Building Online Communities Article

I found an article on building online communities at the OReilly network and found that it had a lot of interesting pointers. According to the article, before even building an online community, you should understand about how they work. The first step to creating the community is to know why your site exists. The author says that you should have a positive, solid, goal for your site to attract users. Without that, they won't know what they are there for and will be turned away. The next point is that users draw other users. Users refer other users, and without a solid community, potential members will not want to join since it will seem like no one else wants to. In healthy online communities the users thrive and volunteer to help with the site. They comment and in a way start to take over the site for themselves by promoting and using the content. Many users have a history on the internet, and are interested in the history of a community, knowing if it has been positive or not. There will be a few users that will voice their opinion about how they don't like the site, but many will be positive, and it is those users that you should pay attention to. The author discussed the barrier of having a customer create an account. A lot of users don't want to have to go through the process, and prefer to reply anonymously, but users like the idea of having members with accounts who will come back and participate often. The creator should make a list of rules to prevent too much mischief from going on at the site, and remember to always discuss the community openly so that change does not come as a shock. Users can be surprising, and you can never really tell how well a community will take off.

I thought this article had a lot of helpful hints in it. I would like to look more deeply into the sites mentioned in it to see how communities work there. One community I could think of that I am in is FaceBook. When the creators made the big change of adding a news feed, the community was mad, and many expressed it through the site. This shows how the community pushes what should and should not be done on a site. The creators should have had a discussion forum set up to tell about changes that would be made before they went and did it. Once you have a strong community, it is important to keep the members while still trying to attract new ones. As I continue researching for my project, I will have to think more about who I think would be in my community and how I could create a space for them to flourish.