It is important to remember that just as a community includes some people, by definition it excludes others.  All healthy communities have boundaries that are self-enforced through a variety of means, from informal social pressure to formal expulsion.  Communities cannot function well without some means of exclusion.

·       Informal barriers to entry include:

o      Having login and password makes the community somewhat formalized.  Interested users will become members. 

o      Design can also be an informal barrier.

o      Plug-in can also be an informal barrier.

·       Formal barriers to entry include:

o      Requiring members to register and disclose personal information.  This can be very annoying and turn away visitors.  On the other hand, it keeps the truly interested.

o      Require an email address and then send an email to that address, requiring the user to reply in order for the account to become active

The level of barrier depends on the goal of the website.  If you want one time connection vs. fostering prolonged conversations over time.

Once you’ve decided on the barrier, consider some formalities for posting:

·       Bury the post button to ensure quality and loyalty. 

o      The distance created will deter users who are looking for trouble or aren’t engaged in your content from posting.

o      The more clicks it takes, the better the posts will be.  Serious users will stick with it. 

o      When they get to the posting area, the users will all have some degree of commonality. (Six clicks show serious commitment.)

·       Consider how you will teach new users the ethics and guidelines the veterans of the site follow.

o      A new member cannot post a new item to the main page until they’ve been a member for at least 24 hours, and have commented at least three times. 

o      This allows the person time to observe the culture. 

o      It prevented spammers and unwanted advertisements.

·       Consider “post by invitation only” based on credibility, membership, expertise, etc. 

·       Seriously reconsider anonymous postings, as that changes the dynamics and all hell breaks loose.

·       Do NOT allow members to link to their own site, it then becomes a self-promotional tool.

·       Too many people posting too many topics?

o      Determine how many is too many.

o      Find the equilibrium over time.

o      After a period of growth, be concerned with whether the original users stopped reading and participating.

·       You can’t control everything - let go of your control.

·       The key is to build a system that allows the community to police itself.

o      Allow the users to boot out a person who is not contributing positively.

o      If more than half in the chatroom want to boot him out, they are booted out for an hour or more.

o      Allow user to post anonymously if he needs to (use caution).

o      Allow users to rate the posting.

o      User with lots of points, good etiquette, submitting acceptable stories and comments, can possibly earn the privilege to become a moderator.

CHAT, CAMS AND VIRTUAL INTIMACY

Intimacy is defined as that feeling you get when you realize that someone is speaking directly to you, telling you something personal that resonates deeply.  Virtual community is the kind of place where intimate exchange can take place safely and without fear.  Intimacy can be found on-line in the form of:

• Communities of support
• Communities of shared stories
• Communities of commerce

Elements of intimacy:

• Paranoia
• Beware of the grifters

EMAIL COMMUNITIES

Email communities differ from web based communities in that you have to go to the web, but email comes to you.  Thus web communities are based more on what will motivate people to click an address, log in, and check threads.  Email flows right to people, which makes it easier, but it’s also easier to get flooded with and blown off. 

GOOD REASONS TO END YOUR VIRTUAL COMMUNITY:

1.     The site is not meeting your personal needs.

2.     The site is not meeting the community’s needs.

3.     You’re just not interested anymore and no one else is either.

4.     Money is inadequate.

5.     No one says communities have to last forever.

Hi all!  I jotted down some notes while reading a book about forming virtual communities, and wanted to share it with the group. Please let me know what additional information would be helpful to you.  

Design for Community (The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places)

By Derek M. Powazek

New Riders (Division of Pearson Technology Group) 2002

ISBN 0735710759

Introduction

A web-based community is not much different from a traditional community that physically comes together for a purpose.  In either forum, it involves real life, both emotionally and intimately.  The web based community just places less emphasis on physically meeting.  The web has an advantage that no other media has; the web grows communities, almost without trying, because the web is the only media that allows its users to communicate with each other directly, publicly, and instantly. The web grows communities because it allows everyone to have a voice.  The web makes dialogues real, immediate, and public.  The medium this communication takes place is virtual, but the connections themselves are real, intimate, and indeed revolutionary. 

Virtual Community Concept and Definition:

·       Community is immensely personal.  Community membership can be a major part of an individual’s internal self image or external professional life.

·       Members of a community will identify themselves with the community when they feel strongly connected to it.

·       Never call a site “community,” instead, provide adequate tools for your member to communicate with each other, plenty of relevant material to talk about, and an elegant structure that encourages conversation.

