Submitted by LizBlankenship on Tue, 01/29/2008 - 16:59.
3
points
Kim made some interesting points about maintaining the intimacy in a growing community by having subgroups available for users. I have often wondered why more sites don't have group features. But it's not always a good idea to have groups, in fact, as we've seen with facebook, sometimes they just become almost meaningless labels. When you're in 100 groups, do you even remember which you're in? Do you use them to connect with people? Most likely not.
But regardless, so long as your site's groups have meaning to members, and there is some perceived value in them returning, they can be very effective in forming more relationships within your site. I liked the examples of clans in online gaming, having participated in a few myself in middle school. It is indeed like forming a family online.
I thought the failure of groups in the Facebook is not because having group feature is not a good idea, but because they did not have a clear purpose for having that feature. The designer made group feature there but the function seems to be merely either "joinging" or "leaving" a group; most of things a sucessful group needs to have mentioned in the chapter were actually missed in the Facebook (which can be really a counter example for this charpter: why group feature in facebook failed to make the community better)
In addition, I a bit suspect how much the Facebook serves for a traditionally meaningful "community," since the it seems to focus on individual social network maintaining rather than forstering communities. More seriously, there is basically no "good place" for either group activities or commmunity activities: people have difficultity to communite simultaneously which results in serious delay and no public space like a bulliton board, which fails to get the "repository" for community memory based on which new conversation can be built with commoness.
Submitted by LizBlankenship on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 00:29.
0
points
I do believe that the groups have essentially a bulletin board, their group wall, which is why they could be useful for making mini-communities, perhaps. But I think in the case of facebook, it's TOO easy to make a group. Hence all the silly groups about interests.
Facebook is obviously a big fish out there in the sea of ecommunities and social network sites. Of course it is for a reason, but I think we need to be careful when we're criticizing it not to generalize or err in unspecifics. I have many qualms with the site, but one of the features that brings me back so often is the groups feature, which seem to be under attack here as "failures" or in being "TOO easy to make a group" and having "all the silly groups about interests." The brief exchange here, I fear, is only focusing on the snarky, self-aware and sarcastic groups that come up with a witty (if not ironic) title but then do little else. We need to keep in mind that even though these groups are ubiquitous, they are only ONE type of group and so may be discarded only in recognitin of other, more practical groups.
In particular, I am part of several Facebook groups that I interact with weekly: I'm in a group tracing the geneology of my family name, an alumni group of student government from undergrad, and a class group where our discussions are extended beyond the classroom (I plan to study this one in particular later.) One of Kim's main points in this chapter is to allow groups to form naturally, so at least according to her, there is no such thing as making groups "too" easy to form." Likewise, the alternate groups I've listed here are hardly silly interests. We'll all admit those exist, but it's overlooking some really interesting (and productive) ones.
I plan to focus my blog this week on looking at my chosen community/group through the lens of Kim's nine key community design strategies provided on p. 314. I think it's a good idea for everyone, esepcially if trying to determine if a group (on Facebook or not) is well-designed and implemented.
I agree with Chris - while perhaps the majority of Facebook groups serve as little more than labels for an interest or funny statement, it is possible for vibrant, active participation to form around one. I've experienced a few instances of this myself - a group for sharing condolences and memories for a friend who lost a loved one, a political group on campus which used the group to create interest and organize events, and most recently, a group created by some relatives of mine to post pictures of the family, reconnect with one another, and plan an upcoming family reunion.
This family group is really interesting to me because now, through Facebook, I suddenly have dozens of older aunts, uncles, cousins, and even my Dad (!) joining Facebook and communicating in a way not possible before. As one cousin put it, "I have had more contact this week with Harmelink relatives then in the past several years! It is kind of fun." And, now that a critical mass of my relatives has joined, more keep joining each week - it's fun to watch the group evolve.
I think what this example shows is that while Facebook makes the tools available for groups to be successful (discussion boards, wall messages, posting pictures to a group), it's really up to the group's members whether the group stays active or not. In this case, the fact that it is a small, active group where all the members know each other is what has made it successful.
Submitted by Tracy Liu on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 21:09.
0
points
It is very interesting to read your discussion about
facebook which is very popular among students.
I do think it is a successful community as it indeed
connects people with each other and spans the area/way for people to interact
with each other
, however, I suspect
that people who you are mostly interacting with on facebook are also your
friends/classmates offline, well, at least for me it is true, in that case,
facebook is not a good tool to expand your social network or helpful for
constructing new groups, but it provides new way to enhance previous groups/
relationships.
I totally agree with Liz that the (sub)groups in facebook are not working well at all. I was thinking the same thing while reading Kim. There might be some groups that work (as Chris Gerben stated) but most of them don't really support facebook as a community. I think you can also wittness that in other big online communities.
But what is the reason?
too easy? I don't think FB groups are too easy to create. That might be a reason for many of the useless groups, but making it harder would not help FB, since it would also get harder to create useful groups.
I think part of the reason is that the group feature is not very well integrated into FB. For example you do not get newsfeed information about activity in your groups. Then there could be much more powerfull tools for group leaders to maintain their groups (maybe somthing like newsletters). A third thing would be to have a better visualization of the group could be better. Maybe some statistics about who is in the group. The last thing that I could think of would be to have somthing that the group collaboratively work on (like a group profile).
I would be really interested what other people think about the group feature in FB?
Submitted by Rozaidi Rashid on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 22:41.
1
point
Responding to the point of "groups must have meaning", based on the Kim reading, my chosen community of my high-school alumni has seen growth from a handful to over a hundred members. Newcomers to the group received encouraging welcome, and the older members remained active. Of course, the group was not really made up of unknowns - we knew each other, although some not as close as others. But online, there seems to be a healthy interaction among all members.
The group has also seen further evolution as suggested by Kim in terms of creation of subgroups--based on common interests (motorbikers, scubadivers, etc), and geography.
I think eGroups (what we started on, now Yahoo Groups) has provided the necessary tools for the community to survive and grow. Admittedly we started on just using the forum (even now it is the dominant use), but other features were also used. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be spin-outs of subgroups--probably because of our common base (being classmates). It is interesting because there are no barriers of entry as mentioned by Kim such as "building identity, giving leadership tools, and containing havoc", and there is no virtual hangout places, yet the community remained together. How is this possible? THe answer maybe lies in the relationship that is not just virtual but physical.
So, can I say that for a community to be strong together, it cannot just be virtual? Based on my network of central bank webmasters, this seems to also be true. THe physical meetings created the glue.
Community needs to be organized into sub-communities, when the size is unmanageable. This is the main design objective of this chapter. Sub-communities will help achieve many community goals like providing a sense of belonging, socializing, maintaining order.
Creating a space for sub-communities to thrive is an important and specific design alternative. Most of the communities we are studying must be having this feature (unless it is a small community). But other design alternatives like communication specific to the sub-community are not common in all the sites.
