Wildfalcon

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about online communities. Not just the technology that allows them, but what exactly is their role. No doubt this has been inspired by my recent work on Paso, a replacement web based online community tool for IVDA.

My friend James pointed me in the direction of Joel Spolsky, who has written a bit about how the tools provided by an online community can have a drastic effect on its culture, and its sociology. For example, putting a “reply” button at the end of a thread rather than the beginning increases the likelihood of people actually reading the thread before replying.

From there, I did a little bit of research about Ray Oldenburg, who has written a book, The Great Good Place, in which he talks about a “Third Place”, somewhere other than work or home for people to gather, and be social. Joel Spolsky pointed out that more and more online communities are becoming a “Third Place” for people. This strikes me as both very true, and very unfortunate. I find that an online community, such as UDS is capable of providing enough social interaction to remove the feeling of loss that can otherwise drive people out in search of a Third Place, but, falls short of providing the social needs that such a place should satisfy. This raises the question, are online communities doomed to be pale shadows of real communities, or have they just not yet reached the point at which they can compare? I think the answer is somewhere in between. They will never (I hope) replace real face to face interaction, but I think the can serve as a great way to maintain social links when its not possible to be physical present, and I think they have much more potential to catalyse real communities. Over the next few months I will be thinking about how this can be achieved in UDS, and no doubt I will be posting some of my thoughts, and maybe even my conclusions here. I would say that the problem of creating viable online communities is no more than 10% solved.

Finally, I would like to point out a talk by Marc Smith, at Microsoft research, who studies online communities, to analyse behaviour patterns. He did a talk that is available on IT conversations. Well worth a listen.

Technorati Tags : “online, communities”, forum, paso, dancing

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