KonzeptioNerd

Community Building with Amy Jo Kim

At eight real-world years, amy Jo Kim’s “Community Building on the Web” should be of interest mostly as a socio historical document. But Kim’s advice is still valid for the second wave of online communities - and not only because everyone’s still quoting her left and right. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point for thinking about online communities.

Like Hafner, Kim views online communities as an extension and possibly a gradual replacement of “real life” community structures, focusing on places, events and lifecycles of tangible individuals:

In the traditional sense, “community” refers to a group of people who live in proximity to each other - in the same tribe, village or town. The Internt makes it dramatically easier to meet and get to know people who may live far away, but with whom we share some special affinity; this means that our online “neighbors” can be people who share our interests, rather than our ZIP code. More and more, people are using the Web to recreate the network of relationships that once existed in a small town; they’re meeting fellow hobbyists and fanatics, connecting with colleagues and clients, getting advice and support during life transitions, and staying in touch with family and friends.” (312)

- a very literal projection of the Global Village.

While her examples from popular community sites of the late 1990s seems rather quaint today, her visualizations of the lifecycles and hierarchies of online communities are still helpful as a first structured approach to the topic in hand.

Key concepts from the introduction:

• Define and articulate your PURPOSE
• Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES
• Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES
• Design for a range of ROLES
• Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program
• Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE
• Promote cyclic EVENTS
• Integrate the RITUALS of community life
• Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS
• and, finally, DESIGN for GROWTH and CHANGE

(pp.xiii-xv)

To attract members and keep them coming back, your community must serve a clear purpose in their lives. And to get the support and resources to keep it running, your community must deliver a satisfactory return on investment of those who fund and maintain it. (2)

Kim’s definition of the term community (note how she does not define online community):

A community is a group of people with a shared interest, purpose or goal, who get to know each other better over time. By this definition [...] the scattered collection of people who watch Star Trek reruns each week aren’t really a community, because they have no way to communicate with each other. The Trekkies who meet up at conventions, fan sites, and mailing lists, however, could become a community, because they can get to know each other better over time. (28)

Community building strategy: “Start small and focused” (66)

“People may come to your community for the content, but they’ll stay for the relationships [...].” (76)

There is also a strong emphasis strategic management and planning with little regard to the self-cleansing powers of especially online communities. See e.g. page 218, “Tools And Rules” where Kim explictly downplays self-management for governance.

Kim’s approach is very much informed by developmental psychology and is certainly an enlightning angle to take on online communities. It does not (and cannot), however, take into account more recent developments, as the increasingly nomadic outlook of internet users and the commodity online communities have become. Kim herself closes with a look to the future:

In this book, you’ve gotten an overview of what’s happening in Web communities circa 2000. But the Internet is a dynamic and rapidly evolving environment - Web communities will look and operate quite differently in 2001, and even more so in 2010. In fact, I’ll bet that by then people won’t even speak of “Web communities” anymore - the ubiquity and bandwidth of online communications and standardization of online protocols will make the Web as pervasive as the telephone or television. (351)

It’s interesting enough that we’re still speaking of “Online Communities”. Perhaps that’s because the connections we make online and the way we communicate online are indeed different to what we do when we’re deeply rooted in a ZIP code. Less commited, more anonymous, aggregated, bookmarking. Very much unlike the local pub.

Amy Jo Kim, Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities (On the Web), Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2000. 360 pages. ISBN 0-201-87484-9.

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