The seventh chapter of Kim's book focuses on events, and how they can be used to create habits and encourage loyalty in users so that they return to the site again and again (276). She highlights three types of events: (1) meetings with small groups participating, (2) performances which are larger presentations with performers/celebrities/etc., and (3) competition where users compete for prizes or glory (237). While in the eighth chapter, Kim focuses on rituals, which make people feel at home. A ritual is defined as “a stylized and meaningful sequence of actions that bind people more closely together” (278). Likewise, “any meaningful transition has the potential to be ritualized” (279).

Both chapters, focusing on events and rituals, outline how to personalize a user's experience in order to get him or her to not only return to the site, but to return to it as if it were a personally owned/designed site. Specifically, I enjoyed reading into the inherent conflict of hosting competitions or contests (chapter 7) where users return to "build character" within the site. This seems like a very interesting, yet somewhat dangerous idea, in that democratic spaces on these sites can suddenly take on a hierarchy that favors some to the detriment of others. Kim likewise hints at this in chapter 8 when she talks about certain holidays favoring others more (Christians, Americans, etc.) Obviously in a global market, American-based sites need to be cognizant of this, and I'm hoping to further discuss the business implications of designs like this where there can quickly become a ruling class of a free online community. I'm wondering if Amazon's use of collaborative filtering (283-284) is one solution where sites can update welcome messages/holiday greetings/recommendations automatically without necessarily alienating others.

Avoid Manufactured Rituals

I enjoyed these chapters from Kim, and not only because my selected community received a tip of the hat.  Kim presented a variety of methods through which community developers can initiate rituals, but in practice, these are not always well received.  For example, celebrating a founder's birthday or an artificial holiday may be seen for what they are:  contrived attempts at manufacturing a community.  Failures may be as trivial as wasting resources or more detrimental, if the community's branding is affected.  In my experience, those rituals that have been most successful, at least within virtual worlds, have been tied to rituals already familiar to the members, and this holds especially true for common holidays.  When encouraging rituals, it pays to select those that will support existing common ground.

Embrace Organic Rituals

Along the same lines of promoting common ground, supporting user contributions can be an important aspect of establishing rituals.  Kim suggets in chapter eight (pg 293) that user contributed content provides an opportunity to generate "free" content and to allow the users to feel appreciated by the staff.  I believe that there are two additional benefits.  First, user-generated content is "organic", unmanufactured, tailored to the audience.  This addresses the concern of common ground.  If the content comes from the community, it seems reasonable to assume that at least a subset of the community will relate to or value that contribution.  The second benefit of user-generated content is a strengthening of the contributing user's bond with the community.  Users who contribute content are investing time, energy, knowledge, etc, and as a result, they have a vested interest in the success of the community.  After all, they do not want their contributions to be for naught.  For these reasons, community-derived rituals have the potential to involve a larger portion of the community in a more meaningful way.

I'm getting a better feel for this book now, and enjoying it more, now that I can see how the casual style of talking through all these different aspects of online communities can help designers decide which ones to use in theirs.

It also helps me reflect on the communities I've participated in. Events seem unimportant or rare in most. Rituals, however, I've seen plenty of, including weddings in games, "secret" club hideouts (also in games), congratulations on various in-community achievements in a wide variety of communities, the use of the word "Mahalo" to great and thank in Mahalo, the mean rejection of any poor soul who posts as a n00b on a discussion board... I could go on.

Regarding rites of passage, I have never become much of a leader in an online community, but I know that at Mahalo they have tiers which include several kinds of "Guides" to "Mentors" to full time staff.

It will be interesting to think more about how these topics relate to the community I'm looking at now, but I'll save that for a blog post.

While Wenger et al. pointed out that interaction makes a community alive conceptually, Kim provided concrete examples to illustrate these points. Both events and rituals are ways to sustain a community. Various events, including meetings, performances and competitions help persons to build relationships with others. On the other hands, rituals make members feel like to belong. While some events may take place only once, ritual occurs repeatedly. Also, unlike events, rituals can be private.

I think many of these ideas have been adopted widely by existing online communities, especially rituals. For example, like personal acknowledgement, I will see “Welcome, XXX”, after I log in some websites. However, when all websites provide similar rituals, it might become a custom and users may take them for granted. So it would be important to differentiate the service by providing unique rituals to arouse arouse the sense of belonging. And user-generated content might be one of solutions.

