The virtual community is frequently
described in terms that evoke the "great good place" [1]; i.e, those
public gathering spots that facilitate conversation and social engagement.
Common "place" descriptors for these communities often emphasize
this attribute, modulating the description to match the desired tone: discussion
forum, cyber-cafe, cyber-inn[2]. The
design and creation of "virtual settlements" [3] has typically relied
upon this metaphor to shape the format, organization, and policies that manage
growth and member interaction.
In "Virtual Communities,
Virtual Settlements, and Cyber-Archaeology", Quentin Jones suggests that
the "material remains" of virtual communities could be considered
"virtual tells", the detritus of conversations over long periods
of cyber-conversation. [3] This archaeological approach to virtual community
data stores is discussed further in "What Do Virtual 'Tells' Tell?":
"Archaeology is the study
of humanity's past by the analysis of the material remains of cultures. The
last 200 years has seen archaeology mature into a science. The result of this
change has been a radical shift in Western culture's understanding of both
human history and humanity's relationship with the environment. Archaeologists
have developed sophisticated classification methods to describe artifacts
and other finds. ...We chose archaeology as an analogous field for a number
of reasons. First, Archaeologists focus on cultural artifacts, and we are
interested in focusing on the artifacts of computer mediated communication.
Examples of such artifacts are listserv postings, web site structures, number
of spams, Usenet content, user log, etc." [4]
This view of virtual community
data as artifact--not of interest for itself, but for what it can reveal--is
consistent with "gathering place" metaphor for these spaces, with
goals aligned to that purpose. In a cafe, or a pub, communication and social
exchange is the desired experience; the online construct focuses on the same
outcome, facilitating communication through computer mediation. The exchange record itself is ephemeral, because
in the real world construct, there is no recording mechanism available to
pick up every interaction.
But the online medium provides
an extra facet that can substantially enhance the value of all exchanges.
Once recorded, exchanges can be collected, referenced, arranged and accessed
by anyone. I have found that the data
produced from the communication has considerably more value in addition to
its use as a historical artifact. From my earliest exposure to virtual communities,
primarily online forums, I have viewed the information produced in the gathering
place, through the communication it affords, as an end in itself, and have
identified a concept of place that supports both the process of communication
and the content it creates.
When I first began posting
in online discussion forums in the late 90s, my primary interest was not in
the communal aspects of the forum. I appreciated the ability to interact with
others, but what fascinated me was that the forum housed a tremendous repository
of data that was largely ignored. The forums provided no organized access
to this information, despite storing it all on powerful databases. The information
was available for manipulation or indexing, but the data didn't seem to have
any value to the forum owners or its members. From what I could gather, the
intended purpose of the forum was to facilitate exchange; once the exchange
had occurred, the data's purpose had been met.
I began indexing this information
for general use. The first "publication" was a movie review website,
which I created by converting the many movie reviews that were posted and
never referenced again. Converting the posts to web pages organized by film
name and reviewer was a tedious manual process, but the site was an instant
hit that soon became a point of reference and a much used resource. The number
of reviews posted increased dramatically; more members gave thought to how
their review would appear once "published".
I expanded the effort to include
exchanges by converting them to web pages and indexing them by subject. Many
of the more prolific writers would start linking in the archive to reference
previous discussions. New members would read the archives and comment on them,
introducing a new discussion that built on the original debate. The archives
began showing up in other sites as well, as members who posted in other forums
would link in archived debates to demonstrate a point or make everyone aware
of a context or approach without restating it.
The use of the indexed and
archived information suggests that members see value in the virtual communities
database and will use the information if given an organized access method.
In 1999, I became involved
in designing and creating a new forum, at first focusing primarily on administration
policies and standards. During my association with The Mote (www.themote.com),
I made observations on the extent to which policies and administration can
assist or hinder forum growth and development. I designed
and requested tools that automated
the organization of the forum content, to eliminate aspects of manual indexing--which
by now had become a significant task.
During my years of involvement
with the Mote, I determined that I preferred a forum-centric, rather than
member-centric, approach to policy and administration. A forum-centric approach
dictates that the primary administrative interest is the overall health of
the forum, not the dictates or desires of the user community. This approach
conformed with my emphasis on the forum as a source of content that extended
beyond the communications that created the repository.
This shift affected the paradigm
of "place" that I envisioned for virtual community. Communal gathering
places in the real world are generally
customer-centric, with management explicitly committed to meeting the needs
of the customer base--due to the entirely reasonable assumption that the customers'
satisfaction is the key to a successful community. In a forum, a member-centric
administrative approach focuses on maintaining group cohesion, creating a
friendly and safe place for communication and engagement. Members believe
their comfort and desires are tantamount and that by meeting their needs,
the community is providing the desired service.
