Design For Community 56
| Design For Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places | |
| author | Derek M. Powazek |
| pages | 307 |
| publisher | New Riders |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Cliff Lampe |
| ISBN | 0735710759 |
| summary | Good stuff, nice to get the developers perspective. |
Since this is at heart a 'how to' book Powazek arranges the chapters in a sensible manner leading the potential community-builder through a series of potential decisions. One of the strengths of the book is Powazek's clear-headed take on the need for community elements in a website, and the first chapter counsels the potential designer to seriously consider whether building an online community is really the best use of his resources. Following chapters range from the sublime to the mundane, including design elements, programming tools to consider, interaction policies, moderation and finally when to know the community is dead. That last element is often neglected in books on building online communites, and is handled with unexpected candor and grace here.
Feature building advice given in this book is typified by Powazek's treatment of design as an element of building online community. When building features for interaction into your website, the following principles need to be considered:
- Design for your audience
- Design for flexibility
- Design for your experience
- Design for simplicity
- Design for readability
- Design for beauty
With each exhortation the author offers screen capture and narrative examples of people who have done it well and poorly. Other features like policies and moderation also are broken into these easily digestible, rarely contentious pieces intended to allow the casual user to consider the options for building community without feeling overwhelmed by issues involved. (As a facetious aside, I thought the designs for both kvetch and fray were terrible, but "do as I say, not as I do").
The real strength of each chapter is the interview with a Real Life (tm) community builder who describes an experience that provides support for the chapter. For example, the chapter on moderation includes examples of what is done at Slashdot, and then an email interview with Rob Malda in all of his curmudgeonly glory. Other interviews include, but are not limited to, Steven Johnson (FEED and Plastic.com) talking about design, Emma Taylor (nerve.com) on barriers to entry and Matt Williams (amazon) on commerce communities. Each community-builder gives a little blurb on what they do, and then goes on to some fairly decent reflections on what it means to run an online community. It ain't all rosy "Love Thy Neighbor" crap, and the narratives really help illustrate the real and solid design issues involved.
What's Good?
The narrative, as mentioned above, makes for compelling reading. Powazek seems to have really done some thinking on the issue, and the practical tone is a nice counterbalance to the Rheingoldian tradition of lionizing online communities. All books (well, this type anyway) are very dependent on audience. If you are a person who is just beginning to think about adding interactive elements to a site that you are running, or want to convince your boss to do the same, this is a very well put together book that addresses the major practical issues.
What's Bad?
The counterbalance to the above statement is that if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but...' will come often to mind. Also, Powazek speaks with the voice of Authority to comfort his intended audience, but in reality the jury is still out on a lot of the benefits of different features in online communities, as well as the value added of user interaction in the first place. Correctly for this style of book, Powazek does not address those issues, but if they are your main interest, you may be driven mad by their absence here.
So What's In It For Me?
If you are thinking of starting an online community, you should get this book. The descriptions of major considerations, with examples from the realities of what's been done before, will be a helpful starting place, though by no means the end of your research. If you are not going to start a community, or are already embroiled in one, this book still has quite a bit to offer. The interviews with various community builders makes for fascinating reading, and could be expanded into a book all its own. Overall, this is not a revolutionary work redefining our concepts of virtual community, nor does it want to be. It is a handy book on designing online interactions, with compelling examples and rich narratives that make for a quick, fun read.
Reviewer notes:
Cliff is a doctoral student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His research involves self-organizing websites, online deliberation and social captial effects of persistent online interaction. He can be reached at cacl@umich.edu
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Where's The Cash? (Score:5, Insightful)
The online community community ends feeling like the guy who threw a party and a thousand people showed up. It's great to be popular, but who the hell is going to pay for this?
What I guess I'm trying to say is that a rationalization or consolidation is in order for the online communities of today. I wouldn't get used to the concept of a full-featured online community, (Slashdot included) because I have a feeling that most of them will be collapsing under the weight of their own successes.
