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Preece2000: Preece, J. (2000).
Online communities. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. (What is an online community, pp 5-19). [available
here∞]
Discussion leader/summarizer:
PaulResnick
Key Points/Claims
"An online community consists of:
- People, who interact socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform special roles, such as leading or moderating
- A shared purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or service that provides a reason for the community
- Policies, in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules, and laws that guide people's interactions
- Computer systems, to support and mediate social interaction and facilitate a sense of "togetherness"
Online communities are neither designed nor do they just emerge. Design choices can influence, but not control, how people behave.
Critique
The definition captures much of what we're going to study in the course.
It's not quite crisp enough for my tastes. For example, "satisfy their own needs" does not seem like a parallel concept to "perform special roles".
The definition doesn't explicitly require interaction with the same people occurring over time, though perhaps that's implicit. It also doesn't explicitly require any notion of membership in a collective entity, which I probably would require as part of my basic definition.
Connections with other readings, ideas, etc.
In this class, we are going to focus mostly on what Preece refers to as "sociability", not "usability". We will take "usability" for granted.
There are a number of references to Wellman and the idea of social networks; these are covered better in our discussion of
Wellman2001.