·       Never expect everyone to agree.

·       Good reasons for creating a virtual community include user generated reviews of products, adding posting to the end of local news stories, creating support forums, etc

Author’s personal definition:  Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in apublic and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

Tools: giving your users tools to communicate is giving them the power. Common tools are web boards, chat rooms, and discussion areas.

Voice: when users see their words on your site, it becomes their site too.

Public: private email exchanges and instant messages can help foster private communities.  But for a community to succeed on the web, it has to be public, at least to some degree.

Immediate: if you’re calling for user participation, you need to have systems in place to accept and reward that participation immediately

Intimate Relationship: if your users develop a strong emotional bond with each other and the site, you’ve done your job well.

Time: Whatever your goal, it’s not going to happen all at once.  Patience is a requirement. Communities take months to develop.

The Big Three factors to consider when starting a community: 

1. Who is your audience?

• Decide who exactly you are talking to, who do you want to attract and retain?                              You can have more than one group, kids, parents, etc.  So decide and prioritize.  If you’re not sure who your users are, ask them.
• What are they likely to want from your site?
• Don’t assume all audiences are the same.

2. Creating Valuable Content

It’s the content of your site that will differentiate it from all others.  And the quality of that content has a direct and unmistakable impact on the quality of the conversation on your site.

3. Community

• Decide how you want your users to respond.  Match the task with the method of communication. Synchronous vs. asynchronous?

•  Synchronous communication is when all the users are at the same place, at the same time. This often mean chat or instant messaging. 
• Allows strong emotional impact
• They’re often more like a slow phone conversation than a well thought out exchange of letters

• Asynchronous communication allows for users to participate at different times (posting to web boards or email lists)
• More convenient, but it lacks the visceral real time impact that a live synchronous chat can have
• Allows participants more time to craft elegant responses
• Consider, should you require users to create memberships before posting or not? Do you need hosts and moderators, or can the users police themselves?

Importance of Content

Content is the most important; it draws people to the community.  Content can be defined as that which the user experiences before he communicates with other users. Something has to draw others to your site, something that sets the tone, something that provides a very clear message of what the site is about. 

·       Who is the site community project for, exactly?  Who do you want to attract to?  What do they do with their lives and how will your site fit in?  Try building a user profile.  Write a little story about a person in your audience and how your site fits into his or her life. 

·       What is on this site for the community to talk about?  Form a basic need or theme.  What are they getting that cannot be obtained anywhere else? How does this site add value and purpose for them?

·       What kind of community features should be provided?  What kind of participation should be established? How much voice? Limited or unlimited participation? Synchronous or asynchronous communication?

·       Consider a site-wide “about us” area. Allow people to voice themselves and consider biography pages.

One way to draw people into conversations is to engage them as people.  Personal stories are a wonderful way to create a discussion that is at once inclusive, polite, and real.  The bottom line is that human beings are subjective, personal creatures by definition.  And communities are about connections between people. Personal stories are the glue that holds any community together, online or off.  So never underestimate the power of a personal story and a direct question.

Content can be a general topic, personal things, news of interest, etc.  No matter how many members the community has, feeling of a small or exclusive community is important.  But this may depend on the overall purpose of the site.  Topics can be presented in many forms:

·       Do community interviews.

·       Let the community decide whom they want to hear from and what questions they would like asked.

·       Add more customization to the site, so people get exactly the experience they want from it.  Topics that people like will come up first, and the topics or authors the users don’t care for will be hidden from view.

·       Provide localized news, weather, events, and entertainment for different regions of the country.

·       Overall, tie content directly to community.

People are what makes a community great.  A very successful community creates a special place in a lot of people’s hearts.

Moderator Responsibilities

Some factors to consider for the moderator:

·       Your task is to identify the goals of your community, select an appropriate editorial voice for your content, and then produce content with the same tone that you want to hear from your users.

·       Introduce yourself.  Who are you and what’s your background?  (This is especially important if you are the moderator or voice host of the community.  The more self-revealing the better.)

·       Personally describe the community project.  What is it about? What is the intent and what do you hope to achieve?

·       As a moderator, pick something you’re passionate about.

·       Pay close attention to the emotional tone your voice content strikes.  Your content leads by example, and you can be sure that the audience will respond in kind. Speak to them, not at them.

·       Be personal.  Remind the community that their hosts and leaders are people too.  Introduce yourself and mention personal elements from your life.