The next design alternative I identified was branding the sub-communities. Users should be able to wear their sub-communities in their sleeves and flash it to everyone in the site. I'm including features like ability to search for groups and search within groups under this design objective. The site also should promote the sub-communities, by ranking sub-communities based on popularity, interestingness, etc. This will increase the credibility and cohesiveness of the sub-community.
If the larger community is a for-profit site, then the members should be allowed to exist with the same objective. This will earn the loyalty of people who will benefit from the community.
I was impressed by the ancientsites.com community. The author has used it frequently to support her claims. I haven't visited the site yet; but as described in the chapter the site owners seem be to hands on with the community. Reviewing the community applications and identifying the dead communities, this ensures that the dead leaves are removed and the greenery is maintained in the ecosystem. I think the site owners are important to be the guardians of the border, while the members should be able to play to their will inside the ground.
Submitted by John Blair on Tue, 01/29/2008 - 22:03.
0
points
John Blair
Another fine foundational chapter from Kim, though I would think that much of what this particular chapter has is basic human behavior. The reading does a good job of addressing the proclaimed design claims, alternatives and goals, though obviously not from an overly technical perspective. The material presented addressed these design topics through dedication to the communities basic values and purpose. If the activity (design, use, growth, etc.) of the community maintains it's values and purpose (focus), there are ways to address the challenges / issues facing the community as a whole through providing new functionality (chat areas, member directories), acknowledging groups & their leaders, enforcing community policy, etc. whatever fits the purpose of the community.
This chapter is talking about the importance of maintaining a leveled structure of community which is composed by sub-communities. To the simplest idea, community, sub-community, or sub-sub-community are all sub-communities of the whole community of our society. Thus when the author talking about how to develop and maintain a sub-community, we can see there are too much similarity with what we talked about to make a community itself. Goals, events and rituals, leadership, and everything else were as the same as required in a community.
I very much like Mouly's idea on branding sub-community and I think it is an efficient way to enhance the identity among group members as well as between with non-group members. However, I proposed one possibility here that whether we could also have some sub-community invisible but crutial for the community as a whole. My point is whether we need to identify and forster explicit sub-community for all cases. For the case of a bulliton borad which I am looking at, it has a very large population and 300 topic based divisions. Usually a person is interested in several topics and hang around there. Those topic divisions are natural sub-communities, where the frequent users often know each other and share many things together. However, I would doubt if we stress this feature of intensive participation in particular divisisons and identify people's belongingness of these divisions, that would hinder people to go freely explore any division until they are evolved in the division. So guess in this case, people really enjoy the freedom to explore whatever division they like although most of time they are just stay in some of them. My point is some time we may also need loose structure of communities.
To make the environment of a community comfortable enough to attact more members is also a difficult task. No one would ever doubt that if a community could successfully continue the small town intimacy and sense of belonging, it would be very powerful in maintaining its members as well as getting new members. Web community brings people together who have something in common, but simply by joining a community does not necessarily mean enough sense of identity. Kim pointed out several points that are essential in building up a group friendly community. First, serve a clear purpose. There must be ways for group leaders to articulate and express the purpose. 2. groups need places to congregateand communicate, such as mailing list, message boards and chat rooms etc. 3. groups affiliation should be part of member profiles. 4. group should accomodate and support a range of roles. It is helpful to identify how long someone has been a member, along with any important roles that person plays in the group. 5.Strong leadership is important. 6. Groups should develop their own etiquette, which could include membership requirements, code of conduct and privacy policies etc. 7. groups should hold cyclic events, and this may be fostered by offering members calendar of events, public venue and etc. 8. groups are strengthened by rituals of community life. 9. with the development of a community, internal subgroups could play an important role. Kim has also pointed for a successful subgroup program, there are a bunch of things to consider, such as timing, structure and etc. As a user, I have joined quite some communities in the past. Personally, the feeling of intimacy and sense of belonging does vary from one to another. Now it makes me think more from the perspective of a site administrator what causes the difference and I think Kim's article provides a thorough and clear argument about it.
The main design goal of this chapter is to establish an intimate community, while members of the community keeps growing. Kim provides two design alternatives. One is to build top-down sub-groups, which are set up by staff, and the other is to establish bottom-up sub-groups, which are created by members.
For the member-run groups, site owner/ administrators can set the stage to foster these sub-groups, such that provide places/events for them to gather and leadership opportunities. On the other hand, for the official program, it can be leveraged from existing platform, and managed by polices created by site owner/ administrators. Also, Kim mentions different design alternatives to achieve design goals of building different sub-groups.
One point I noticed is that timing is important for setting up sub-groups, since in the early stage, the main goal is to have members to identify the community itself rather than exploring other new areas. It also fits Wenger et al’s idea that the new-comers problems may be more prominent in a more matured community. I like this reading, since it complements other readings. Compared with other assigned readings, Kim provides more concrete and relevant examples of maintaining a growing community in terms of online communities.
Submitted by Daniel Zhou on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 18:51.
1
point
Kim Ch9 mainly talks about subgroups within communities. The topics include: why subgroups are important, how to nurish and support subgroups as community coordinator, how to prevent subgroups from leaving, whether to prune dormant subgroups, how to advertise subgroups, and so on.
I thought it was nice to see Kim touch on the costs of subgroups. Most of the emphasis was on reasons for and ways to support subgroups in large communities. On the surface, best practices for subgroups like clarifying purpose, communicating roles, and setting etiquette may nurture relationships between old-timers. However, focusing life too far away from the main stage may make the main community seem less vibrant and less attractive for recruiting newcomers.
Kim's suggested solution was to give incentives for people in subgroups to maintain a public presence. She didn't go much further, but I have some thoughts on to encourage interaction with noobs and bring subgroup activity to the forefront:
1) Show Activity: Linking to most active discussions, members, pages, etc. on a highly visible point of entry (like a front page) may create a view into important community values and interests. Benefits include a fast point of access to "what's hot right now" and should appeal to both oldtimers and newcomers as a sign of energy within. One cost is that popular items may sometimes go against brand or purpose.
2) Spotlight Contributions: Kim suggests that community designers "highlight behaviors that add value to the community" (p34). By emphasizing contributions that are in line with the purpose of a community, all members can be reminded of the group's focus. Further, showing members appreciation encourages increased loyalty.
3) Rewards: To encourage relationships between old-timers and newcomers, a community designer could formalize an incentive structure. For example, if a community awards points for participation, maybe a member could boost their score by welcoming a newcomer.
Submitted by Matt Adamo on Thu, 01/31/2008 - 14:07.
1
point
In addition to shifting the focus away from the main stage, Kim also points out that subgroups
can migrate away from the larger community. This could be costly if a subgroup contains key community leaders or a significant amount of members. She offers 3 suggestions to prevent migration, but they aren't as clearly defined as many of her other design ideas. One idea is to "build group identity into your system," which I interpreted as finding ways to tether subgroups to your community. The other ideas have to do with subgroup leadership - empowering/rewarding good leaders and eliminating the bad ones.