In declaring the forum interest
as paramount, the service orientation shifts. The service-oriented delivery is still paramount,
however the focus of the service is the forum, not the members. Rather than
focusing on the specific needs of the current group, the community served
is expanded to all current and potential members. The future of the forum
is more important than the needs of the current group.
By shifting the priority to
the forum, it became easier to address common problems without having to appease
members to accept the outcome. This should not be construed as an indifference
to members; clearly, achieving high quality content is impossible without
satisfied members interacting in the environment that meets their needs. But
administrative authority is a given in most online forums. Members understand
that they won't always be content with the decisions. Changing the administrator's
primary task to protect the forum provides a different framework for decisions,
and prioritizes considerations that otherwise aren't given their due attention.
In July of 2002, I left the Mote to develop a new forum that incorporated many of my ideas. The Perfect World (www.theperfectworld.us) adopts a forum-centric approach and designs the interface to enable a wide range of behavior norms that are documented on the thread level. The forum uses custom software developed by the co-founder. (The title comes from the phrase, "in the perfect world I'd rule".)
The Perfect World has no absolute
behavior requirements. Politeness and respect are not officially recognized
values. Many members are intense, excitable, and extremely rude--and very
often hilarious in tandem. Other members are intimidated by rudeness, or simply
repelled by it. The Perfect World takes no position on behavior and only requires
that members follow the individual thread requirements.
But if TPW is not concerned
with rudeness, it is very attentive to classification issues. Almost all forums
require topicality, but it is often subjected to member preferences. At TPW,
it is a priority.
Topicality and member participation
are highly valued. An off-topic conversation of any real length creates the
following problems:
Creating a new thread for
the new topic will alert other members to the discussion, leave the original
thread for its intended topic, and also create more content that can be found
and referenced later.
This fairly stringent topicality
requirement inevitably receives complaints. However, many members have informed
us that after an initial irritation at the strictness, they appreciate the
fact that threads actually have some relationship to topic. More users find
themselves engaging in topics that they normally wouldn't have found interesting
because they noticed a new thread topic and checked it out--whereas in other
forums the conversation would have just continued on in a thread unobserved
by the majority. New users have mentioned that, despite the forum's extensive
scope, they find it easy to navigate and comprehend.
The forum is still quite new,
and it remains to be seen whether our goals for organization and content will
foster the growth that we've seen thus far.
The Perfect World provides
content by facilitating communication. It prioritizes content production,
but since members are less likely to communicate in a comfortable and congenial
environment, it provides a method to create any environment, rather than focusing
on one limited standard.
A brief conversation with
a mildly disgruntled member spurred the development of a new “place” metaphor
for the forum. The member was unhappy with the topic segmentation; her preference
was to discuss any topic she desired in one or two large threads. This would
provide a more congenial atmosphere. In explaining that the forum was not
her living room, where she knew that her DVDs were filed in reverse chronological
order, but a public facility in which everything was best organized for optimum
access, I mentioned that the forum was analogous to a library--infinite resources
of entertainment and knowledge, but only accessible if the books are filed
in the right order on the correct shelf.
As I responded, I realized that this library analogy was an apt, if incomplete, paradigm of place for virtual communities with any datastore. The paradigm holds even if the community doesn't view it through that lens. The data store guarantees that content is produced. Whether organized or not, the content of the communication is accessible to everyone for review and retrieval. A virtual community is a dynamic library, enabling the creation and organization of content. The communication is the process by which the library grows, not the end in itself.
Since a defining aspect of
the virtual community is content production, one could argue that a more accurate
"place" analogy could be a publishing house, with its emphasis on
production as well as classification. But publishing is a commercial enterprise,
and a library is a community establishment, with rights, responsibilities,
and privileges granted to all users, not just those who wish to buy or can
turn a profit. The library metaphor captures the setting appropriately and
it seems reasonable to extend the metaphor to include community production.
Libraries aren't terribly
sexy, and certainly as a metaphor for "place" it isn't as easy to
market as a bar or cafe. But while conversational organization may seem onerous,
a brief consideration of our regular entertainment purchases reveals that
this is an unfair bias. Entertainment content is highly organized and classified;
indeed, we require it. Whether it
is Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble, or The Wherehouse, they are all library variants that organize
their content in order to give us easier access, increase participation, and
assist in information or entertainment retrieval. Organizing the information
produced by a forum is merely an extension of the entertainment concept and
content.
The library/publication paradigm
is extremely valuable in setting membership context and expectations. In a real-world gathering place, communication
is achieved through the spoken word; only those who are physically present
at the time of the exchange will witness it. Others hear of it after the fact
and will have to filter their knowledge through the perception of witnesses.
Using this paradigm for virtual communities has its risks, encouraging members
to think of their communication as equally ephemeral as in its real life equivalent.