Kim 7

Kim shows the relationship between events, habits, and loyalty. Events have a time, place, beginning, middle, and end. The reading is useful for helping realize why my own online communities are successful, so to respond to these I use examples from one: lego-builders.

Meetings
----- We have a lego chat room
----- We have offline clubs and local events, culminating in a national BrickFest
Performances
----- We don't have performances as such, but I have seen synchronous conferences like this.
Competitions
----- We have lego contests.
----- We then mimic the winners' techniques in other builds.

I'm not sure that performance has to be synchronous. Technically, every post is a performance.
----- We build and take pictures and share them (and techniques and knowledge)
----- We treat comments and responses as "applause"

Another community I am part of is for science fiction writers. Every year we engage in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Page 240 discusses events, coordinators, attendees, follow-up, and expectations, as well as three phases planning, facilitation, and follow-up.

My only caution is that all of this assumes that there are available resources (time, money, expertise) for the community to draw upon. Are poor communities doomed?

Kim 8

There is an important distinction between public and private rituals, as well as other suggestions throughout:

----- ritualize transitions
----- use collaborative filtering for recommendations.
----- commemorate special days
----- highlight/reward contributions
----- utilize retrospectives and recall
----- acknowledge achievements

Two caveats: 1) I'm not sure how all the personal interactions are "on topic" for the community and they could be construed as spam and be detrimental, and 2) acknowledging achievements publicly can lead to differences, distinctions, divisions, and degradation (these are words with a "D" this time).

When I suggested a lego-builders "Hall of Fame" my friend and lego-builder Jon Palmer wisely said to me: "Members of the community already know who the good builders are. We don't need to alienate everyone else."

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

Some takeaways from Kim Chapter 7:

1)  Online meetings have lower transportation costs than real-world meetings.

2) Online meetings may be more affordable than real-world meetings.

3) Online meetings can support rapid feedback and automatic documentation of asynchronous communication.

4) Contests are ways to encourage participation and give members group-wide recognition for their efforts.

5) Event planning, facilitation, and follow-up are critical phases in the execution of a valuable activity.  Organizers must consider needs, logistics, outreach, and opportunities for continued engagement after the event.

6) Not all online meetings, events, or competitions will have a value proposition for all members of a community.  Some may not meet entrance requirements, while others may be better served by different modes of communication.

Rituals provide people with a sense of belonging to a community.  They are meaningful because they mark transitions from one state to another and highlight values, goals, people, and/or narratives.  In an online setting, members should be welcomed to establish their inclusion and inform the community of a new arrival.  Members leaving should be also be acknowledged because it signifies people value their contribution to the ritual.  Community events are opportunities to acknowledge achievements by promoting people to "the next level".

Chapter 7 and 8 of the Kim reading discuss events and rituals, respectively. The author presents an extremely detailed discussion on the importance of catering to a community by catering to the users’ needs, retaining them through meaningful events and memorable rituals. In addition, the author illustrates several real-life cases of online communities, and their approach and success at holding chat-rooms, events, and giving users a sense of belonging. However, given the vast differences between the users, preferences, size, and content of present online communities, sometimes best practices are really only best practices. More specifically, Kim’s observations seem to be more applicable to all the “big-name” online communities. For instance, I know for a fact that users at one of the smaller online communities that I am familiar with, would not like if each time we logged in to the community, we were spammed with welcome messages or acknowledgements. In fact, the community has long stripped off all the frills that many other communities might find necessary. I like to think of this little community as the Southwest of online communities.

Similarly, Kim places a great deal of emphasis on the role and responsibility of the “leaders” in shaping events and rituals. While Kim ultimately recommends leaders to encourage participation and grass-root initiatives at the member-level, I think this point can not be stressed enough. In several communities, rituals and events are entirely managed and kicked-off by regular members. In some cases, as long as an idea is mainstream enough and applicable enough (or perhaps, in some cases non-mainstream and off-topic enough) to the community, it could be implemented. Along the same lines, Kim gives the example where an Ultima Online community staff constructed an in-game memorial for a deceased user. However, when the same thing happens in the World of Warcraft community, when a certain guild decided to honor their recently passed guild member, a rival guild shows up and raids the funeral (killing everyone's avatars), causing a reasonably large discussion over the internet. As controversial as this may sound, to the rival guild, this was most likely a ritualistic, eventful event that appealed to enough of its members. 