Designs based on these ideas might be effective, but only to a certain extent. As Kim concedes, it's natural for subgroups to evolve and if one is intent on leaving, there really isn't much you can do.
In this chapter, Kim discusses subgroups, clans, and groups within online communities. The primary purpose of having these smaller "groups" within an online community is basically to cater to the needs of users. Kim describes this need such that "newcomers feel welcome and old-timers feel comfortable and appreciated."
Kim continues to make the claim that smaller groups within communities form because people with similar interests will ultimately gather together. The assumption is that the community is designed in a way that makes forming small groups possible.
Kim explains that groups are basically like any other communities, presenting nine community design strategies. These nine strategies basically list out some of the important success factors of groups and communities.
1. Groups should serve a clear purpose
2. Groups need their own "space" (gathering place)
3. Group affiliation should be clear from a member's profile
4. Groups should accommodate and support different users
5. Leadership within groups is important
6. Groups have their own culture, etiquette, and traditions
7. Cyclic (regular) events help groups grow
8. Rituals help groups grow
9. Groups need to support sub-groups
While these nine design strategies are reasonable and can probably be observed from most online communities, I definitely felt a sense of redundancy. It feels like Kim has already covered these issues while discussing how successful online communities must cater to the needs of its target users.
I think it's interesting how the examples in the Kim reading that reference Ultima Online can be directly transferred to how World of Warcraft handles subcommunities. Both have guilds, ways to identify with guilds, and a lot of common themes.
Also, I think it's interesting that the subgroups can be used to partially protect the old timers from the noobs, and vice versa. While you don't want noobs and old timers completely avoiding each other, it can be nice for the old timers to have their own space away from all the noise.
Kim makes the design claim that providing groups with the means to express and carry out a clear purpose will help the groups be successful. I basically agree with this design claim. I'm a big fan of mission statements and shared meaning. However, I think it's important to pay attention to context in this one.
In a community that fosters emergent groups, I think some of the most robust groups would have a difficult time agreeing on a single mission statement. An offline example for me is a book group I belong to. I go to the book group because I love literary discussion. Others belong to the group because it's one of the only times in their day that can talk to people other than their pre-school aged children. And others belong because it motivates them to read. The group has several different purposes - to try to articulate and live by one purpose would necessarily exclude some people.
So I would add to Kim's claim than providing groups with means to express and carry out a clear purpose will help groups be successful when those groups are focused primarily on production (creating something or achieving some action). Thus, it would include Q&A forums, but probably exclude online Scrabble tables.
Submitted by Sean Munson on Sun, 02/03/2008 - 23:42.
0
points
Erin, I think you raise an important point here. I had the opportunity to go through a strategic planning process at my undergraduate institution. At some point in the process, the consultant hired to help the school through the process made the comment that creating a meaningful mission statement and strategic plan will tend to make a few people leave and others choose not to join.
I think this is good advice for those seeking to create goal-oriented organizations, and like you, I think that giving these groups a way to carry out a clear purpose is important for their success. I also think that many other groups -- including your book group and the Scrabble sites --
benefit from a clear identity and purpose that could be described in mission-statement-like way. That doesn't preclude people from having some very individual needs met by their participation.
Imagine if someone disruptive came into your reading group -- so disruptive that you felt that you needed to ask them to leave or modify their behavior. How would you explain it to them? I suspect that a description of the group's identity would be part of your explanation.
Subgroups are pitched as a solution to oversized communities in this chapter from Kim. It seems to me that the uses of subgroups (focused purpose, "third place", stronger identity within the community, etc) should all be afforded by the larger community to begin with. That is to say, subgroups appear to be a solution to the failure of a community, whether that failure is establishing cohesive group identity, defining the community's raison d'etre, etc. Subgroups, or subcommunities, are what results when the larger community is no longer satisfactorily meeting the needs of its members.
I'd also like to briefly protest Kim's classication of Yahoo Groups, Geocities, etc as 'communities'. These types of sites provide tools for creating your own communities, but I think it is a far stretch of the imagination to consider any of them communities in and of themselves. I think the true test would be to determine whether any of the users identify themselves as being a part of the site (Geocities, Tripod, Lycos Clubs, etc) over being a webmaster or simply the leader of their own community, neither of which identifies strongly with the company providing the tools. I don't think a significant allegiance to Geocities could be found among its users.
I agree with Dustin about being skeptical of Yahoo Groups or Geocities as good examples of communities. I'm aware that there are some active groups within Yahoo Groups, but on the whole what I've experienced are a lot of groups that have been created around a topic, and then quickly abandoned. As Kim said, it's a choice for the community builders whether they want the site to be a "manicured garden" or a "wild swamp", and in Yahoo's case, they choose the latter, by making it easy to create and join groups. This makes group proliferation 'cheap, fast, and out of contol'. I think this ends up hurting Yahoo Groups more than help it - if users start to get the impression that groups on Yahoo are often dormant or unfocused, why keep returning?
On another note, I was an avid Geocities user back in the mid to late 1990's, creating many sites and attempting to create communities for bands I liked. But I actually never got it until I read this article that the 'neighborhood' you chose your site to be in was supposed to match the sites' topic. I always just chose the neighborhood that I liked the name of best (usually Sunset Beach, which was actually meant for travel sites). I think Geocities finally realized that users weren't using this feature as intended, and eventually phased out the neighborhood URL idea around 2000. Just an interesting case of where the community builders did not communicate their concept well with users.
How groups form online is a very interesting topic to me. Kim’s general perspective is that in any community groups will emerge and they can be beneficial, so they should be supported. Overall I agree. But there are a number of popular ‘social’ websites that don’t seem to have formal groups at all. Unless I’m overlooking them it doesn’t seem that Digg has any group functionality.
I use Digg somewhat regularly and I have puzzled over the lack of groups. Mixx is basically a clone of Digg and it allows the formation of groups. Looking at Mixx gives some clues as to why groups may not be a useful way to organize activity for this type of site. Of the first 10 groups listed on Mixx, 4 have no postings at all. This suggests that the type of interaction that these sites promote has little benefit from groups. I’m curious as to why this is occurring, especially since I’m working on a site right now that is similar to Digg but relies entirely on groups. The site I’m developing also allows users to post questions and their own blog posts as well as links, but I wonder if this is enough to promote use.
Most of the sites that Kim mentioned in this article had a larger component of user-generated content than Digg or Mixx. I guess I’m curious if the amount of content that you can contribute is a factor in how users perceive the benefits of groups? Or does the amount that you contribute eventually necessitate forming groups to help manage and steward the content? In any case I think that Digg is an interesting exception to this rule.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Submitted by Paul Resnick on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 20:31.
