Slashdot Mirror
Design For Community
Since this is at heart a 'how to' book Powazek arranges the chapters in a sensible manner leading the potential community-builder through a series of potential decisions. One of the strengths of the book is Powazek's clear-headed take on the need for community elements in a website, and the first chapter counsels the potential designer to seriously consider whether building an online community is really the best use of his resources. Following chapters range from the sublime to the mundane, including design elements, programming tools to consider, interaction policies, moderation and finally when to know the community is dead. That last element is often neglected in books on building online communites, and is handled with unexpected candor and grace here.
Feature building advice given in this book is typified by Powazek's treatment of design as an element of building online community. When building features for interaction into your website, the following principles need to be considered:
- Design for your audience
- Design for flexibility
- Design for your experience
- Design for simplicity
- Design for readability
- Design for beauty
With each exhortation the author offers screen capture and narrative examples of people who have done it well and poorly. Other features like policies and moderation also are broken into these easily digestible, rarely contentious pieces intended to allow the casual user to consider the options for building community without feeling overwhelmed by issues involved. (As a facetious aside, I thought the designs for both kvetch and fray were terrible, but "do as I say, not as I do").
The real strength of each chapter is the interview with a Real Life (tm) community builder who describes an experience that provides support for the chapter. For example, the chapter on moderation includes examples of what is done at Slashdot, and then an email interview with Rob Malda in all of his curmudgeonly glory. Other interviews include, but are not limited to, Steven Johnson (FEED and Plastic.com) talking about design, Emma Taylor (nerve.com) on barriers to entry and Matt Williams (amazon) on commerce communities. Each community-builder gives a little blurb on what they do, and then goes on to some fairly decent reflections on what it means to run an online community. It ain't all rosy "Love Thy Neighbor" crap, and the narratives really help illustrate the real and solid design issues involved.
What's Good?
The narrative, as mentioned above, makes for compelling reading. Powazek seems to have really done some thinking on the issue, and the practical tone is a nice counterbalance to the Rheingoldian tradition of lionizing online communities. All books (well, this type anyway) are very dependent on audience. If you are a person who is just beginning to think about adding interactive elements to a site that you are running, or want to convince your boss to do the same, this is a very well put together book that addresses the major practical issues.
What's Bad?
The counterbalance to the above statement is that if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but...' will come often to mind. Also, Powazek speaks with the voice of Authority to comfort his intended audience, but in reality the jury is still out on a lot of the benefits of different features in online communities, as well as the value added of user interaction in the first place. Correctly for this style of book, Powazek does not address those issues, but if they are your main interest, you may be driven mad by their absence here.
So What's In It For Me?
If you are thinking of starting an online community, you should get this book. The descriptions of major considerations, with examples from the realities of what's been done before, will be a helpful starting place, though by no means the end of your research. If you are not going to start a community, or are already embroiled in one, this book still has quite a bit to offer. The interviews with various community builders makes for fascinating reading, and could be expanded into a book all its own. Overall, this is not a revolutionary work redefining our concepts of virtual community, nor does it want to be. It is a handy book on designing online interactions, with compelling examples and rich narratives that make for a quick, fun read.
Reviewer notes:Cliff is a doctoral student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His research involves self-organizing websites, online deliberation and social captial effects of persistent online interaction. He can be reached at cacl@umich.edu
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I am trying to build a community educational web site. The idea is pretty basic: open up education so that people can participate fully as learners, educators and "accreditors". I've taken inspiration from slashdot as well as other community web sites. Problem is: it's not very "sticky" and this is because its kinda complicated and a tiny bit hard to use. I don't have the resources right now to totally fix that, although I have ideas. Please check it out: Oomind Open Education Community. I've even got an e-commerce aspect so that once it gets going a bit, people can actually earn money from their contributions. Check out The Philosophy of Oomind for some background thoughts as well. This is a blatant plug: I would really love to get lots of people using it, and particularly contributing to it!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Powazek is an extremely well-regarded member of the online community. Unfortunately, I'm not sure about the future of online communities. Banner revenue has been in free-fall for months, and online communities have the unfortunate side effect of encouraging users to hang around, view many (often dynamically created) pages, and ask for more features.
The online community community ends feeling like the guy who threw a party and a thousand people showed up. It's great to be popular, but who the hell is going to pay for this?
What I guess I'm trying to say is that a rationalization or consolidation is in order for the online communities of today. I wouldn't get used to the concept of a full-featured online community, (Slashdot included) because I have a feeling that most of them will be collapsing under the weight of their own successes.
Check out the book's online community.
Excerpts, discussions and more!!
As someone who works for a company whose speciality is online communities, I can attest that banner ad revenue is falling but that is by no means the end of online communities. Remember, not everyone is out to make money fast like now.
The best place for them is for non-profits and governmental organizations who want to communicate, educate, or do something related online. If your audience is more targeted, you don't have the Slashdot effect for your community--for example, not just a website for youth involvement, but one for youth leaders who are organizing other youth to do things (that's a real-world example).
Obviously, it's not all we do, and we're moving into other areas, but it's still a part of what we do and it's working for our clients (or we wouldn't be in business--we're self-financed).