Kim Ch7 mainly talks about three types of events: meetings, performances and competitions. Most of the contents are quite straightforward if you have arranged some events. I'd like to excerpt some takeaway points here:

• Conversations feel interactive when you know the other person is aware of your presence and responding to you. If you want to create the same feeling in your events, acknoledge the presence of your audience and let them know that their comments and questions are being heard.
• The more developed someone's online persona becomes, the more invested that person becomes in maintaining his or her identity and staying involved in the community.

Kim Ch8 talks about rituals and their power "to reinforce group identity and strengthen the bonds between members". The major three categories of rituals are: personal acknowledgements, community holidays, and passages and transitions. The chapter also provides many small, practical tips to make a community more attractive. But the bottom line here is to create the sense of belonging.

The chapter on rituals reminded me of inward facing circles, a powerful framework for thinking about ritual from "Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge" by Michael Suk-Young Chwe.

Inward facing circles are, well, exactly what they sound like. Think of a fireside camp. Everyone sits around the fire, you can see what everyone is doing, everyone can see what you're doing. The situation creates common awareness.

In his book, Chwe talks about how the Superbowl is basically a huge inward facing circle. Everyone's going to watch the game. You know it, they know it. You're in the same space - even though you're in separate locations. Which is one reason that superbowl commercials are so sought after. Everyone's going to talk about those commercials the next day because they know that everyone else saw them. What better marketing can you ask for?

These two chapters used an easy tone to illustrate how a community lives organically by practising; which in fact involoves a lots of events and rituals going along. The articles were very understandable by using simple examples. And it could be a good design duide book for community practice.

A community is identified by who and what they act there. In addition, events and rituals actually constitute the major activities differenciating the community from others. Because, other activities, if not being ritualized in some way, would fade over time or can not distinguish from others. Like I said in another comment, a living system has a goal to continue; these events and rituals are the approaches to the goal of living.

The behind thing more than those tips of how to nurture the rituals, is that we should really appreciate the importance of having them; in fact, like many others have mentioned, online communities in preactice have changed the properties of the events and rituals. So we are not going to implement each of those tips, but we should intentionally nurture an environment for emerging new types of rituals. For example, on the Facebook, the free applications can be seen as a way to generate good/popular rituals.

Chapter 7 describes three categories of community events including meeting, performances and competitions. Further, chapter 8 introduces how rituals connect people closer in communities. I would like to reflect these ideas in online fans clubs which I have been involved in for last three years.

For an online fans club, the informal meetings within core participants, usually those forum administrators are through their discussion on a private section of that forum, which is only visible and accessible to forum administrators. Their discussion topic expands from whether they need to open a new subsection on that forum to who can be selected as another administrators serving for this forums.

The performances on these online fans club are usually videos of those idols(pop stars) including their MV, Movie Trailer and TV-show. Competitions are also very popular on these forums, for instance, they will select the best movie criticism, self-made poster and so on. All these activities promote the interaction between members on these online communities.

In the aspect of rituals, they have special post for introducing new members. Members who are very active here will create birthday post between each other for their birthday, which strength their relationship a lot.
The birthday of their idols and the anniversary of these forums are the biggest festivals for members. During these events, they will have special chat posters, performances and different kinds of competitions.

I'm a bit skeptical in the effectiveness of community "sponsored" events as described in the two Kim chapters. I think that meetings can be meaningful if derived from member patterns and activities.

For example, if it's observed that members tend to gather in the chat rooms on Friday afternoon, it might be nice to acknowledge that as a time for everyone to gather. But a community should say, "okay guys, we're gonna meet on Friday afternoons at 1pm and talk about our weekends!"

Competitions are actually pretty effective in building community, both in numbers and feeling of ownership. I think anyone who has won a prize online has definitely felt the urge to "repay" whoever gave them the prize by participating more often, even if this effect only lasts a certain amount of time. 

