KimChapter1

Discussion leader/summarizer: PaulResnick

Key Points/Claims

From the perspective of both the community owner and the community participants, there must be a clear "purpose". These purposes may be different.

Page 5 offers a couple of frameworks for thinking about

Be prepared for the community to change. First: family, work, play, spirituality, politics. Second, based on what members will have in common: geography, demographic characteristics, topic, activitity.

There's an analogy to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where basic needs must be fulfilled before people pay attention to the next level of needs. These levels, in an online community, are:

1. physiological: system access; the ability to maintain one's identity, and participate in the community
2. security and safety: protection from hacking and personal attacks; the sense of having a "level playing field"
3. social: Belonging to the community as a whole, and to subgroups within the community.
4. self-esteem: The ability to contribute to the community, and be recognized for these contributions.
5. self-actualization: The ability to take on a community role that develops skills and opens up new opportunities.

There's a planning exercise beginning on page 10. For members, the steps are to understand who they are, make a list of their needs, and then prioritize which of those your community is going to meet. For owners, the steps are similar. Next, you need to articulate the vision, and create two versions of the mission statement, for internal and external consumption.

For a web-based community, it's useful to have a tagline that embodies the vision of the audience and purpose of thecommunity.

Conveying a backstory is very helpful. The backstory is the story of what happened before the communty came into existence, why it was formed, and what happened it its very early days. (At eBay, the backstory begins with Pierre Omidyar's girlfriend's love of Pez dispensers.) The backstory can be explicitly written down, but it's also helpful if there are symbols which will remind members of the backstory and prompt members to retell the backstory to newcomers in explaining the symbols.

Critique

It's not clear whether the purpose of the community, from the perspective of its members, needs to be shared or whether it needs to be easily articulated by either the members or some outside analyst. It could be that the purpose of the community differs among members, but their needs are complementary, such as in a Q&A site, where questioners need answers but answerers need something else (validation?).

The two breakdowns of types of purposes are probably not exhaustive. What other kinds of purposes can you think of? Is there any better categorization scheme you can come up with for the purposes?

It's hard to know where to start in critiquing the Maslow hierarchy. If we ignore the analogy, it's not a bad list of needs, or at least desirable features. But, as with the original hierarchy, it's highly questionable whether these needs actually form a hierarchy, where one level has to be met before energy can be devoted to the next level. For example, one can start to take on a community role even if there is no protection from hacking or personal attacks.

The idea of the mythic backstory seems quite powerful and fits with on-line communities I've seen.

Connections with other readings, ideas, etc.

The focus on audience in the planning exercise fits with PowazekChapter1, but he then focuses on content (what will people talk about) whereas Kim focuses on purpose (why will people want to participate). Which do you think is more important?