Community Building On The Web

There's a raft of books about building online communities, but Amy Jo Kim's Community Building On The Web is one of the best. From Net Noir to Ultima Online, she goes a long way towards laying out what makes successful communities work. (Read more).

Community Building On the Web
author	Amy Jo Kim
pages	352
publisher	Peachpit Press
rating	7/10
reviewer	Jon Katz
ISBN	0-201-87484-9
summary	the nuts and bolts of building good community sites

I've read a raft of books on community-building on the Web in the past few years, and Amy Jo Kim's Community Building: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities may be the best one yet.

A long-time online community designer and founder of Naima, a design studio specializing in creating Web communities, Kim has worked for AOL, Adobe, eBay, iVillage, MTV, Sony, Yahoo, and Nickelodeon.

It's easy to see why. She writes clearly and authoritatively, and has culled valuable lessons about what works in building Web communities and what doesn't. As she rightly points out, community building is one of the toughest online tasks to pull off, from hostiles to competition to wary visitors, and there's some urgency about figuring out how to do it.

By 2010, she predicts, people won't even refer to "Web communities" anymore. The ubiquity and bandwidth of online communities and the standardization of Net protocols will make the Web as pervasive as the telephone or TV. Though I'm not sure I agree about bandwidth, which shows no sign yet of having the infrastructure to entice the mainstream population.

Online communities will be viewed less as isolated destinations, more as ways to meet people, stay in touch with families, do work, buy things, without doing anything more remarkable than making a phone call. This process is already underway, Kim says, as towns, schools, families, peers, and colleagues use the Web to stay in touch, do research, and share information. She points to gaming clubs as a model: communities first coalesce online, then share photos and videos, hear each other's voices, and make plans for face-to-face meetings.

Kim draws from some of the most effective websites -- Ultima Online, eBay, Slashdot (she cites the moderation systems here as a model way to control free-wheeling discussions, and to identify and promote leadership within communities), Women.com, GeoCities, MomsOnline, NetNoir, Third Age, The Motley Fool, Heat.neat, Mplayer, iVillage -- to make her case that there are three enduring principles to building successful communities:

Designing for growth and change.

Balancing the efforts of management with the ideas, suggestions and needs of members, giving members a progressively larger role to play in maintaining the culture and building the site.

Design for growth and change.

Kim is also tough on etiquette: lay down crystal clear rules of behavior, make sure people read them, and enforce them.

Every community faces a core issue, she points out: member freedom versus quality control. Balancing those sometimes competing values is one of the toughest tasks in community-building on the Web.

Kim also discusses the way successful communities develop and maintain unique personalities. Net Noir, for instance, highlights a different member on its home page each day to make it clear that the site is aimed at African-Americans (particularly singles). Other successful sites find their own ways to signal audiences what they're about.

Especially interesting and useful is the way in which Ultima Online turns each member's profile into a multi-faceted, ever-changing window into his or her online persona. (She reproduces a closeup of "Sosostris," whose clothes, skill levels and knapsack contents tell us that this character is a sophisticated player.

Convincingly organized, Community Building on the Web focuses on nine design strategies, from developing leadership programs to spawning member-run subgroups.

Community Building covers a ton of ground. In addition to being useful, the book is also a mirror into the culture and future -- even the anthropology -- of online communities.

However the Web does or doesn't evolve, the failure or success of these communities will shape the future of the Net and the Web. This book will help people who want to try.

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You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.