In the first chapter, Kim talks about importance of events. Admittedly, regular events play an integral part in the existence and development of a community. Kim focuses on the question of how to make those events successful, in which he then goes on in more details talked about the three phases in an event, planning, facilitation and follow up, as well as the detailed procedures in each of these phases. He also discussed about three specific types of events: (1) meetings with small groups participating, (2) performances which are larger presentations with performers, and (3) competition where users compete for prizes or glory which seems pretty intuitive nowadays.

Chapter eight talks about rituals, which are quite common in today’s world. He defined it as a stylized and meaningful sequence of actions that binds people more closely together. And he also pointed out following ideas, 1. Any meaningful transition has the potential to be ritualized. 2. Recommender systems can be useful, especially through collaborative filtering. 3. Remember special days. 4. Acknowledge and reward individual contributions.

I can see why Paul mentioned that some of the readings might seem dated though the concepts are still relevant. Kim wrote this book right before the bubble burst and the rise of web 2.0. But, certainly there is a place for online events and calendars, but I get the sense as I read Kim that for an online community successful, it needs to mirror a real-world (read: not online) community exactly. Obviously a "real-world" community wouldn't be much of a community if the participants never met or exchanged ideas. But in the online world, these meetings are generally asynchronous events, like posting and responding on a message board.

Many online communities do not have a need for regularly scheduled sessions. A community can exist without these special events. This is one the joys of online communities. I can respond or interact when it's convenient for me. The forum or message board keeps track of all the interactions and I won't miss it if I didn't avail myself for the 9 PM Meet and Greet on Infertility and Reproduction (from page 250) in order to exchange ideas. I can do this asynchronously on the message board.

However, there are situations where these virtual meetings could ostensibly create a stronger sense of community. I just feel that we need not force these "real-world" paradigms on the virtual world. Certainly, these real world paradigms helped guide how people formed communities during the nascent stages online interaction. The vocabulary has expanded now and I think people have a better sense of what the web can offer and not all online activities need to be modeled on real-world metaphors.

This reminds of something Michael Cohen taught in a class I took from him. I believe he got the idea from someone else but unfortunately, I can't remember who it was (perhaps Paul Hartzog remembers). He talked about SI and compared it to new pidgin languages that form at boundaries. These pidgin languages use very simple nouns and verbs to bridge the boundary languages. SI faculty come from many different backgrounds and have created a new pidgin language. Over time, these languages evolve into creole languages with richer syntax and more vocabulary. We are the ones learning the new creole language and will take it out into the marketplace and research space.

This is a long winded way of making the point that Kim's original comparison to real world constructs is a type of pidgin. We are now seeing new creole languages develop for online communities. The pidgin is a necessary step to achieve the creole.

In Ch7, the author has explained the types of events that can be held by an online community. The three types of events are meetings, performances, and competitions. I wonder if all sites will be able to implement all types of meetings. Many of the communities, that do not capture our attention, will require only a few occasional events. A community of volunteers for a non profit may not necessarily need acompetition to keep the community alive. But in general I agree that events are important to keep the community spirit alive. Events also will force users to invest time and effort to build their community profile. This will be a deterrent for them to switch to other communities. (I'm curious if this advantage will hold true if the movements like dataportability.org become standardized)

The next chapter is on the rituals and dances for online communities. Honestly I have found the welcome section of online forums amusing. As the author mentions, having the right welcome message is tricky. The welcome message has to convey a sense of hospitality while having some utility to the user. Having the recommendation page as the welcome page
seems to the right balance. I consider celebrating holidays as a type of event. What holiday can the slashdot community celebrate? Just because my real world friends meet Friday night does not mean that I should have a online party with all my Flickr buddies.

Back in ’98, I was working for a division of a
media company in NYC that produced LiveByRequest,  http://www.livebyrequest.com/ which is a cable broadcast of a
live concert utilizing its live audience as an interactive jukebox.  So, for example, the audience (members are
pre chosen) chooses what songs they want Tony Bennett to perform.  I keep thinking how this franchise could so
benefit from a community where they are taking advantage of a loyal fanbase,
creating habits that further reinforce fan loyalty and creating events not
unlike the interviews that Kim talks about on CNN, MTV.  And as for the Simuchat- wow, I just can’t
believe that 14 years later LivebyRequest still has not gotten their act
together and implemented these strategies. 
I should suggest they read Kim chapter 8.