0
points
Seems we would like to get to a characterization of the types of communities where subgroups are helpful in achieving the goal of maintaining intimacy and group identity.
Your suggestion seems plausible that the key context factor is the amount of user-contributed content. When there's a lot, subgroups are needed to keep people interacting with a small set of others to maintain intimacy. Conversely, when there's not a lot, there may not be a need to create subgroups.
On the other hand, this many not be the whole story. It seems to me that if there's a fragmentation of interests, you might need subgroups even if there isn't that much user-contributed content.
I had trouble resonating with the Kim reading this week....
Herein Kim supports the claim that community health = small, close knit groups.
"Cities spawn neighborhoods, boarding schools form houses, universities include colleges and dorms, and companies create divisions and project teams."
I have participated in many of the above environments and cannot honestly say that I witnessed community extant in any of them.
(pg 314 has a useful list of things to consider)
"Often their members form such strong internal bonds and tight friendships that, regardless of how carefully you manage your program, they’ll become more loyal to the group and the group leader than to your community."
Sentences like this provoke (in me) the notion that if the subcommunity elicits more loyalty than the greater community, then the greater community probably isn't worth being loyal to anyway. At the very least, we should be conscious about how the motives of large "communities" and small communities are not necessarily congruent and are capable of being in radical conflict.
We are advised to "Cultivate Emerging Subgroups" but not too successful ones. Kim seems to get a lot of mileage out of suggesting that we do X and then immediately following it up with a caveat or point of wary caution.
The more I think about the Kim, the more I realize that it is tied to a notion of community that I find deeply questionable, i.e. a community in which control is explicit -- via the server, the ISPs, the administrators, etc. More and more, I doubt that such human groups can be called communities.
Finally, "Send Staff Members to Special Events" made me realize that all of the successful, i.e. emotionally valuable, online communities that I have participated in, do not have budgets, owners, or staff members. They are volunteer-run, self-selected, communities of people who have created their own umbrella and NOT opted to stand under someone else's umbrella which has been put out for them with an ulterior motive.
-------------------------------------------------------- PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
Paul,I found myself agreeing with your point that Kim seems to state: "you should do this to foster community/subgroups", but immediately after says: "but, be careful, here are some problems you might encounter!" At first I found it rather annoying, but the more I read, the more I felt that she was just trying to point out different cases where community might mean different things to different people and designers/creators need to be aware of the type of community they are trying to foster.I do disagree with one of your points, though. I don't think Kim is trying advocate a specific, centralized community (I know your strong feelings about this ;-) ). Rather, she seems to be saying: sometimes the subgroup creation needs to come from the top, but often your users will surprise you. She mentions many cases where the community rallies behind the actions of certain members, e.g. the charity tournament within Heat (p 345). Even one of the sidebars mentions this - top-down groups vs. bottom-up groups (p. 316).
I was also left feeling a bit put-off by this particular Kim Chapter. I think my struggle with her ideas began in the section on Top Down vs. Bottom Up communities wherein she describes strategies for manipulating people to stay in your community and not migrate to others....
Migration is inevitable, and probably healthy. Her approach here reminded me a lot of the literature I read in fundraising courses on how to rope in your funders through things like putting ever-so-obvious manipulative things like a dime peeking through the view envelope that reads "for the cost of this dime a month, we could do X with your money"
I think the question of suggestively selling your e-community should be considered carefully. People do not like to be backed into corners, no matter how nice those corners may be...
I did get a kick out of the concept of tribal badges which she discussed in UO communities....
Clubs, subgroups, general groups,top down groups, bottom up groups,"the Guardians",Virtual neighbors,the neighborhood,Kazola's tavern,private gathering places,creating fertile environments and
TERRORISM. E-terrorism. griefer attacks. sociopaths of virtual worlds.
Believe it or not, there is already terrorism taking place within communities and virtual worlds. I wonder what research paper Kim will be writing about to counter this phenomenom?
Submitted by Satyendra on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 01:44.
2
points
The Kim reading lays out a framework of nine key design strategies for communities which can help build more successful communities. At first glance the strategies seemed to be quite obvious
and general. However, reading through the comments I went through them again and I realized that while they seemed general and obvious it was very easy while designig communities to be
loose focus of these aspects and end up making decisions which may prove to be not so valuable in the long run. This is quite true of the community I am looking at. The community I am looking
at is one of India's largest and most vibrant communities and serves a *very useful and specific* purpose. There are similar groups that aim to serve a similar purpose that exist on social networks like facebook and orkut however they are far from being even close to the PagalGuy community. If we look at Kim's guidelines we can see why this would be so.
I've discussed these differences in more detail in my blog post but in general the PagalGuy community was built specifically for a purpose and provided a useful utility by letting people achieve a goal that
was not possbile otherwise. The communities on orkut and facebook on the other hand are there because the platforms allow them to make communities and people who are just browsing across communities
come across them and if they are interested join them because they are interested. However, the incentives to participate for each person in this case are pretty low as compared to incentives on the dedicated site where people come only because they realize that that community provides them important benefits. Further on Orkut and Facebook your there is no "tribal badge" which you receive because of your participation
to that specific sub-group. You reputation if and when it is visible to others is generally built on our paticipation on the orkut or facebook platform in general and not that specific sub community. Thus it doesn't hold
any shared special meaning for that subgroup whereas in the group dedicated to that one activity, all your reputation in the community is built on your participation, your expertise and your knowledge around that one focal activity and hence it builds a stronger sense of community. Further, development of specific etiquettes that are particularly meaningul for the members of the community is easier in dedicated communities. For example PagalGuy members are called puys. It is very hard to maintain several such specific etiquettes for various subcommunities on a general site like facebook or orkut. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that
both on Orkut and Facebook there were PagalGuy communities - which could be in a loose sense the kind of people we could call brokers who carry part of their culture from one domain to another. This illustrates
how strong a sense of belonging to a community can be if the community has a specific, focussed purpose
Subgroup-specific spaces are another element I think could be translated into a design claim -- if you want to allow users to form subgroups (in order to foster mutual feedback and participation), one thing you can do is give subgroups their own communication channels and virtual spaces.
I have seen this in action on Everything2.com -- where "usergroup" nodes which originally were for administrators and editors eventually proliferated into geographical groups (ie Boston Noders, No-cal Noders), religious persuasions, and lifestyle groups (moms and the gay/bi group "outies").
Each usergroup had a few essential features -- a badge on each users homepage, a weblog which any group member could post to, and a chat channel for discussion. It wasn't long before the chat channels for subgroups far outstripped chats between individual users or general site chat on the site.
Giving subgroups space I think is an important way to foster subgroups, and it's nice if it can happen in-platform, but don't underestimate the use of external tools like meetup and google/yahoo groups.
maintaining intimacy through subgroups - not always an easy task
Kim made some interesting points about maintaining the intimacy in a growing community by having subgroups available for users. I have often wondered why more sites don't have group features. But it's not always a good idea to have groups, in fact, as we've seen with facebook, sometimes they just become almost meaningless labels. When you're in 100 groups, do you even remember which you're in? Do you use them to connect with people? Most likely not.