But the existence of the data repository ensures that everyone who ever reads
the exchange is equally a witness and equally "present" no matter
how far removed in time from the original exchange.
The library paradigm, in contrast,
emphasizes communication as content. Members are quick to realize that all
communication is "published" and available for scrutiny throughout
time.
By emphasizing the "place"
of a dynamic, ever growing library, the member responsibility to the forum
becomes apparent. The communication and exchange is still a vital element
of the forum, the attraction that keeps the members returning for more. But
the sense of "place" within the community increases in importance. Members realize that they are
publishing content, and that the value of their content is increased exponentially
by the number of people who see it, not only at this point in time but into
the future. The library paradigm emphasizing organized information content
supports and reinforces desired behaviors: staying on topic, spawning new
topics when interesting subjects arise, using forum tools to draw attention
to new content.
Desirable community behavior
shifts as well. Since the members can set behavior standards for any topical discussion, there is no single norm
for interaction. Members are not rewarded or praised for politeness or congeniality,
but for the quality of their content--which, given the vast array of tastes,
allows most members to experience the pride of status and ownership.
The desired community behavior,
in an environment dedicated to content, is, of course, the production of content.
Lurking is discouraged, members who are often praised for being quiet, neighborly
companions in other forums are surprised to learn that these attributes aren't
considered admirable, that the forum prefers interaction and engagement, even
if it is contentious. In the limited time The Perfect World has been in operation,
some members who previously lurked in other forums have changed their behavior
to the new norm. They are more likely to post (however infrequently), or to
create a thread, or use the “highlight”
tool to attract attention to a discussion, in the awareness that participation,
not politeness, is considered desirable behavior. While I have no statistics
on our lurk to participant ratio at this time, anecdotal evidence suggests
that more members are changing their behavior in order to adopt to the change
in paradigm of place.
In keeping with the emphasis
on organized production and presentation, The Perfect World provides powerful
tools that give all members the ability to organize and present content for
the entire community.
This again emphasizes the
priority on organization and content, as well as reinforces the emphasis on
the forum as a resource and tool for engagement. Other tools to further extend
this capability are in planning stages.
The risk of topic enforcement
is the potential for disruption; "moving" the place of conversation
from one thread to another can discourage participation, as many members will
engage in a spontaneous conversation but not follow it to a new thread. This
necessitates the development of tools that minimize the disruption and investment
needed to move topic--and members--to a new location.
As time goes on and the forum
grows in size, it may be necessary to restrict some activities purely to avoid
information overload, not because of member ill will. If this becomes desirable,
we will also create tools by which all members can have input to the organization,
even if sheer volume requires us to restrict authorization for actual modification.
Most forum software packages
offer organization tools, but the design paradigm is optimized for communication,
not content. If more users discover and adopt the library as the appropriate
paradigm for virtual communities they may drive the development of other forum
software packages.
Many virtual communities have
data repositories that end up on Google. But if more communities adopted the
library paradigm of place and began to value the organization and presentation
of content, rather than emphasizing communication, it may be possible to standardize
the organization of subject matter and topical identification to provide content
that responds to standard queries. This is a subject already under discussion
in the weblog community (http://www.truthlaidbear.com/blogmd/), another form
of virtual community that might benefit from adopting the library paradigm.
Classifications will also
facilitate the "cyber-archaeology" of studying the content produced
by virtual communities; historians and anthropologists can use the metadata
to anticipate the sort of content they will need to identify and examine.
Many virtual communities implicitly
recognize the value of organization, sorting their conversations by topic.
But often the focus is still on the membership, on facilitating communication
rather than producing and providing content. Further consideration of the
library as an appropriate metaphor may be useful for these communities, both
as a management and promotion method.
While The Perfect World is
still new, the shift to a different real world “place” has proved very useful
in setting policy, behavior, and member expectations. It may be that other
organized public community places will emerge as meaningful analogies for
virtual communities, if others find value in shifting to a forum-centric model
with the emphasis on communication as content and the information produced
as a valuable resource. That this information has continued use is beyond
question; what is yet to be determined is the access and classification method
that allows us to make use of it.
References:
Oldenburg, R., 1989. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community
Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They
Get You Through The Day., Paragon House, New York.
Coate, J., 1992. Innkeeping in Cyberspace, In: Directions and Implications
of Advanced Computing (DIAC-92), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,
Palo Alto, CA. http://gopher.well.sf.ca.us:70/0/Community/innkeeping.
Jones Q. 1997. Virtual-communities, virtual-settlements & cyber-archaeology:
A theoretical outline. J of Comp Mediated Communication 3(3)
Jones, Q., and Rafaeli, S. What do virtual 'Tells' tell ? Placing cybersociety
research into a hierarchy of social explanation. In Proceedings of the
33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (Hawaii 2000),
IEEE Press.