community

Defining Online Community

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:

community, jive software, podcast

How to Structure a Community

Last week, I posted a piece on the Jive Talks blog with ideas for how to structure a community:

If you want a community (internal or external) where social productivity can be optimized, you need to put quite a bit of thought into how the community will be structured. In addition to productivity concerns, this initial structure can also impact the adoption of your new community. The challenges include how much or how little structure should be provided and then what kind of promotion/coaching/training should follow the initial implementation. The amount of structure falls into three main categories: emergent, highly structured, and adaptive.

In the post, I go into more detail about the pros and cons of each of the three types of structures (emergent, highly structured, and adaptive). I thought some of the Fast Wonder readers might also be interested in reading it. The full content of the post is on the Jive Talks blog.

I also have a Fast Wonder podcast on the topic of community structure that should go out sometime this weekend.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

General

Off the Grid

I will be mostly off the grid as of this evening and not returning to the wired world until the 27th. Instead, I will be hanging out with family in a very rural area of Ohio for the holidays.

My internet access will be limited to what I can get on my cell phone.

If you need something related to Legion of Tech, Ignite, or other community tech event stuff, Todd will be around during the holidays.  When he isn’t visiting his family here in Portland, he’ll probably be spending time watching violent (non-Dawn approved) movies and eating lots of meat 🙂

community, ignite, ignite portland, legion of tech, portland

Ready for Ignite Portland on Feb 5?

Our last Ignite Portland was so awesome that we decided to do another one on Tuesday, February 5th!

If you missed the last event, take a look at the videos and presentations on the Ignite Portland site. After seeing them, you WILL want to attend this event!

Want to Attend?
Tuesday, February 5th
Time: 6:00 – 9:00pm
Bagdad Theater 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97214
Admission is always FREE
RSVP on Upcoming

Want to Sponsor?
We had ~300 people at the last event, and we hope to have more at this one. Ignite Portland is only as good as our sponsors – our ability to provide food, beverages, etc. is only possible because of the generous sponsorships of local companies! If you are interested in sponsoring, contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky at gmail).

Want to Present?
We will have the presentation idea submission form up soon, but for now, start thinking about an awesome presentation that will wow the audience in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds!

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

community

Who "Owns" the 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:

barcamp, barcampportland, community, ignite portland, legion of tech, portland

Legion of Tech

I’ve been hinting about a non profit organization that a few of us have been working on for a while. Today, we received confirmation of our Oregon non profit incorporation status. Keep in mind that we are not (and may never become) a 501(c) (3) tax-exempt organization (we will file for it, but ultimately the IRS makes this decision).

The organization is called Legion of Tech, and the purpose of this organization is to

  1. Grow and nurture the local Portland technology community through educational, not-for-profit, community-run events.
  2. Make it easier for community members to organize technology events.
  3. Provide resources and assistance for technology community events.

Ignite Portland, BarCamp Portland, and Startupalooza will all fall under this organization. You can read our complete bylaws and see who is on the board of directors on our website.

Note: we are still in the early stages of designing a logo. If you have some mad design skills and want to design a logo for a good cause … in other words for free 🙂 … just let us know!

community, ignite realtime, jive software, jivespace

Community Roles: Manager, Moderator, and Administrator

I was asked an interesting question last week about the best ways to divide the community manager role into separate manager, moderator, and administrator roles. In my role as community manager at Jive, I act in all three roles under the broader title of community manager with plenty of help from the web development team on the administrative side and participation from development and product management with answers to questions.

In small to medium sized communities, I suspect that a single person typically performs all three roles. In most cases, and in my case, the community manager also performs the moderation functions. If the community gets enough traffic, it would probably make sense to have a separate moderator role to handle the load. This question got me thinking about how the roles might be divided for very large communities.

If you were going to break them out into separate positions, I have two scenarios (although there are probably many more):

Scenario 1: The Enormous Community

In reality, I suspect that these would only be full time jobs for 3+ people in a large community.

  • Community Moderator: The moderator or moderators would focus on day to day responsibilities for the community. Reading the threads, making sure that the right people are answering questions, moving threads when posted in the wrong place, dealing with spammers, and other day to day maintenance in the community.
  • Community Manager: This person would be responsible for the overall direction of the community. They would be responsible for content plans, content creation, determining new functionality, and evolving the community.
  • Community Administrator: This person (or team) would be responsible for the software and other technical aspects on the community (maintenance, upgrades, implementing new features, etc.)

Scenario 2: The Medium to Large Community

For most medium sized communities and for new communities, I would start with this approach and then further separate the roles as community growth required more focused time commitments.

  • Community Moderators: Subject matter experts responsible for a specific area within the community as part of their regular job. For example, the product manager might be responsible for the feature requests area within the community. Moderation would be a small part of several people’s jobs. In this role of community moderator as expert, they would stimulate discussion by responding thoughtfully to posts and starting new discussions to get feedback on ideas or get the community thinking about a specific topic. It would also be good to have them blogging in the community within their areas of expertise.
  • Community Manager: This person would be responsible for the overall direction of the community – probably a full-time job. They would be responsible for content plans, content creation, determining new functionality, and evolving the community, but would also be focused on day to day responsibilities for the community. Reading the threads, making sure that the right people are answering questions, moving threads when posted in the wrong place, dealing with spammers, and other day to day maintenance in the community. The community manager would make sure that the community moderators are keeping up with their assigned areas.
  • Web developer / administrator: Unless your software is an extremely complex or custom solution, it probably makes sense to have one of your web developers or admins also administer the community software.

I think that what I have said above is probably more applicable to corporate communities; however, I think that these roles are similar in other types of communities. For example, in open source communities, community members typically pick up most of the moderation role in an informal capacity. This is certainly the case with the Ignite Realtime community – most of the moderation is really done by the community, and I usually only step in for any larger issues. I suspect that this is also true for social communities as well.

In general, there is probably quite a bit of overlap between community administrator, manager, and moderator. I would be curious to hear about how other people have successfully (or not so successfully) broken out the role of community manager.

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

community, podcast, reputation

Fast Wonder Podcast: Reputation in Communities

I just released the second Fast Wonder Community podcast today, Reputation Systems in Online Communities. In this episode, we talk about best practices and ideas for using reputation within online communities along with different types of reputation systems and using community reputation for rewards and hiring from within the community.

If you have any suggestions for people you would like to see interviewed on a future podcast, please let me know!

You can also subscribe to the Fast Wonder Community Podcast via RSS or iTunes.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

FastWonderPodcast, podcast

Episode 2: Reputation Systems in Online Communities

This episode contains the second of four recordings made during a recent discussion I led at the December Portland Web Innovators meeting. In this edition, I lead a discussion about best practices and ideas for using reputation within online communities. We talk about different types of reputation systems and using community reputation for rewards and hiring from within the community.

Downloads:

The next edition in this series of four podcasts from the Portland Web Innovators meeting talks about ideas for structuring new online communities. After these initial four podcasts, I am planning to switch to an interview format (via skype most likely), so if you are doing something really cool with your online community, please let me know! I am open to suggestions for potential interviews.

You may have also noticed the link to iTunes in the sidebar. iTunes is my preferred way to get podcasts, so I thought that I would include the link for any others who want to subscribe.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.