One of the best examples of a thriving online professional community is I Love Typography. Almost 50,000 people subscribe to its RSS feeds. There are many voices: multiple authors and lots of people who care enough to respond. It feels vibrant and live. People share experiences and point to great examples of typography in use.
It’s beautifully designed — a wonderful exemplar of what can be achieved with design-friendly tools like WordPress when put in the hands of a talented web designer.
But what makes this such a vibrant community? What lessons can we take away from this example and apply elsewhere?
This blog exhibits the qualities required to keep online communities alive and thriving:
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Shared effort
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Shared purpose
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Shared identity – sense of belonging
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Organic
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Freedom
[Thanks to thought leader Larry Keeley, innovation strategist at The Doblin Group, for articulating these characteristics of community in the 1990s — way ahead of his time, as always.]
Shared Effort
There are multiple voices in this typography community, mostly those of designers and practitioners — people who love type and use it as a key component of well-designed communications.
The blog posts attract dozens of comments. People care; you feel their passion in what they write.
Larry Keeley wrote that attributes of shared effort in building a community include things like:
- A sense of obligation or responsibility on the part of the members
- Access, the ability to participate
- Opportunities for collaboration
- A sense that it matters, that the community has consequence
Shared Purpose
People in the community understand and buy into its mission, its raison d’être; they have a shared vision for what it is, what it could become, and where it’s heading. They work together to make progress toward a common goal.
Shared Identity
People in the community have shared histories or shared experiences in the workplace, in their educational or vocational backgrounds. They may have worked at the same company or attended the same school, or have the same professional credentials. (Just think of all those groups that are springing up within the LinkedIn environment.)
Members feel a sense of belonging, feel “at home,” welcomed – free to speak and act in ways that are authentic to who they really are.
In the case of designers they’ve probably been taught similar ways of “seeing” or imagining, learned common approaches to problem solving.
Members often have shared values.
The community exerts a magnetic attraction (may grow virally), and pulls new like-minded people into its gravitational force field. Who in turn attract others.
Organic
What happens in the community is not imposed top-down, by some centralized authority. Instead membership is distributed, effort and contributions are decentralized. Effort (and hopefully rewards or benefits) are balanced among all the participants. People are interdependent.
The opposite to this is what can happen within volunteer organizations when effort is not equally distributed, and a small core team of contributors valiantly perform the work of the entire community. Eventually they give up, tired and unappreciated, and the community withers away…
Freedom
Members or visitors are free to come and go. Choices are offered: what to do, what to read or see, where to go. Rights are protected; people understand the rules of engagement, and within that clarity understand their freedom to act or speak out.
It feels empowering to members.
The notion of freedom as a required attribute does not imply that communities can’t put up walls or boundaries (like requiring registration or subscription fees). But it does mean that there needs to be freedom of movement, freedom of speech and choices offered once inside the walls of the community.
What Happens When Attributes Are Lacking
When an online venue lacks these ingredients, it’s not a true community.
Instead it’s a portal or a media outlet or some other hybrid example whose “oxygen” is being fueled by the sponsor… In that case the so-called community will disappear once the sponsor ceases to provide what’s necessary to keep it going.
This is why so many brand-centric or vendor-sponsored “communities” are at risk if they don’t pass the “shared effort” and “shared sense of purpose” tests…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. While it hearkens to the basics, the basics are so easy to lose sight of when analysing a lack of liveliness in a community.
Thanks, Jeff. You’re right: sometimes it’s overlooking the basics that can lead to problems downstream.