Building a Great Community Online

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:

• Shared effort
• Shared pur­pose
• Shared iden­tity – sense of belonging
• Organic
• 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…

Tagged as: building an online community, community defined

Revised on November 16, 2009