But regardless, so long as your site's groups have meaning to members, and there is some perceived value in them returning, they can be very effective in forming more relationships within your site. I liked the examples of clans in online gaming, having participated in a few myself in middle school. It is indeed like forming a family online.
I agress: maintaining groups is not easy:)
I thought the failure of groups in the Facebook is not because having group feature is not a good idea, but because they did not have a clear purpose for having that feature. The designer made group feature there but the function seems to be merely either "joinging" or "leaving" a group; most of things a sucessful group needs to have mentioned in the chapter were actually missed in the Facebook (which can be really a counter example for this charpter: why group feature in facebook failed to make the community better)
In addition, I a bit suspect how much the Facebook serves for a traditionally meaningful "community," since the it seems to focus on individual social network maintaining rather than forstering communities. More seriously, there is basically no "good place" for either group activities or commmunity activities: people have difficultity to communite simultaneously which results in serious delay and no public space like a bulliton board, which fails to get the "repository" for community memory based on which new conversation can be built with commoness.
more on fb
I do believe that the groups have essentially a bulletin board, their group wall, which is why they could be useful for making mini-communities, perhaps. But I think in the case of facebook, it's TOO easy to make a group. Hence all the silly groups about interests.
Let's not generalize Facebook just yet
Facebook is obviously a big fish out there in the sea of ecommunities and social network sites. Of course it is for a reason, but I think we need to be careful when we're criticizing it not to generalize or err in unspecifics. I have many qualms with the site, but one of the features that brings me back so often is the groups feature, which seem to be under attack here as "failures" or in being "TOO easy to make a group" and having "all the silly groups about interests." The brief exchange here, I fear, is only focusing on the snarky, self-aware and sarcastic groups that come up with a witty (if not ironic) title but then do little else. We need to keep in mind that even though these groups are ubiquitous, they are only ONE type of group and so may be discarded only in recognitin of other, more practical groups.
In particular, I am part of several Facebook groups that I interact with weekly: I'm in a group tracing the geneology of my family name, an alumni group of student government from undergrad, and a class group where our discussions are extended beyond the classroom (I plan to study this one in particular later.) One of Kim's main points in this chapter is to allow groups to form naturally, so at least according to her, there is no such thing as making groups "too" easy to form." Likewise, the alternate groups I've listed here are hardly silly interests. We'll all admit those exist, but it's overlooking some really interesting (and productive) ones.
I plan to focus my blog this week on looking at my chosen community/group through the lens of Kim's nine key community design strategies provided on p. 314. I think it's a good idea for everyone, esepcially if trying to determine if a group (on Facebook or not) is well-designed and implemented.
Some Facebook groups do matter
I agree with Chris - while perhaps the majority of Facebook groups serve as little more than labels for an interest or funny statement, it is possible for vibrant, active participation to form around one. I've experienced a few instances of this myself - a group for sharing condolences and memories for a friend who lost a loved one, a political group on campus which used the group to create interest and organize events, and most recently, a group created by some relatives of mine to post pictures of the family, reconnect with one another, and plan an upcoming family reunion.
This family group is really interesting to me because now, through Facebook, I suddenly have dozens of older aunts, uncles, cousins, and even my Dad (!) joining Facebook and communicating in a way not possible before. As one cousin put it, "I have had more contact this week with Harmelink relatives then in the past several years! It is kind of fun." And, now that a critical mass of my relatives has joined, more keep joining each week - it's fun to watch the group evolve.
I think what this example shows is that while Facebook makes the tools available for groups to be successful (discussion boards, wall messages, posting pictures to a group), it's really up to the group's members whether the group stays active or not. In this case, the fact that it is a small, active group where all the members know each other is what has made it successful.
Enhance current relationship or create new groups?
It is very interesting to read your discussion about
facebook which is very popular among students.
I do think it is a successful community as it indeed
connects people with each other and spans the area/way for people to interact
with each other
, however, I suspect
that people who you are mostly interacting with on facebook are also your
friends/classmates offline, well, at least for me it is true, in that case,
facebook is not a good tool to expand your social network or helpful for
constructing new groups, but it provides new way to enhance previous groups/
relationships.
subgroups don't work well in facebook -- but why?
I totally agree with Liz that the (sub)groups in facebook are not working well at all. I was thinking the same thing while reading Kim. There might be some groups that work (as Chris Gerben stated) but most of them don't really support facebook as a community. I think you can also wittness that in other big online communities.
But what is the reason?
too easy? I don't think FB groups are too easy to create. That might be a reason for many of the useless groups, but making it harder would not help FB, since it would also get harder to create useful groups.
I think part of the reason is that the group feature is not very well integrated into FB. For example you do not get newsfeed information about activity in your groups. Then there could be much more powerfull tools for group leaders to maintain their groups (maybe somthing like newsletters). A third thing would be to have a better visualization of the group could be better. Maybe some statistics about who is in the group. The last thing that I could think of would be to have somthing that the group collaboratively work on (like a group profile).
I would be really interested what other people think about the group feature in FB?
Virtual groups can be made stronger offline
Responding to the point of "groups must have meaning", based on the Kim reading, my chosen community of my high-school alumni has seen growth from a handful to over a hundred members. Newcomers to the group received encouraging welcome, and the older members remained active. Of course, the group was not really made up of unknowns - we knew each other, although some not as close as others. But online, there seems to be a healthy interaction among all members.
The group has also seen further evolution as suggested by Kim in terms of creation of subgroups--based on common interests (motorbikers, scubadivers, etc), and geography.
I think eGroups (what we started on, now Yahoo Groups) has provided the necessary tools for the community to survive and grow. Admittedly we started on just using the forum (even now it is the dominant use), but other features were also used. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be spin-outs of subgroups--probably because of our common base (being classmates). It is interesting because there are no barriers of entry as mentioned by Kim such as "building identity, giving leadership tools, and containing havoc", and there is no virtual hangout places, yet the community remained together. How is this possible? THe answer maybe lies in the relationship that is not just virtual but physical.
So, can I say that for a community to be strong together, it cannot just be virtual? Based on my network of central bank webmasters, this seems to also be true. THe physical meetings created the glue.
Have sub-communities for growth
Community needs to be organized into sub-communities, when the size is unmanageable. This is the main design objective of this chapter. Sub-communities will help achieve many community goals like providing a sense of belonging, socializing, maintaining order.
Creating a space for sub-communities to thrive is an important and specific design alternative. Most of the communities we are studying must be having this feature (unless it is a small community). But other design alternatives like communication specific to the sub-community are not common in all the sites.
