Providing Tools to Builders of Online Communities

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Providing Tools to Builders of Online Communities
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Online Community Defined

• Any group of people who (would) use the internet
  to mediate (some of) their communications.
• Examples of internet group mediation
  technologies
• Mailing lists
• Discussion groups
• Web pages (one-way), weblogs (blogs)
• Instant messaging
• Freeport has much of this -- but for people using
  VT100s, not for people using browsers

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Who are Community Builders?

• Online communities are probably initiated by
  people comfortable with technology and wishing to
  provide a service for others (eg., a windsurfer
  creating a web page that grew into Ottawas
  windsurf page)
• Historically, initiators were probably technology
  enthusiasts/hobbyists (geeks) but now the tools
  are easier (eg., CommunityZero, Yahoo, MSN, etc).
  Theyre probably still enthusiasts but the bar
  is much lower.

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Examples of Communities

• Ottawa Windsurfers
• Sandy Campbells extended family
• Pats Boating in Canada
• Not-for-profit organizations
• City of Ottawa Official Plan web site
• Anyones home page
• Teams working together (eg., this one) who would
  benefit from a sharable contained history of
  their work and discussion
• The guy using NCF to sell his software

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What Community Builders Need

• To figure out what community initiators might
  want, we can
• Think about what you would want if you were
  creating a community, ie., introspect
• Look at what commerical community hosts provide,
  eg., Yahoo, CommunityZero, ie., learn from others
  (copy and leapfrog)
• Ask current NCF community initiators what they
  want
• I recommend looking at what other community hosts
  have done and then verifying it against personal
  and local desires. I suspect the set of
  desired/required services is small and fairly
  obvious (because this is a mature offering,
  commercially).

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Commercial Community Hosts

• Yahoo! GeoCities
• Yahoo! Groups
• Ramius (CommunityZero)
• AOL
• MSN (Microsoft)
• Many more
• (in the slides that follow, if you follow the
  links of only one, Yahoo! GeoCities is the best)

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Yahoo! GeoCities

• Your home on the web
• Starts at 5 per month for a site (20/mo for
  features like PHP, etc)
• Main page http//geocities.yahoo.com/
• Feature list (worth reading) http//geocities.ya
  hoo.com/ps/learn/Explain.html
• Comparison chart of Yahoo offerings
  http//geocities.yahoo.com/ps/learn/CompChart_Plus
  ProWebmAdv.html

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Ramius (CommunityZero)

• Features http//www.ramius.net/solutions-features
  .cfm

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AOL

• Hometowns
• Main page http//hometown.aol.com/
• Details (there seem to be problems clicking
  around if not a member) Click on
  http//hometown.aol.com/flanker.adp and then
  click on Build better pages and then Advanced
  Features for feature list
• Looks like most features are not supported (I get
  a redirect to a cnet help page, implying that
  AOL is using a branded service from cnet?)

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NCF needs Discussion Groups

• NCF has a glaring hole there is no way to host
  browser-based two-way discussions at NCF
• By adding discussion groups, NCF would have a
  fairly complete offering
• Many sites have discussion groups and call it
  community

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Desirable Discussion Group Features

• Browser-based
• User-managed
• Access control
• Embed-able in web page
• For more detail, refer to discussionGroups.html