Building Online Communities

In many ways, the Internet is an extended society growing in the surreal space of our collective computers. Even though it's often thought of as an impersonal machine, or a place where people who can't "make it" in the real social world go, the Internet is a thriving society, and the world's largest social experiment.


Internet societies exist in forums, chat rooms, mailing lists, and blogs. In all these, friendships and romances form, feelings are hurt, ideas are created, and ultimately people live. It's often thought of as uncontrolled space, but in actuality there's a great deal of control through peer interaction and through good moderating.

The Control Room: How Top-Down Control Is Exerted in Online Communities

In the worst forums, there is little or no control of what's being discussed, which enables people to do what they please. And what they please, when the person on the other end seems less real than those you can touch, can be very bad indeed.

In a classic experiment conducted by Dr. Stanley Milgram of Harvard in 1963, people were told to apply electric shocks to others who were not in the room. Because the scientist was telling them to, the subjects administered increasingly dangerous levels of "shock" to the other person. Sometimes they heard nothing, and at other times they could hear the other person screaming, cursing, and begging for no more.

Not a single participant refused to continue administering shocks, as long as the scientist told them to. Some never even resisted.

This tendency to be insensitive to the pain of people not in your line of sight extends to online communities. Without a strong leader, online communities frequently devolve into "flame wars" or just a few vulgar people shooting shocking comments back and forth. The extreme anonymity provided by the Internet allows them to release their inhibitions, and dump the worst of themselves onto the community. A really good example of that is in the Yahoo! News feedback bulletin boards; heavily trafficked by relatively anonymous posters but moderated primarily by BBS participants, these areas started as a great service but have devolved into a place to get a quick education on how vulgar and nasty people can be.

Fortunately, most long-standing online communities aren't like this at all. Any serious community has volunteer or paid moderators who can and will exert their authority to warn, then ban, people who get out of line. And instead of turning into online free-for-alls, most of these places turn into genuine online communities.

Why Do We Do It?

There are dozens of reasons people get involved with an online community, from loneliness and isolation to seeking information on topics. Contrary to what many believe, introverts and nerds don't often get involved in an online community successfully; even in a forum like this, many lack the social skills or the desire to participate. Most people in online communities are seeking out other people.

The best online communities are attached to other services; for instance, bloggers often form networks of communities, where they recommend other bloggers, discuss recent blogs by others, and share readership. Informational sites often host forums that allow people to discuss topics in more depth, seek out experts, or share information. Writers and artists seek out online communities to share work, looking to these communities as a way to have their work peer-reviewed; academics will do the same.

The two most critical elements of an online community are:

• It must fulfill its stated purpose – if it's a writing email list, it must focus on writing, while if it's a political blogging community, it must not suddenly talk about raising rabbits – unless that has somehow become political.
• It must be a welcoming and nurturing environment. That doesn’t mean it has to welcome everyone; many online communities are closed to outsiders, but provide a comfortable online home to those who "belong."

How Do You Develop A Great Online Community?

The best online communities are developed over time; therefore, time is the most critical component of your fledgling community. Your technology must work smoothly as well, but that’s just the basic requirement. Nobody will join your community and stay there just because you used the best technology to build it or spent the biggest marketing budget.

It's critical to have people who know what they're talking about – not necessarily experts, just people who can give a sensible answer when asked for advice. This means either you or a partner or a paid employee should be the moderator of the community.

Whoever the moderator is, he or she must be hands-on. That means the moderator must be ready to step in at any time and eliminate problem community members, either by chastising them into submission or by removing their privileges. In this context, the moderator is the sheriff, judge, and jury of the online community.

Written, clear rules that prospective members sign off on are a must. In addition, all members should be registered with the site; this helps prevent troublemakers from coming in and creating conflict. In addition to being available and signed to, written rules must be enforced.

And over time, the moderator and other posters must be encouraged to get others to sign onto the new community, either by recognizing recruiters with titles and honors or by awarding prizes, discounts, or special privileges to those who are effective at bringing in new members.

How Do You Maintain A Great Online Community?

Ideally, an online community keeps everyone in it happy and, if it's supposed to, it grows. Online communities are kept healthy by the contributions of their members. For this reason, good communities will have some motivation for the members to post.

In many, you're given successively higher levels of responsibility as you post. People who post frequently, as evidenced either by a posting ticker or by a title or honor unique to frequent posters, are generally looked up to by the rest of the community; there is an intangible benefit to this for most people in that it makes them feel good, powerful, or confident.

An example of an excellent reward system for online communities is the karmic retribution system on Slashdot. Here, they work on the assumption that everyone wants to be read; it's also such a large forum that it's hard to police with moderators. So karmic points can be awarded by anyone. Offensive topics have negative karma; helpful or popular posts are awarded positive karma. The highest karmic ratings rise to the top when they post.

Besides encouraging people to post, order must be maintained. All rules originally established should be enforced; if for some reason they must be changed, the list or forum owner should avoid changing them unilaterally, but instead should present them to list members with questions about how to change them to benefit the whole community.

Ultimately, great online communities sometimes spill over into real life. Group members meet one another and have social gatherings; this happens frequently on the large listserv Momwriters, whose members often post about meeting one another. Flash mobs sponsored by different organizations are also supported by online technology. These phenomena have just started happening, and it's hard to predict where it's going; but if members want to meet in real life, it's probably destructive to the group to tell them they can't. The problem is, it leaves you open to a lawsuit if something bad were to happen. Your best bet if you own the community is to remain neutral, and maybe even put a disclaimer in the sign-up section that you aren't responsible for anything that happens to those who disregard their personal safety.

You can't control these things, anyway. In the end, the best online community no longer belongs to the person who started it, but rather belongs to the members of it. It's the purest and most successful form of collectivism, and it's available to anyone.

References

The Milgram Experiment:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/compliance.shtml

An article on professional and academic online communities and their future: here

A Web Based Virtual Community

"Howard Rheingold's classic work "A Virtual Community free online

Howard Rheingold on Smartmobs