·       Be nice and patient as the moderator.

·       Be inclusive in considering topics.  The best content for your website is the content that comes out of your community.  You can create ways to feature exemplary community generated content.

·       Be honest with your information you choose to share.

DESIGN MATTERS

·       Design for your audience.  Identify and profile your audience before you even start the visual design process. Who are these people?  What do they like?

·       Design for flexibility.  Consider large text for visually impaired or avoiding color combinations like red on black for colorblind people.  Allow people to change the font size in their browser and design the page to look good in an increased font size.

·       Look at your site the way the user does-as an experience, with a beginning, middle, and end.  The first few pages should be welcoming and explanatory.  The middle of the experience should contain the main content and functionality.  The end should provide closure. It’s the experience that’s most important in web design, not the individual pages.

·       Design for simplicity.  Too much information can confuse the purpose of the community.

·       Design for readability.  Nice high contrast difference between he text color and the background. Narrow column of text-news paper style.  Use 5-10 words per line.  Don’t make the font too small.

·       Design for beauty.  Every pixel counts.  Make it inviting.

·       With an integrated design, the look and feel of the content areas and community functionality are the same.

TOOLS FOR DOING THE HEAVY LIFTING

·       To buy or build the server, carefully consider both options.

·       Look for free discussion tools and community developing software. 

o      Shashdot is an example of a free software.

o      Infopop.com costs some money.

o      Prospero and webcrossing are robust and expensive.  

·       When choosing a software, consider:

o      Hosted or integrated (hosted will guarantee the visitors stay on your site)

o      Uptime

o      Features

o      Expandability

o      Design customization

POLICIES AND POLICING

·       Change the disclaimer to include what you mean by inappropriate things.

·       Encourage civil and respectful discussions.  Communicate rules clearly and enforce with no exception.

·       If someone submits a copyright complaint, investigate it right away.  If there is a violation, and someone has posted something that he does not own the copyright to, without the permission of the owner, remove the content.

·       POST the DMCA compliance page.

·       Include a privacy statement (includes user’s rights in your community space, what is personal data, if any, that you collect on each user and what you will or won’t do with it)

·       Indicate terms of service.

·       Communicate guidelines and consider placing it as pop-up window, linked from every posting form.

·       If there is a host, he ore she can act as an enforcer of the rules, help those in need, and set good examples.  The importance of the role a host plays depends on the complexity of the site.

·       The moderator or hosts postings should look more official and different in color slightly so that the community knows its official.

Design for Community (The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places)

By Derek M. Powazek

New Riders (Division of Pearson Technology Group) 2002

ISBN 0735710759

Introduction

A web-based community is not much different from a traditional community that physically comes together for a purpose.  In either forum, it involves real life, both emotionally and intimately.  The web based community just places less emphasis on physically meeting.  The web has an advantage that no other media has; the web grows communities, almost without trying, because the web is the only media that allows its users to communicate with each other directly, publicly, and instantly. The web grows communities because it allows everyone to have a voice.  The web makes dialogues real, immediate, and public.  The medium this communication takes place is virtual, but the connections themselves are real, intimate, and indeed revolutionary. 

Virtual Community Concept and Definition:

·       Community is immensely personal.  Community membership can be a major part of an individual’s internal self image or external professional life.

·       Members of a community will identify themselves with the community when they feel strongly connected to it.

·       Never call a site “community,” instead, provide adequate tools for your member to communicate with each other, plenty of relevant material to talk about, and an elegant structure that encourages conversation.

·       Never expect everyone to agree.

·       Good reasons for creating a virtual community include user generated reviews of products, adding posting to the end of local news stories, creating support forums, etc

Author’s personal definition:  Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

Tools: giving your users tools to communicate is giving them the power. Common tools are web boards, chat rooms, and discussion areas.

Voice: when users see their words on your site, it becomes their site too.

Public: private email exchanges and instant messages can help foster private communities.  But for a community to succeed on the web, it has to be public, at least to some degree.

Immediate: if you’re calling for user participation, you need to have systems in place to accept and reward that participation immediately

Intimate Relationship: if your users develop a strong emotional bond with each other and the site, you’ve done your job well.

Time: Whatever your goal, it’s not going to happen all at once.  Patience is a requirement. Communities take months to develop.

