Building Web Communities, Continued

Amy Jo Kim: "Social scaffolding"

Amy Jo Kim runs a company called Naima which specializes in strategic consulting for community spaces. She is also the author of a soon-to-be-published book on web community-building. Amy Jo spoke recently at Web Design and Development '98 in Boston, and has some valuable insights into community-building.

Defining community

"Community" is becoming an increasingly meaningless term—very much like "interactive." Amy Jo offers a working definition of community to help clarify what it is we are working toward. In her definition, a community is "a group of people who gather together around a shared purpose, activity, or interest." She qualifies this with the statement that people get to know each other better over time, and that some of them will develop personal relationships.

This idea that a community is about people gathering together around "a shared purpose, activity, or interest" helps answer one of the most important questions in community-building: why do people join? Amy Jo asserts that they join to meet a need (such as a social, information, learning, or other need), and that they normally stay because of relationships. As site developers, she advises, we should give some thought to how our community spaces can serve the needs of our population. This provides direction and focus, essential underpinnings of a community space.

"Social scaffolding"

From numerous discussions with web community builders, Amy Jo Kim has outlined nine important elements of successful web communities. These elements are the "social scaffolding" of a community, the structure that allows conversation and collaboration. Amy Jo's nine elements are as follows:

1. purpose

Define and articulate a purpose for your community.

2. places

Provide dynamic "extensible gathering places" that grow over time. Don't lock things into unmaintainable formats.

3. identity

Provide each person with a "persistent and unique member identity" and an evolving member profile (not a static one).

4. roles

Support a spectrum of member roles: visitor, new member, regular, leader, elder. Consider the needs and responsibilities of each.

5. leadership

Moderate conversations, and model desired behavior.

6. etiquette

Communicate rules for good manners.

7. events

Engage in cyclic events (those from "real life" and those of importance to the community).

8. rituals

Engage in rituals and rites of passage: birthdays, elevation to a new member status, and so on.

9. subgroups

Build in subgroups within the overall community. These might be "bottom up" subgroups (like Tripod's Pods, which are member-driven) or "top down" subgroups (such as GeoCities' neighborhoods).

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