community, identity & science / fiction.

Recently in the betahaus Café I spoke with a friend about what makes up a community.

He is a filmmaker and he said he was mainly interested in working already existing, strong networks of people. People, perhaps, sharing the same space, such as the betahaus for example. At betahaus, people may not all work on the same things, and they may each have entirely different points of view, but they bump into each other on the stairway, eat the same food in the betacafé and read the same books and announcements while waiting for the constantly jammed elevator. Although not every individual knows all other individuals in this network, the interconnectivity is very high.

Interconnectivity through a shared space with physical boundaries – kind of like a village with only one bar, one supermarket, a limited number of bus stops and even fewer busses to take you into the next larger town.
Except people aren’t born in the betahaus, they choose to come there because of the benefit of the specific infrastructure it offers.

Needless to say, we both soon agreed shared space doesn’t need to be a physical space. Space is a metaphor: wherever people bump into each other, riding along on a shared infrastructure of vlaues, words, and technologies, there is a shared space.

The interconnectivity – and thus strength and efficiency – of a network rises as more and more bumps occur. A few days later another friend told me about his experience studying at the d-school in Potsdam. He complained that he felt that in his second semester, the general atmosphere and sense of mutual inspiration declined. Not because his fellow students were more boring or the staff less motivated: simply because the second semester of studies took place in a new building. The new space, he said, was simply too large. Two stairways directed the flow of people in a circle, so that they never ran into each other. The architecture wasn’t designed to create “bumps” – and apparently, those bumps were relevant.

For those who professionally builds or manages online communities, I think the metaphor of creating a space or a shared infrastrucutre that allows for frequent bumps is one which can help us build stronger and ultimately more effective communities.

How can we establish a more differentiated discourse in community management?

I’ve sometimes found it frustrating to discuss online communities and community management because there’s a tendency to keep things too general, resulting in commonplace observations because we’re comparing apples with pears.

Online communities differ vastly in their purpose and formal structure, and so does the community management’s role within an organization.

Right now, it seems, any sort of effort to open up towards an audience/users (i.e. company facebook page) or creating opportunities for online interaction (i.e. dating platform) seems to pass off as an online community.

And they all are, somehow. So perhaps we need a vocabulary to distinguish types of online communities, allowing for more specialized discussions?

Typology along axis of motivation

Obviously, I’m not the first one to think about this. Richard Millington proposes 4 types of online communities, along the axis of motivation (What are reasons for people to join communities).

1. Leisure
2. Relationships
3. Fix something
4. Self-Improvement

This is somewhat useful when trying to understand how communities work and why people contribute to them, but does not really help to differentiate type of online communities because most communities adress more than one of these motivators and the boundaries are too fluid.

Typology along axis of formal strcuture

This typology by Ed Mitchell on the other hand is extremely useful: a typology along the axis of formal structure. Ed Mitchell sees three types of communities:

1. Centralized: one space, one login (exclusive, limited to others)
2. Decentralized (one space, multiple login options)
3. Distributed: using a range of (standard) spaces: facebook, twitter etc. to build community)

This distincition is useful because it helps us understand what type of skills a community manager will need to employ. Will she be working with a custom backend, involved in shaping user management, platform features, and reading community-specific data? Or will she be working mainly with social media tools, listening and reacting to dirstributed conversations and analyzing its impact?

Typology along axis of trust and editorial involvement of members

It took me a while to get Rachel Hinman’s typology, but once I did it turned out to be a rather interesting perspective. Her approach is to look at the level of trust and freedom of the members in an online community (“freedom” vs. ‘editorial shepherding’ by community “owners”)

In her words, an “inner circle” community would be one in which members create all the content, have administrative rights and are (more or less) self-governing. A “Brands that resonate” community is one in which a strong brand invites customers/users to interact with content along the lines of what resonates with the brand, and on their terms. And of course, there are shades in between.

Typology along axis of purpose

Lasty, I’m proposing my own typology, one in which I sort online communities by their purpose. asking the question of what function they have and who participates.

1. Peer-to-peer Community: fan forums, special interest communities
2. Community revolving around editorial/authored/branded content
3. Customer Relations/Support: managing technical support and feedback with community elements
4. Innovation/Ideation Community: solving problems, improving products
5. “platforms”, allowing any type of user generated content to be published i.e. youtube, flickr: are these even communities?

That’s it for now – will develop that thought next week.

The unlikelihood of community.

The idea of community seems oddly outdated. Where individualistic values rule, traditional frameworks loose their grip, and an impenetrable mess of identities, philosophies and styles should result. All things in common would dwindle down to an absolute zero, a point at which one language is understood by one person, and one person only. This would be a very limited, trapped existence.

What’s there to counter hyper-individualism? There’s no way we’re returning to life-plans predetermined by family, religion or gender. But sliding towards cultural absolute zero is equally absurd. Instead, communities of interest emerge, less binding, less constant than the geographical and rigid communities our poor ancestors were strapped to for a lifespan.

A global network recognizes and connects the faintest synchronicity of interests, matches similar words in strange dialects and says: “If you like A, you might wanna say hi to B”. Our communities are voluntary, temporary, and found when asked for.