Not everyone is out to make money (Score:5, Insightful)
The best place for them is for non-profits and governmental organizations who want to communicate, educate, or do something related online. If your audience is more targeted, you don't have the Slashdot effect for your community--for example, not just a website for youth involvement, but one for youth leaders [youthactionnet.org] who are organizing other youth to do things (that's a real-world example).
Obviously, it's not all we do, and we're moving into other areas, but it's still a part of what we do and it's working for our clients (or we wouldn't be in business--we're self-financed).
Collapse? (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter what the economy or state of the net is like, people will gather to talk and interact with each other about a common interest. They'll do it wherever they can and will return frequently providing the atmosphere and interaction keeps their interest. It's one of those circle of life things.
Gimicks and new features are nice, but established communities do not fall because the instant messenger is broken 9 days out of 10, they fall due to a stagnant atmosphere and lack of interesting and stimulating discussion.
Re:Lame (Score:2, Insightful)
Most communities are filling several purposes. Some are artificially nurtured and thrown together in an effort to drive traffic to a site and promote e-commerce. Some are support groups for folks of similar interests. Some are ways for people to work together on projects despite being scattered across a globe. Powazek is attempting to design a set of guiding principles in building and maintaining these different types of communities. Whether or not he succeeded, I'm not certain--but the value of a well maintained community should be obvious to most Slashdotters.
It's much much easier than it sounds (Score:3, Insightful)
(That's cellar.org, not the Image of the Day.)
The big difference is that when I started it, I did it for the community; when you did it, you did it for your employer, who did it for their own reasons, none of which had ANYTHING to do with the community.
I mean COME ON NOW. The community itself cannot be an afterthought.
On my community, there are no ads. There is no business plan. There isn't even a Paypal/Amazon tip jar. Commerce is not the point - is NEVER the point. The community is not about money, nor is it about me as benevolent dictator. The community is about communication. Nothing else matters.
What do people want out of a community? They want security - to know their words aren't going away. They want utility - to know they aren't going to have to wade through copious amounts of spam or other crap to get what they want. They want unfettered access to each other. They don't want to sit there and work out who's making money or whether the post they write is going to be deleted or whether the post they're replying to was written by a marketing bot.
They want reality in droves. They don't fit into a marketing plan. If they do, it's by accident, and next month they won't.
I built a community because my goal in life is to help people communicate using technology, and I am fascinated by the collision of technology and culture. Excite built communities to make a buck. Our online existence is transparent - the people can tell what we're all about and why. Is it not obvious why mine has lived all these years while Excite is gone?
As far as Slashdot's mis-steps on the way to growth: I ask, how much of that is due to losing sight of what is critically important - the community and its vitality? If Slashdot fails, is it because there aren't hundreds of thousands of tech people who deperately want to connect with each other and communicate with each other? Or is it because it now serves a different master?
Wiki as a good starting point (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, the wiki at http://www.c2.com is dedicated to Design Patterns, a general enough audience, and after so many years it is still growing. Last time I checked there were about 18000 pages, all made by outsiders, and almost all well written and quite interesting.
The best way to have your community thrive is to have it as open as possible. IRC is so successful and well-used because anyone can become powerful in their own little corner of the system. While nobody likes the people who go out of their way to stir things up on online communities, their existence does tend to lead to others following after them and tidying their mess up. In the end, there is more traffic, and your site becomes more popular, until there are enough signal producers to make the noise producers ignorable.
Re:in it for the money (Score:3, Insightful)
If however, you're just providing a service for users, then you're going to run into the problems that any for profit outfit will--because you're in it for the money you make from the site, whether or not you expect to earn a profit. So in that sense, there is no difference. In other senses there are.
But hey, if your users are used to getting something for free, behave like an organization and fund-raise from them. Most of the news and community sites I visit that aren't run by organizations are doing that now. It is a big PITA, but hey, it works for PBS.