The next design alternative I identified was branding the sub-communities. Users should be able to wear their sub-communities in their sleeves and flash it to everyone in the site. I'm including features like ability to search for groups and search within groups under this design objective. The site also should promote the sub-communities, by ranking sub-communities based on popularity, interestingness, etc. This will increase the credibility and cohesiveness of the sub-community.
If the larger community is a for-profit site, then the members should be allowed to exist with the same objective. This will earn the loyalty of people who will benefit from the community.
I was impressed by the ancientsites.com community. The author has used it frequently to support her claims. I haven't visited the site yet; but as described in the chapter the site owners seem be to hands on with the community. Reviewing the community applications and identifying the dead communities, this ensures that the dead leaves are removed and the greenery is maintained in the ecosystem. I think the site owners are important to be the guardians of the border, while the members should be able to play to their will inside the ground.
Thanks for identifying design alternatives
And just to be extra-explicit, I think you have formulated a design goal and a design claim.
Goal: create a sense of belonging.
Claim: subgroups will lead to a sense of belonging.
development & maintainance of groups
John Blair
Another fine foundational chapter from Kim, though I would think that much of what this particular chapter has is basic human behavior. The reading does a good job of addressing the proclaimed design claims, alternatives and goals, though obviously not from an overly technical perspective. The material presented addressed these design topics through dedication to the communities basic values and purpose. If the activity (design, use, growth, etc.) of the community maintains it's values and purpose (focus), there are ways to address the challenges / issues facing the community as a whole through providing new functionality (chat areas, member directories), acknowledging groups & their leaders, enforcing community policy, etc. whatever fits the purpose of the community.
Communities of Community
This chapter is talking about the importance of maintaining a leveled structure of community which is composed by sub-communities. To the simplest idea, community, sub-community, or sub-sub-community are all sub-communities of the whole community of our society. Thus when the author talking about how to develop and maintain a sub-community, we can see there are too much similarity with what we talked about to make a community itself. Goals, events and rituals, leadership, and everything else were as the same as required in a community.
I very much like Mouly's idea on branding sub-community and I think it is an efficient way to enhance the identity among group members as well as between with non-group members. However, I proposed one possibility here that whether we could also have some sub-community invisible but crutial for the community as a whole. My point is whether we need to identify and forster explicit sub-community for all cases. For the case of a bulliton borad which I am looking at, it has a very large population and 300 topic based divisions. Usually a person is interested in several topics and hang around there. Those topic divisions are natural sub-communities, where the frequent users often know each other and share many things together. However, I would doubt if we stress this feature of intensive participation in particular divisisons and identify people's belongingness of these divisions, that would hinder people to go freely explore any division until they are evolved in the division. So guess in this case, people really enjoy the freedom to explore whatever division they like although most of time they are just stay in some of them. My point is some time we may also need loose structure of communities.
Intimacy counts
To make the environment of a community comfortable enough to attact more members is also a difficult task. No one would ever doubt that if a community could successfully continue the small town intimacy and sense of belonging, it would be very powerful in maintaining its members as well as getting new members. Web community brings people together who have something in common, but simply by joining a community does not necessarily mean enough sense of identity. Kim pointed out several points that are essential in building up a group friendly community. First, serve a clear purpose. There must be ways for group leaders to articulate and express the purpose. 2. groups need places to congregateand communicate, such as mailing list, message boards and chat rooms etc. 3. groups affiliation should be part of member profiles. 4. group should accomodate and support a range of roles. It is helpful to identify how long someone has been a member, along with any important roles that person plays in the group. 5.Strong leadership is important. 6. Groups should develop their own etiquette, which could include membership requirements, code of conduct and privacy policies etc. 7. groups should hold cyclic events, and this may be fostered by offering members calendar of events, public venue and etc. 8. groups are strengthened by rituals of community life. 9. with the development of a community, internal subgroups could play an important role. Kim has also pointed for a successful subgroup program, there are a bunch of things to consider, such as timing, structure and etc. As a user, I have joined quite some communities in the past. Personally, the feeling of intimacy and sense of belonging does vary from one to another. Now it makes me think more from the perspective of a site administrator what causes the difference and I think Kim's article provides a thorough and clear argument about it.
Maintaining Intimacy & managing growth
The main design goal of this chapter is to establish an intimate community, while members of the community keeps growing. Kim provides two design alternatives. One is to build top-down sub-groups, which are set up by staff, and the other is to establish bottom-up sub-groups, which are created by members.
For the member-run groups, site owner/ administrators can set the stage to foster these sub-groups, such that provide places/events for them to gather and leadership opportunities. On the other hand, for the official program, it can be leveraged from existing platform, and managed by polices created by site owner/ administrators. Also, Kim mentions different design alternatives to achieve design goals of building different sub-groups.
One point I noticed is that timing is important for setting up sub-groups, since in the early stage, the main goal is to have members to identify the community itself rather than exploring other new areas. It also fits Wenger et al’s idea that the new-comers problems may be more prominent in a more matured community. I like this reading, since it complements other readings. Compared with other assigned readings, Kim provides more concrete and relevant examples of maintaining a growing community in terms of online communities.
a brief summary
Kim Ch9 mainly talks about subgroups within communities. The topics include: why subgroups are important, how to nurish and support subgroups as community coordinator, how to prevent subgroups from leaving, whether to prune dormant subgroups, how to advertise subgroups, and so on.
Signs of Life
I thought it was nice to see Kim touch on the costs of subgroups. Most of the emphasis was on reasons for and ways to support subgroups in large communities. On the surface, best practices for subgroups like clarifying purpose, communicating roles, and setting etiquette may nurture relationships between old-timers. However, focusing life too far away from the main stage may make the main community seem less vibrant and less attractive for recruiting newcomers.
Kim's suggested solution was to give incentives for people in subgroups to maintain a public presence. She didn't go much further, but I have some thoughts on to encourage interaction with noobs and bring subgroup activity to the forefront:
1) Show Activity: Linking to most active discussions, members, pages, etc. on a highly visible point of entry (like a front page) may create a view into important community values and interests. Benefits include a fast point of access to "what's hot right now" and should appeal to both oldtimers and newcomers as a sign of energy within. One cost is that popular items may sometimes go against brand or purpose.
2) Spotlight Contributions: Kim suggests that community designers "highlight behaviors that add value to the community" (p34). By emphasizing contributions that are in line with the purpose of a community, all members can be reminded of the group's focus. Further, showing members appreciation encourages increased loyalty.
3) Rewards: To encourage relationships between old-timers and newcomers, a community designer could formalize an incentive structure. For example, if a community awards points for participation, maybe a member could boost their score by welcoming a newcomer.
Another cost of subgroups
In addition to shifting the focus away from the main stage, Kim also points out that subgroups
can migrate away from the larger community. This could be costly if a subgroup contains key community leaders or a significant amount of members. She offers 3 suggestions to prevent migration, but they aren't as clearly defined as many of her other design ideas. One idea is to "build group identity into your system," which I interpreted as finding ways to tether subgroups to your community. The other ideas have to do with subgroup leadership - empowering/rewarding good leaders and eliminating the bad ones.