Upon reading about leveraging the community database by
creating an evolving welcome for a specific community using collaborative
filtering (pp.283), whereby a site can recommend items a member might be
interested in based on what they had previously expressed interest in, I
immediately thought back to a company that I read about just a few months
ago.  I thought this company might also
revolutionize e-communities just as well.

The company is called Proclivity Systems and it can predict,
for its clients, when a customer will buy something and for how much.  Proclivity (or tendency) is a predictive
engine that analyzes data left behind from a customer’s interaction on a Web
site.  For businesses, this is the
equivalent to marketing on steroids and it clearly affects volume and sales as
is evidenced by the line of retail companies that are awaiting the benefits of
Proclivity Systems’ patent pending algorithm for prediction.

So, I wanted to post this to begin a dialogue on the
potential that something like this could have on e-communities.  Think about it, based on what your members
are discussing at any given moment this system could capture key phrases over
the span of X days or weeks, capture their information and you could then
tailor information to that group on that specific topic without them even
having to look further. Think of this as a highly evolved form of Collaborative
filtering.  Something like this need not
be just limited to conversation, it could perhaps also be tied to external
searching throughout the web.  So, your
members are signed on to your community but they decide to take a break and
cruise the web.  This tracks their
searches and tailors information to them. 
I believe this aspect is already happening to a certain extent on the
web though it is not at all refined. 
The above technology seems to have this process highly evolved.

Is it invasive?  It
can be.  But it need not be.  This could be utilized as a service
mechanism to tailor information to a customer. 
And I think when well thought out and presented it has hints of
e-altruism!

http://www.proclivitysystems.com/

Kim describes how events can help build stronger communities through the creation of habits and loyalties which keeps the members from returning. Kim mentions how events and rituals can provide the user with a sense of ownership and belonging to the site.  I agree that the notion of having events and rituals is important not only because it keeps users of the site returning repeatedly but also because it can connect the user to the site in a very unique way by creating a sense of shared purpose and  involving the users into a stronger connection because of common goal or activity. The effect it has on a person of course will depend on the person and the context of the meeting. For example a group of people meeting to chit chat each Friday might give users a sense of belonging to a regular group of friends but nothing deeper than that. On the other hand a group of hackers who only know of each other through the code each other has written trying to meet every Friday night to figure out the best way to expose a process illegally collecting private data in software released by a large corporation may have a different sense of belonging to their group. Thus the purpose of the event, it’s legitimacy and the importance of it in the people’s live can have a big influence in the loyalty the event can build. I can’t help but remember the movie “Dead Poet’s Society” and having studied in a boarding school almost all my life myself I can imagine how those covert meetings and the sense of belonging to that group would have affected each one of them so profoundly. So I’m pretty convinced of Kim’s arguments that regular meetings and events can build a much stronger sense of community in the members  in most cases than what would exist without them.

Before I got into SI, I frequented the site for the Community 

Information Corps student group.  It was my first experience of feeling like a voyeur on a site.  I was a logged-in guest, but my idea of what the community was was very different from my experience being an actual member now.  The CIC seminar plays a key role in strengthening the cohesion of the group, whose membership is extremely fluid, with students coming and going every two years. 

The CIC seminar itself is a ritual of sorts that helps to build a framework for the CIC.  As an outsider, all I could see was that the site was well organized and 

well maintained.  As a participant, I recognize that several rituals help to give off that impression even when its not exactly the case.  There are periods when CIC members don't blog often or at all, but we do try to maintain at least a running list of events that may be of interest to CI students and a feed to non-profit tech

job boards.  This has been a great way to maintain group cohesion, it is easy for new members to post events before they are ready to blog more formally on a topic.  It keeps the community site relevent.   

Lisa McLaughlin

Lot's of useful, practical advice in these chapters.  That said, I can't really think of any meaningful rituals that I've had in online communities because of the techniques discussed in the chapters.  But, I also haven't participated in many online communities.  Can other people share some experiences about these meaningful rituals?  (Well... I see Liz's post with lots of examples).  To the extent that I've participated in online communities, the meaning in the experience has been because others in the community had information that I wanted.  

