“Community” is one of the web’s most popular buzz words. Ten years ago, we all knew that community on the internet referred to message boards, those (sometimes) sophisticated descendents of computer bulletin boards or listservs. It seemed inconceivable that a wealth of message board networks would not soon take over the internet.
As it happens, they did not.
Sometimes the software was to blame. There are a number of good ways to help people conduct asynchronous conversations on the web (the longer name for “message boards, listservs, and their ilk”). It is surprising how many people haven’t explored what literature there is, and how many ways there are to do things poorly. And when online communities are set up with bad tools, you end up proving what you already knew: bad tools don’t work—and you still don’t know if online community, as instantiated by asynchronous conversations—works, or is right for your organization.
And, ten years ago, talking about such asynchronous conversation—in ASCII, no less–could be understood as synonymous with “online community.” We would have been wrong, but then, we were wrong.
The magic of online community is that people do lots of things. Conversation is one of the things we do together, but as a typical male, I have to point out that there is more to life than conversation worth recording in utf-8. On the web, today, we demonstrate community by sharing factoids about what we are doing, leaving our marks, er, tags, on pictures and other ephemera; sharing ephemera, commenting on blog posts, friending people who sound like the sorts of people who would be our friends in face-to-face life, etc. So, when we talk about community, it is worth remembering that conversation can matter, but also worth remembering that most people don’t have much to say most of the time—but we still hang together in places that feel heimish, or community-like.
This came up here at work recently when we discussed plans for a new wiki project. We want to put materials on the web in wiki form. It seems like the best way to engage a community of people who care about these materials, and to ensure that the materials are kept current and expanded.
But, we are not Wikipedia. Unlike wikipedia, we aren’t online to just gather facts. We want the facts that we, and others, have gathered to be used, to inspire, and to help people want to know more. So, even if we were a larger community, we would still want to do things differently from Wikipedia.
Still, out of the millions of people who use Wikipedia each month, hundreds, maybe thousands participate. If we engage people (is it fair to imply “community” when I really mean, “engage people”?) at the same rate, and we get thousands of visitors a month, then we have 1st, maybe 10s of people contributing. Actually, in our world, getting 10s of the tens of thousands of visitors who visit our site each month engaged would not be a bad result. But it is worryingly low. If I am wrong about 1:1000 of engaged visitors:casual site visitors ratio, then we could have nobody, or so few, that people would feel eternally lonely. (I once thought that we were likely to engage a much higher percentage of people—direct mail marketers, for instance, get a few percent response rate. When we spoke of read:respond ratios on message boards, success implied something approaching parity. Surely an engaged community can do better than 1:1000. But, I don’t yet have proof that this is so, or even proof that with the proper tools, this may be so. Remember that transaction costs have changed—if you were on an old-fashioned computer bulletin board, moving to explore another online world meant dialing a new system, creating a new login, and you were still dealing with ASCII and a computer terminal; in our current online world, one click and one is in a new universe.)
So, I want to engage people more actively. Maybe instead of just wikipedia pages I offer other methods of stickiness—let people comment on the wiki pages (on a bio, for instance, “I wrote a paper that was inspired by this person’s work. here is the URL” or “I have often wondered if this person’s success was due to being born at the right place and right time, or if the ideas would have exploded, regardless.”) and spark conversation. Maybe, instead of comments, we set up a message board—or both, over time (hoping not to diffuse potential conversation so far that nobody notices it when it springs up). Maybe, the ability to tag, to share the pages, email them to friends, comment, or separate conversation boards all create enough means of interaction that we create, first, the appearance of community, and then community (always assuming, of course, that we do our part and prime the pump, make people feel at home, etc.). Or, maybe this is too much. Maybe it is enough to have a wiki, and, if it seems useful and attracts visitors, we add more later, based on how people use the wiki.
What makes an online community? Or, for our purposes, how do we engage a small community around ideas and history (we are, after all, an archive) that matter? What works for you? What have you learned doesn’t work?