Designs based on these ideas might be effective, but only to a certain extent. As Kim concedes, it's natural for subgroups to evolve and if one is intent on leaving, there really isn't much you can do.
Some thoughts on Kim reading
In this chapter, Kim discusses subgroups, clans, and groups within online communities. The primary purpose of having these smaller "groups" within an online community is basically to cater to the needs of users. Kim describes this need such that "newcomers feel welcome and old-timers feel comfortable and appreciated."
Kim continues to make the claim that smaller groups within communities form because people with similar interests will ultimately gather together. The assumption is that the community is designed in a way that makes forming small groups possible.
Kim explains that groups are basically like any other communities, presenting nine community design strategies. These nine strategies basically list out some of the important success factors of groups and communities.
1. Groups should serve a clear purpose
2. Groups need their own "space" (gathering place)
3. Group affiliation should be clear from a member's profile
4. Groups should accommodate and support different users
5. Leadership within groups is important
6. Groups have their own culture, etiquette, and traditions
7. Cyclic (regular) events help groups grow
8. Rituals help groups grow
9. Groups need to support sub-groups
While these nine design strategies are reasonable and can probably be observed from most online communities, I definitely felt a sense of redundancy. It feels like Kim has already covered these issues while discussing how successful online communities must cater to the needs of its target users.
UO => WoW
I think it's interesting how the examples in the Kim reading that reference Ultima Online can be directly transferred to how World of Warcraft handles subcommunities. Both have guilds, ways to identify with guilds, and a lot of common themes.
Also, I think it's interesting that the subgroups can be used to partially protect the old timers from the noobs, and vice versa. While you don't want noobs and old timers completely avoiding each other, it can be nice for the old timers to have their own space away from all the noise.
Mission Statements Must Exclude
Kim makes the design claim that providing groups with the means to express and carry out a clear purpose will help the groups be successful. I basically agree with this design claim. I'm a big fan of mission statements and shared meaning. However, I think it's important to pay attention to context in this one.
In a community that fosters emergent groups, I think some of the most robust groups would have a difficult time agreeing on a single mission statement. An offline example for me is a book group I belong to. I go to the book group because I love literary discussion. Others belong to the group because it's one of the only times in their day that can talk to people other than their pre-school aged children. And others belong because it motivates them to read. The group has several different purposes - to try to articulate and live by one purpose would necessarily exclude some people.
So I would add to Kim's claim than providing groups with means to express and carry out a clear purpose will help groups be successful when those groups are focused primarily on production (creating something or achieving some action). Thus, it would include Q&A forums, but probably exclude online Scrabble tables.
maybe more general?
Erin, I think you raise an important point here. I had the opportunity to go through a strategic planning process at my undergraduate institution. At some point in the process, the consultant hired to help the school through the process made the comment that creating a meaningful mission statement and strategic plan will tend to make a few people leave and others choose not to join.
I think this is good advice for those seeking to create goal-oriented organizations, and like you, I think that giving these groups a way to carry out a clear purpose is important for their success. I also think that many other groups -- including your book group and the Scrabble sites --
benefit from a clear identity and purpose that could be described in mission-statement-like way. That doesn't preclude people from having some very individual needs met by their participation.
Imagine if someone disruptive came into your reading group -- so disruptive that you felt that you needed to ask them to leave or modify their behavior. How would you explain it to them? I suspect that a description of the group's identity would be part of your explanation.
The Subgroup Solution
Subgroups are pitched as a solution to oversized communities in this chapter from Kim. It seems to me that the uses of subgroups (focused purpose, "third place", stronger identity within the community, etc) should all be afforded by the larger community to begin with. That is to say, subgroups appear to be a solution to the failure of a community, whether that failure is establishing cohesive group identity, defining the community's raison d'etre, etc. Subgroups, or subcommunities, are what results when the larger community is no longer satisfactorily meeting the needs of its members.
I'd also like to briefly protest Kim's classication of Yahoo Groups, Geocities, etc as 'communities'. These types of sites provide tools for creating your own communities, but I think it is a far stretch of the imagination to consider any of them communities in and of themselves. I think the true test would be to determine whether any of the users identify themselves as being a part of the site (Geocities, Tripod, Lycos Clubs, etc) over being a webmaster or simply the leader of their own community, neither of which identifies strongly with the company providing the tools. I don't think a significant allegiance to Geocities could be found among its users.
What actually counts as a community
I agree with Dustin about being skeptical of Yahoo Groups or Geocities as good examples of communities. I'm aware that there are some active groups within Yahoo Groups, but on the whole what I've experienced are a lot of groups that have been created around a topic, and then quickly abandoned. As Kim said, it's a choice for the community builders whether they want the site to be a "manicured garden" or a "wild swamp", and in Yahoo's case, they choose the latter, by making it easy to create and join groups. This makes group proliferation 'cheap, fast, and out of contol'. I think this ends up hurting Yahoo Groups more than help it - if users start to get the impression that groups on Yahoo are often dormant or unfocused, why keep returning?
On another note, I was an avid Geocities user back in the mid to late 1990's, creating many sites and attempting to create communities for bands I liked. But I actually never got it until I read this article that the 'neighborhood' you chose your site to be in was supposed to match the sites' topic. I always just chose the neighborhood that I liked the name of best (usually Sunset Beach, which was actually meant for travel sites). I think Geocities finally realized that users weren't using this feature as intended, and eventually phased out the neighborhood URL idea around 2000. Just an interesting case of where the community builders did not communicate their concept well with users.
Why are there no groups on Digg?
How groups form online is a very interesting topic to me. Kim’s general perspective is that in any community groups will emerge and they can be beneficial, so they should be supported. Overall I agree. But there are a number of popular ‘social’ websites that don’t seem to have formal groups at all. Unless I’m overlooking them it doesn’t seem that Digg has any group functionality.
I use Digg somewhat regularly and I have puzzled over the lack of groups. Mixx is basically a clone of Digg and it allows the formation of groups. Looking at Mixx gives some clues as to why groups may not be a useful way to organize activity for this type of site. Of the first 10 groups listed on Mixx, 4 have no postings at all. This suggests that the type of interaction that these sites promote has little benefit from groups. I’m curious as to why this is occurring, especially since I’m working on a site right now that is similar to Digg but relies entirely on groups. The site I’m developing also allows users to post questions and their own blog posts as well as links, but I wonder if this is enough to promote use.
Most of the sites that Kim mentioned in this article had a larger component of user-generated content than Digg or Mixx. I guess I’m curious if the amount of content that you can contribute is a factor in how users perceive the benefits of groups? Or does the amount that you contribute eventually necessitate forming groups to help manage and steward the content? In any case I think that Digg is an interesting exception to this rule.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
interesting context qualification
Seems we would like to get to a characterization of the types of communities where subgroups are helpful in achieving the goal of maintaining intimacy and group identity.
