Update – Tara’s slides are now available (pdf)

Building Fostering Online Communities

Tara Hunt from the Citizen Agency has just been up on stage here in London, talking about online communities. Many good points, that align with the things we are doing around our developer network. Here are the raw notes, which I need to think about a bit…

what makes a community?

‘a virtual space supported by computer-based it, centred upon communication and interaction of participants to build relationships’ (Lee and Vogel)

personal homepage/profile

personal content creation

ability to interact with the content of others – comments, etc

ability to ‘friend’ and share content

visitor -> customer -> community member

benefits of community

heightened customer loyalty (emotional lock-in)

self-policing

amplified word of mouth

better feedback

stronger and more interesting filters on content

examples of communities

lightweight social processes

- low-barrier social involvement like voting and recording of participation (digg, last.fm, Amazon readers who bought, del.icio.us etc)

collaborative information structures

- developer network

high end collaboration

- groups utilising systems to make sense and share complex materials and data (wikipedia, linux, etc)

common community themes

looked at Flickr, twitter, wordpress, threadless, BarCamp

sense of fun/play important

- have fun. Founders having fun. Playful messages/imagery

keeping dialogue going

- personal use of the product, involved personally in support, greet new customers and welcome them to the site (“if guests come to a party and don’t know anyone, they’ll leave”)

wouldn’t it be awesome if…

- take experimental approach to dev, throw away the business plan and learn to embrace chaos [Flickr the side project to building a game, Google, etc]

the power of word of mouth

- built-in variety of ways to share [invitations to friends, blog widgets, rss, ], participants are creators too [so help them to help you], instead of adding more features add more on-ramps [jabber, email, web-based, sms-based etc in twitter]

involving community in decisions

- listen to your users and be flexible, let the community create the content, put the audience in charge,

simple platforms for building on

- google maps v Yahoo! maps [Yahoo richer application, but Google simpler and easier to build upon - WAY more mashups...], building blocks built by experts and combinable easily by non-experts [Pipes etc], make the platform simple and extensible, provide a simple but rich API, keep it simple and document it openly, focus on one function and do it well

compelling stories

-

rewards for members

- featured members, parties, etc…

Setting fertile ground for your OWN community

motivation [what's in it for THEM]

sense of community [feeling of membership [do I belong/fit ?], feeling of influence [your voice is heard, feedback responsiveness, rule enforcement], integration and fulfilment of need [feeling of being supported by the community, rewards of membership, shared values, feeling of competence - maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff, esp social, self esteem/ego, self-actualisation - karma points, vip status, etc.], shared community feeling [relationships, high quality and frequent interaction, personal investment of time and resources, the effect of honour and humiliation, spiritual bonds - this last level CANNOT BE CREATED - although physical interaction will help, and patience is essential]]

“Fostering healthy communities is complicated, time consuming and requires dedication to your members, but the rewards are high and long term.”

Slides to go up on slideshare.

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