The Big Three factors to consider when starting a community: 

1. Who is your audience?

• Decide who exactly you are talking to, who do you want to attract and retain?                               You can have more than one group, kids, parents, etc.  So decide and prioritize.  If you’re not sure who your users are, ask them.
• What are they likely to want from your site?
• Don’t assume all audiences are the same.

2. Creating Valuable Content

It’s the content of your site that will differentiate it from all others.  And the quality of that content has a direct and unmistakable impact on the quality of the conversation on your site.

3. Community

• Decide how you want your users to respond.  Match the task with the method of communication. Synchronous vs. asynchronous?

•  Synchronous communication is when all the users are at the same place, at the same time.  This often mean chat or instant messaging. 
• Allows strong emotional impact
• They’re often more like a slow phone conversation than a well thought out exchange of letters

• Asynchronous communication allows for users to participate at different times (posting to web boards or email lists)
• More convenient, but it lacks the visceral real time impact that a live synchronous chat can have
• Allows participants more time to craft elegant responses
• Consider, should you require users to create memberships before posting or not? Do you need hosts and moderators, or can the users police themselves?

Importance of Content

Content is the most important; it draws people to the community.  Content can be defined as that which the user experiences before he communicates with other users. Something has to draw others to your site, something that sets the tone, something that provides a very clear message of what the site is about. 

·       Who is the site community project for, exactly?  Who do you want to attract to?  What do they do with their lives and how will your site fit in?  Try building a user profile.  Write a little story about a person in your audience and how your site fits into his or her life. 

·       What is on this site for the community to talk about?  Form a basic need or theme.  What are they getting that cannot be obtained anywhere else? How does this site add value and purpose for them?

·       What kind of community features should be provided?  What kind of participation should be established? How much voice? Limited or unlimited participation? Synchronous or asynchronous communication?

·       Consider a site-wide “about us” area. Allow people to voice themselves and consider biography pages.

One way to draw people into conversations is to engage them as people.  Personal stories are a wonderful way to create a discussion that is at once inclusive, polite, and real.  The bottom line is that human beings are subjective, personal creatures by definition.  And communities are about connections between people.  Personal stories are the glue that holds any community together, online or off.  So never underestimate the power of a personal story and a direct question.

Content can be a general topic, personal things, news of interest, etc.  No matter how many members the community has, feeling of a small or exclusive community is important.  But this may depend on the overall purpose of the site.  Topics can be presented in many forms:

·       Do community interviews.

·       Let the community decide whom they want to hear from and what questions they would like asked.

·       Add more customization to the site, so people get exactly the experience they want from it.  Topics that people like will come up first, and the topics or authors the users don’t care for will be hidden from view.

·       Provide localized news, weather, events, and entertainment for different regions of the country.

·       Overall, tie content directly to community.

People are what makes a community great.  A very successful community creates a special place in a lot of people’s hearts.

Moderator Responsibilities

Some factors to consider for the moderator:

·       Your task is to identify the goals of your community, select an appropriate editorial voice for your content, and then produce content with the same tone that you want to hear from your users.

·       Introduce yourself.  Who are you and what’s your background?  (This is especially important if you are the moderator or voice host of the community.  The more self-revealing the better.)

·       Personally describe the community project.  What is it about? What is the intent and what do you hope to achieve?

·       As a moderator, pick something you’re passionate about.

·       Pay close attention to the emotional tone your voice content strikes.  Your content leads by example, and you can be sure that the audience will respond in kind. Speak to them, not at them.

·       Be personal.  Remind the community that their hosts and leaders are people too.  Introduce yourself and mention personal elements from your life.

·       Be nice and patient as the moderator.

·       Be inclusive in considering topics.  The best content for your website is the content that comes out of your community.  You can create ways to feature exemplary community generated content.

·       Be honest with your information you choose to share.

DESIGN MATTERS

·       Design for your audience.  Identify and profile your audience before you even start the visual design process. Who are these people?  What do they like?

·       Design for flexibility.  Consider large text for visually impaired or avoiding color combinations like red on black for colorblind people.  Allow people to change the font size in their browser and design the page to look good in an increased font size.

·       Look at your site the way the user does-as an experience, with a beginning, middle, and end.  The first few pages should be welcoming and explanatory.  The middle of the experience should contain the main content and functionality.  The end should provide closure. It’s the experience that’s most important in web design, not the individual pages.

·       Design for simplicity.  Too much information can confuse the purpose of the community.

·       Design for readability.  Nice high contrast difference between he text color and the background.  Narrow column of text-news paper style.  Use 5-10 words per line.