I started a list serv a few years ago that was moderately successful with a lot of lurkers.  It started as a group of my friends that wanted to send each other "quotes of the day." Initially, there was a lot of enthusiasm and the membership grew very diverse.  Eventually, only two or three die-hard users posted quotes to the site...

The odd thing about it was that the lurkers were way more upset than I had imagined they would be when I "ended" the list.  It has now been years and since I knew some of the members off-line, I occassionally run into them. They are very nostalgic about the list serv and have asked that it be revived.

Although this group never went through the murky stages from the reading wherein people are ripping each other's posts apart and being hyper-critical, it did nonetheless suffer a death....I wonder now, however, it it would have made sense to keep the list in tact and revive if after a period of down time.....

If there aren't high costs associated with keeping the community in tact and dormant, i think that may be a useful alternative in some cases.   

Lisa McLaughlin

Summary of points from the reading:

Reasons to close a community:

n       Site is not meeting personal needs

n       Site is not meeting community’s needs

n       No one is interested in the community anymore

n       Lack of Money

n       The community just ends naturally

Things to pay attention to when close a community:

n       Be honest –tell the true reason of closure

n       Don’t take it lightly – show your sincerity

n       Provide ample warning – let members be noticed and prepared

n       Don’t just shut off the servers – consider members’ feeling

n       Enable alternatives

n       Don’t blame your users – never

n       Encourage closure – keep good memories

Whether to archive or not depends on the nature of the site, the reason and way of closure and the will of the community.

Most important design consideration at this phase is the initial announcement. Make sure the announcement is appropriately placed so that it is visible to all, also link the discussion at the bottom and keep the page up to date is important.

This doesn't specifically relate to the topic of closure, but it's from the Powazek reading so I don't feel too guilty bringing it up. Earlier this semester, the class seemed to be split over whether limiting the size of a community is a good or bad idea. For what it's worth, in the the interview with Noah Grey, Grey says that if he were to start another community he would institute a member cap in order to keep too many members from "competing" for each others' attention.

Grey also emphasizes the fact that even though a community may exist online, it is still composed of real, emotional people. This highlights the main idea of the chapter, which is to respect your community members through to the very end.

There's another plausible reason for shutting down a community that Powazek did not address - that of technical failure. This is what happened in the case of CouchSurfing, back in 2006, when they suffered from server failure that lost most of their community data. I'll discuss more of this in my blog post, but the basic story is that the site's founder felt the situation was hopeless - there was no choice but to end the community for good. But after posting a closing annoucement, he got so many responses urging him to keep the site going that he changed his mind and with the help of many volunteers, rebuilt the site from scratch. Now it is stronger than ever.

The sites's founder did many things in way Powazek advises: he was honest about what had happened, giving explicit details of why and how the site had failed. He did not take the situation lightl, showing how sad he was about the situation himself. And he provided alternatives, of ways that members could keep communicating without the site.

But the worst thing about this case was that there was no way to give ample warning, which from Powazek seems to be the most important piece. Additionally, this was not a time when anyone was considering shutting down the site if it had not been for the server failure - it had been going strong. This is why I think the site's founder made the right decision in keeping the site going - there was simply too much interest in keeping it going for him to ignore.

One of the past readings, by Powazek also I believe, talked about how adding barriers to entry, which in the most drastic case means starting the site over from scratch - can be extremely beneficial to a community. I think CouchSurfing is an example of this.

I am not sure about the actual meaning of a grace closing for a community. Some reasons for closing are predictable and acceptable like it has been going down and people keep leaving, so this is more like a dying by illness. Closing is just happening earlier or later. Some may be not, like short of financial support, or the company is closed something, more like being killed by some reasons out of the community. A grace announcement only serves for politeness. If the owner of the old community can provide some controllable alternatives, I don't think that is a real closure. If not, an announcement will be only an announcement.

One thing that struck me about this chapter is that the communities described are always in the form of one super-powerful community owner and the many community members. But this sort of arrangement doesn't really occur naturally in many real life communities. While communities have leaders, it seems as though they usually can't be closed by one omnipotent owner. Can you imagine a village shutting down because it isn't fulfilling the owner's needs?

It's probably because of the era that this book was written. Nowadays, with this web 2.0 stuff, you have communities of people, by the people and for the people. There still are definite community owners, but users have a much more powerful role as generators of content. I'd say that the guidelines in this chapter are still a good idea to follow, but they seem anachronistic in the context of the user-powered communities of today. There would be no good way to close Digg or Reddit, and I'm pretty sure those sites could never "die" because some community members would step in and provide replacements for them.

One thought that I had about closing communities was that in many cases the cost of closing may be incalculable. Imagine what the cost of closing World of Warcraft (WoW) would be. What does the makers of that game owe the users if the community were to fold? It would be difficult to calculate and they may legitimately not owe them a thing, but in a scenario like this it would feel unfair to end the community without acknowledging the investment that the users had made. But what is it worth?

I had a number of thoughts as I read Powazek's chapter on the death of communities. First, I wasn't sure what to make of his archival advice. His attitude seems to be: "It's up to you whether you archive the site or not", rather nonchalant. I would have preferred to see some stronger advice here. Perhaps it's the SI mentality showing up here, but it's a shame to consider a community where people have invested a great deal, sharing and creating and then just losing it all to a site owner who wants to scuttle the server. Preservation should be a very important consideration when considering shutting down a site. This leads to a second thought.

The current infrastructure of the web/internet seems to allow more graceful transitions when a community leader/site owner wants to shut down a site. For example, Derek Hansen (a recent SI PhD grad) and I run a community site for friends who lived by each other during graduate school. With Derek's new job as an assistant professor, he obviously has less time to devote to the site.

Rather than letting the site go stale, we transitioned it to Ning, a site that allows you to create your own social network. The site now runs itself. People can contribute and when new features are rolled out to Ning, our site gets them as well. We devote much less time to infrastructure and let Ning take care of some of the hard work of maintaining a community. People are able to keep in touch and share experiences with each other, even though we don't all live by each other any more.

Closing down the community is the biggest decision for the admin/owner. I agree that it should be communicated well to the members. As discussed in the text, communities close down for a reason. Not every member will agree that the time has come to pull the plug. But someone has to make the hard decision and stick by it.

Archiving could be a good option. Is there any service that "collects" data/content from all old communities? Members might find some solace in knowing the fact that their content is not lost forever. Also, it could be a valuable repository once it reaches the critical mass.