All communities start with individuals. The individual is the core constituent and what everything revolves around (this is kinda what I tried to say in centred communication).
However, we frequently ignore this and IMO the number one problem that we have in designing and developing online communities is that we tend to try to develop communities around things other than people. Yes, communities must have an ‘object’ at the centre of them, a common area, but the people are more important. Think about yourself for example, you’ll have a vast array of interests, likes, hobbies etc. etc. but you would *never* end up being in a community for each and every one of those things… you might meet people in an ad hoc way who share similar interests, you might form friendships and develop communities around them but that’s far more likely *not* to happen.
So, when we try to develop a community round this and a community round that in our online environments we’re trying to do something artificial, yes people should be able to establish their own communities but through independent (and, dare I say subversive ;) means rather than automated action (i.e. “I like beer” – ping you’re in the beer community – not good). Successful communities need energy, participation and commitment… so if you have a lot of automatically generated communities without much fire in them then you start to get the broken window thing rolling.
So what I’m getting at in a very convoluted way is that ‘designed’ communities need to be focused, energized and purposeful. In the educational context there are many great examples of successful community ‘themes’ around, for example, research, discipline, faculty, politics etc. We shouldn’t over look these. Also, the communities we create need to be focused around individuals rather than separate from them.
I think that while intelligent aggregation to central areas through tools like tags has its purposes, far more valid is the capacity for ‘participation’ through blogs with these functioning as the absolute core representation of a person rather than just another application or resource.
From a users perspective I’d see people having a posting area / dashboard (similar to WP) where they are able to select (and suggest… once 5 people have suggested then it gets put up) global categories that they are then added too as a member and are able to post to by their blog. They are also able to visit that categories ‘aggregation’ page by clicking on the category name and grab a general category ‘feed’. Different social software tools operate using the same global categories database and are linked into the blogging backend. Stuff like Technorati etc. is just aggregated in.
The point is that the individual is always at the centre of the experience, nothing more is needed than to log in to his or her blog – which will hopefully also have an aggregator… that’s something Winer has always been spot on with – and then participate in (as an individual) or travel from there too the communities. The WP dashboard even has a real capacity for becoming a display of different communities within the blogging tool.
I had a great thought as I was going to sleep last night about how I was going to start the next presentation I’ve got coming up at ASCILITE… it’s going to be a few slides on how life exists at the bottom of oceans, under intense radioactivity, even, perhaps, on comets and in volcanoes. And community can exist in discussion boards, learning management systems, wikis and other third party abstract environments too.
I take the view that rather than global categories, we change the way users think when creating their content by calling them communities and aggregating them similarly as you’ve suggested. I’ve been quietly working on this for a personal multiple community project whereby I can share and discuss topical subjects with friends. Create unlimited private or public community streams where my content is aggregated. Private single user communities being the equivelant to my own blog categories. Creating a post would simply add to that private community stream, later allowing myself to group that stream with others and generate my personal blog. Alternatively generate a blog based solely on my technical streams. Or contribute that stream to an open community for discussion. Or all three. The point being the ability to easily select the community and the level at which my content is aggregated and who has permission to view it.
I’m looking forward to seeing projects like Six Aparts Project Comet come into fruition. There are some discussions on the OPML front to include namespace and attention metadata that is beginning to come interesting and may help bring more connected communities forward into the mainstream.
It’s making this interaction transparent to endusers that will ultimately do that.
[...] Developing Online Communities the Centred Way James Farmer’s article on developing successful online communities… just remember to focus on individual users Keywords: academia, blogs, howto, productivity, social [...]
Hiya – sounds to me like you’re heading (in your thinking) towards network theories…have a look at George Siemens’ article in Learning Circuits http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/nov/2005/seimens.htm
or Barabasi’s book “Linked”…
It looks at nodes (individuals) and connections between nodes – forming these connections are what develops into learning networks…then you’ve got hubs, rogue nodes – but all of it allows for the changing patterns of information flow between the connections…
You could create an amazing activity around this for ASCILLITE!
ABB :-)
Craig, gee sounds fascinating! Have you used elgg.net? I’d be really interested in any comparisons or perspectives you might have of that.
Anne, ya link didn’t work :( Yes, I know I’m getting dangerously close to ANT and having to figure out what it actually means ;) Guess that where I’m coming from is that we need to realise that in order for this stuff to happen on the web it kinda needs not to happen on the web… I’m trying to get some actualisation going, um, perhaps.
Yeh, I wanna chip everyone at ASCILITE and show them the results at the end!
I’ve used elgg.net, yes. Feels so awkward, limited. Unintuitive to me. The concept is a great one, the implementation and interface just not user friendly. Their implementation of seperating a users blog from their community, when a blog in itself is a community, doesn’t gel with me either. My desire to have many blogs on many different topics and have the ability to aggregate those topics with other topics(streams as I call them) into numerous blogs and communities isn’t possible with elgg or anything else out there for that matter. This is the hole I want filled, the hole I’m looking at filling.
Whats needed are next generation aggregators integrating; privacy support, attention metadata, news and meme readers all into the one system. Preferably using standards available today so that blogs and user streams the world over can be integrated into public and private communities easily. Inclusion of an Amazon Turk like blogosphere community in filtering out spam and junk (a honeypot) similar to Matt’s Akismet wouldn’t go astray either. The ability to publish using forms generated from microcontent formats, the ability to create custom forms and microcontent and share those forms as microformats. Bring the power to the people in deciding what formats become widespread. Think of the services people could create if there were publicly available streams of many kinds of microcontent. Bring power to the people in choosing which stream(s) they publish their microcontent to.
This is how I want my web to work.
Well I certainly wouldn’t disagree with you that readers need to sit with publishers… heck I started out on Radio Userland, I know all about that.
Doesn’t WP through smart categorisation (and multiple themes) allow for “many blogs on many different topics and have the ability to aggregate those topics with other topics(streams as I call them) into numerous blogs”.
How to get those into communities though. Well, I think that the first place you have to start looking is blogger vs. LJ… there is NO blogger community but that’s almost ALL LJ is about, so how you translate that is interesting. Personally I’m for an approach of ‘nearness’ rather than this global thing we’ve got going with technorati etc. We are not ‘one big family’ we just seem to be because there aren’t that many of us… as time goes on we’ll become small disparate (but not quite as separate as before) groups. I reckon.
Privacy, yeh. Critical if these are to become our own CMSs, mydocuments online, attention stuff (am still trying to figure this one out, almost got it the other day but it escapes me without a drink), memes – not necessary, we get memes because of who we know and what we know, news… of course.
Microcontent: aren’t there already publicially available streams?
[...] Developing Online Communities the Centred Way ‘designed’ communities need to be focused, energized and purposeful. In the educational context there are many great examples of successful community ‘themes’ around, for example, research, discipline, faculty, politics etc. We shouldn’t over look these. Also, the communities we create need to be focused around individuals rather than separate from them. [...]