Your suggestion seems plausible that the key context factor is the amount of user-contributed content. When there's a lot, subgroups are needed to keep people interacting with a small set of others to maintain intimacy. Conversely, when there's not a lot, there may not be a need to create subgroups.
On the other hand, this many not be the whole story. It seems to me that if there's a fragmentation of interests, you might need subgroups even if there isn't that much user-contributed content.
What are the real communities?
I had trouble resonating with the Kim reading this week....
Herein Kim supports the claim that community health = small, close knit groups.
"Cities spawn neighborhoods, boarding schools form houses, universities include colleges and dorms, and companies create divisions and project teams."
I have participated in many of the above environments and cannot honestly say that I witnessed community extant in any of them.
(pg 314 has a useful list of things to consider)
"Often their members form such strong internal bonds and tight friendships that, regardless of how carefully you manage your program, they’ll become more loyal to the group and the group leader than to your community."
Sentences like this provoke (in me) the notion that if the subcommunity elicits more loyalty than the greater community, then the greater community probably isn't worth being loyal to anyway. At the very least, we should be conscious about how the motives of large "communities" and small communities are not necessarily congruent and are capable of being in radical conflict.
We are advised to "Cultivate Emerging Subgroups" but not too successful ones. Kim seems to get a lot of mileage out of suggesting that we do X and then immediately following it up with a caveat or point of wary caution.
The more I think about the Kim, the more I realize that it is tied to a notion of community that I find deeply questionable, i.e. a community in which control is explicit -- via the server, the ISPs, the administrators, etc. More and more, I doubt that such human groups can be called communities.
Finally, "Send Staff Members to Special Events" made me realize that all of the successful, i.e. emotionally valuable, online communities that I have participated in, do not have budgets, owners, or staff members. They are volunteer-run, self-selected, communities of people who have created their own umbrella and NOT opted to stand under someone else's umbrella which has been put out for them with an ulterior motive.
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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser
Different communities for different types
Paul,I found myself agreeing with your point that Kim seems to state: "you should do this to foster community/subgroups", but immediately after says: "but, be careful, here are some problems you might encounter!" At first I found it rather annoying, but the more I read, the more I felt that she was just trying to point out different cases where community might mean different things to different people and designers/creators need to be aware of the type of community they are trying to foster.I do disagree with one of your points, though. I don't think Kim is trying advocate a specific, centralized community (I know your strong feelings about this ;-) ). Rather, she seems to be saying: sometimes the subgroup creation needs to come from the top, but often your users will surprise you. She mentions many cases where the community rallies behind the actions of certain members, e.g. the charity tournament within Heat (p 345). Even one of the sidebars mentions this - top-down groups vs. bottom-up groups (p. 316).
The guises of Communities without Community
I was also left feeling a bit put-off by this particular Kim Chapter. I think my struggle with her ideas began in the section on Top Down vs. Bottom Up communities wherein she describes strategies for manipulating people to stay in your community and not migrate to others....
Migration is inevitable, and probably healthy. Her approach here reminded me a lot of the literature I read in fundraising courses on how to rope in your funders through things like putting ever-so-obvious manipulative things like a dime peeking through the view envelope that reads "for the cost of this dime a month, we could do X with your money"
I think the question of suggestively selling your e-community should be considered carefully. People do not like to be backed into corners, no matter how nice those corners may be...
I did get a kick out of the concept of tribal badges which she discussed in UO communities....
Lisa McLaughlin
You sunk my Battleship
Clubs, subgroups, general groups,top down groups, bottom up groups,"the Guardians",Virtual neighbors,the neighborhood,Kazola's tavern,private gathering places,creating fertile environments and
TERRORISM. E-terrorism. griefer attacks. sociopaths of virtual worlds.
Believe it or not, there is already terrorism taking place within communities and virtual worlds. I wonder what research paper Kim will be writing about to counter this phenomenom?
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons
Kim Framework and My Community
The Kim reading lays out a framework of nine key design strategies for communities which can help build more successful communities. At first glance the strategies seemed to be quite obvious
and general. However, reading through the comments I went through them again and I realized that while they seemed general and obvious it was very easy while designig communities to be
loose focus of these aspects and end up making decisions which may prove to be not so valuable in the long run. This is quite true of the community I am looking at. The community I am looking
at is one of India's largest and most vibrant communities and serves a *very useful and specific* purpose. There are similar groups that aim to serve a similar purpose that exist on social networks like facebook and orkut however they are far from being even close to the PagalGuy community. If we look at Kim's guidelines we can see why this would be so.
I've discussed these differences in more detail in my blog post but in general the PagalGuy community was built specifically for a purpose and provided a useful utility by letting people achieve a goal that
was not possbile otherwise. The communities on orkut and facebook on the other hand are there because the platforms allow them to make communities and people who are just browsing across communities
come across them and if they are interested join them because they are interested. However, the incentives to participate for each person in this case are pretty low as compared to incentives on the dedicated site where people come only because they realize that that community provides them important benefits. Further on Orkut and Facebook your there is no "tribal badge" which you receive because of your participation
to that specific sub-group. You reputation if and when it is visible to others is generally built on our paticipation on the orkut or facebook platform in general and not that specific sub community. Thus it doesn't hold
any shared special meaning for that subgroup whereas in the group dedicated to that one activity, all your reputation in the community is built on your participation, your expertise and your knowledge around that one focal activity and hence it builds a stronger sense of community. Further, development of specific etiquettes that are particularly meaningul for the members of the community is easier in dedicated communities. For example PagalGuy members are called puys. It is very hard to maintain several such specific etiquettes for various subcommunities on a general site like facebook or orkut. In fact, I was quite surprised to see that
both on Orkut and Facebook there were PagalGuy communities - which could be in a loose sense the kind of people we could call brokers who carry part of their culture from one domain to another. This illustrates
how strong a sense of belonging to a community can be if the community has a specific, focussed purpose
The Home within a Home
Subgroup-specific spaces are another element I think could be translated into a design claim -- if you want to allow users to form subgroups (in order to foster mutual feedback and participation), one thing you can do is give subgroups their own communication channels and virtual spaces.
I have seen this in action on Everything2.com -- where "usergroup" nodes which originally were for administrators and editors eventually proliferated into geographical groups (ie Boston Noders, No-cal Noders), religious persuasions, and lifestyle groups (moms and the gay/bi group "outies").
Each usergroup had a few essential features -- a badge on each users homepage, a weblog which any group member could post to, and a chat channel for discussion. It wasn't long before the chat channels for subgroups far outstripped chats between individual users or general site chat on the site.
Giving subgroups space I think is an important way to foster subgroups, and it's nice if it can happen in-platform, but don't underestimate the use of external tools like meetup and google/yahoo groups.
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oostendo@umich.edu
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