There is an interesting discussion forming on Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy Blog about the best way to define community, which started in Twitter as he was formulating the initial ideas resulting in a blog post.

Jeremiah proposes this definition:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools.

He also points to a definition originating from Jake McKee:

A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.

I actually like elements of both, but am not entirely happy with either definition. Jake’s definition highlights a couple of things I see missing from Jeremiah’s definition. Most notably “shared experiences” and “relationships”, which are more important to me than information. All websites have information in some form or another, but a community takes it one step farther than just sharing information.

Dawn’s Definition of Online Community

I would go with something more like this, which really is just Jeremiah’s definition with a few tweaks based on ideas from Jake’s definition:

An online community is: Where a group of people with similar goals or interests share experiences and build relationships using web tools.

What do you think?

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

• Who “Owns” the Community
• Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator
• Hot Topics in Communities: Reputation Systems
• What Does it Take to Manage a Community?

Jeremiah Owyang recently interviewed Bill Johnston to talk about community ownership. You should take a look at the video before reading the rest of this entry.

I talked to Bill last week here in Portland, and he’s a really sharp community guy. In this case, I think he is mostly right, but a tiny bit wrong in his assessment that marketing should “own” the community (note that he also says that marketing doesn’t quite deserve the right to own it yet until they move past a quarterly campaign focus and into a strategic, long-term relationship building mentality).

First of all, I think that you have to be a little careful about how you use the word ownership. Under a traditional definition of ownership, which is not the definition Bill uses in the video, the community “owns” the community with community defined as all participants (company employees, customers, random fans, etc.) In other words, no one group should feel like they own the community, since that implies a level of control that is mostly an illusion within communities. Doc Searls also posted some similar ideas about brands and social networks, which is related to this discussion, but in a slightly different vein.

However, I do think that marketing should facilitate most customer communities. If you redefine ownership the way Bill does in this video as the people who do the care and feeding of the community to make sure that questions are being answered, the community stays funded, spam gets deleted, content stays fresh, etc., then marketing should probably be the owner of customer communities under this new ownership definition.

However, while this is true for most customer communities, I am not as sure that marketing should own, facilitate, or drive other types of communities. Developer communities and open source communities come to mind as good examples of communities that should be driven out of a technology group not driven by marketing types. I’m sure that a lot of people would disagree with this statement, but I think that developer and open source communities work best when they are created by developers for developers.

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

• Community ROI, Metrics, and Events
• Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator
• Hot Topics in Communities: Reputation Systems
• What Does it Take to Manage a Community?