The seasons and life transitions points are really important for marketing.  Retail advertising and promotion is completely organized around seasons and holidays.  Major life transitions such as marriage, moves, buying a home, birth of children are massive marketing opportunities that support entire industries, and web sites.  I thought that a few of the examples in the Kim chapters weren't the kinds of communities with members who had sustained interactions but were websites with content, with advertisers, and with some community features.  Motley Fool for example - fine, call it a hybrid.  But, then in these kinds of examples, I wonder if  the holiday/seasonality stuff isn't more for promoting commerce than nurturing the online community.  

Right now, I'm interested in simuchats and more specifically in ways to talk about, tag, share TV.  If anyone has any experience with this stuff, could we chat?  I'm doing a TV related project for a Ross school class.

I think Kim is right to include a discussion of rituals, including rites of passage, in her book. I also think she gives it a reasonble discussion for aspiring designers of online community spaces.  I also appreciate the emphasis on organic rituals, but I still felt the focus was a bit too much on how you, the aspiring community designer, can build in a mechanism for these rituals. I'm not entirely sure that this is always the right approach, and would have liked to see a bit more of an acknowledgement that community designers need not design specifically for all of these activities, and an increased awareness that the community you attract may exist across many spaces, and some of these activities may occur in spaces you don't design.

Meetups of community members, and the roles these meetups play, are one example that comes to mind. I did an undergraduate project on this topic, and found that a great deal of bonding that helps people feel a sense of belonging in their community happens in these physical spaces. In many cases, the only "design" that a community leader has had to do was let people advertise their meetup in a thread. In the words of a meetup participant for SomethingAwful. Describing one evening, after the non-regular attendees and many of the regulars had let the meetup:

the conversation took a turn, transitioning from "very general talk – mixed group talk – to, very, uh, very personal. And now the subjects were much more about their personal lives and going into things that were not to be shared with the rest of the group. This was when I was exposed to a lot of the dynamics of the group. Things opened up drastically at that point."

This sounds a lot like a right of passage to me -- being encouraged to stick around, to enter this more closely-knit group. 

I don't really fault Kim for not including a discussion of these undesigned spaces and activities -- the book, after all, is about designing online communities, so why talk about what can't be designed? -- but I think it's useful to consider in the context of our course. 

Some of the most dramatic shifts in a community i've seen have been from the initiative of the site leaders to create events for people.  In any online community, even dry and crusty communities of practice, there are people who "hang out", and the very powerful suggestion that something *should* be done can be powerful with enough idle brainpower.

The community I am studying, perlmonks.org, did this with a series of "quests" -- for a set period of time (30-60 days) certain menial tasks on the site were rewarded with extra "XP" from the administrators, and all entries into the quest were linked from the top of the front page.  The results were quite good, considering some of the tasks given out:

- writing tutorials for the tutorials section

- cleaning up previous conversations into concise question and answer formats

- elaborating and cleaning up the FAQ

- enhancing the core language documentation

- coming up with poll ideas

 Each one of these produced a great deal of material which might otherwise not have been generated, and both created a sense of accomplishment for the contributors and the moderators of the quest.  Best of all, it enhanced the space as a whole by incentivizing "unglamorous" tasks by publically rewarding them.

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oostendo@umich.edu

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John Blair

As with other chapters in Kim's book, these chapters continue down the path of being excellent foundational material for online comnunity development and considerations.  I like it that occasioinally there is also some mention as to how to accomplish the various tasks / objectives mentioned throughout the text.  For someone just beggining in this area, I think this would be an excellent reference.

I agreed with much of what Kim said in the chapter on Events - I can see how regular, recurring features in a community could keep people coming back and involved. Competitions too, if they make sense for the site, could be a good community builder.

Rituals, however? I'm not so sure about that. I agree with what others have said, that it seems she is trying to force the real-world idea of rituals onto virtual communities. And often the rituals she is describing don't sound like rituals at all. Things like "collaborative filtering", which is funny to hear described so long ago, are very commonplace now (think iGoogle personalized home pages, or Amazon's suggested items) but how many of us think of these as rituals? I think Kim has some good points - yes, it's good to celebrate major occasions in a community and to have some ritualistic behaviors specific to that community - but I think she reaches a bit too much in this chapter as to what rituals can be.