Online Communities

An online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such internet-based social networks. (from Wikipedia).
 

Definitions:Social Networking in Plain English by Common Craft.

Communities: TechSoup Community; KnowHow NonProfit; ICT Knowledgebase.

Networks: The Charity Place; NetSquared; NTEN; NTEN’s Online Community Building Affinity Group (free).

Consultants: Britt Bravo’s Building Your Online Community with MyBlogLog: An Interview with Ian Kennedy post; Kathy Sierra’s How to Build a User Community series; Rohit Bhargava’s 10 Secrets of Successful Online Community; Andrew Cohen’s Characteristics of Successful Online Communities.

Organisations: Non-profit Leadership Institute’s Non-profit Good Practice Guide: Online Community Building through Discussion Boards; Network for Good’s Using Message Boards to Build Community.

Blogs: Common Craft’s Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen post; Beth Kanter’s What, Why, and How of Facebook Pages: An Expertise Roundup from Mari Smith, Jesse Stay, Collin Douma, and Others post.

Tools: LeFora; MyBlogLog; FriendFeed; Ning; Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages.

Publications:Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run a Successful Community Discussion Board by Patrick O’Keefe; Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim; Online Community Handbook: Building Your Business and Brand on the Web by Anna Buss and Nancy Straus.

How to moderate a forum

by Amy

  1. Create your Terms and Conditions to include the legal requirements and stipulations for participation, but also the ‘community’ requirements and stipulations you want your participants to adhere to (things like appropriate behaviour, off-limit topics, and so on). Also include the repercussions for contrary behaviour (will you delete posts that do not adhere to T&C? will you ban a user for continued bad behaviour?).
  2. Empower your participants to start conversations and reply to threads as they see fit (you can use tools to encourage this use by showing recent activity on the site, providing ways for participants to subscribe to RSS or other alerts at new activity, and so on).
  3. When stepping in regarding bad behaviour or other administrator actions, make the actions/communications public and cite the T&Cs specifically.
  4. Encourage participants to self-moderate by giving a certain level of power over the conversation (this can be ways to note whether a comment or topic is flagged for moderation, to vote things up or down in quality/priority/interest, or to attribute a scale or point system to posts and/or users).