Community Building

by Heather Champ

It was a pleasure to take part earlier this week in the monthly gathering of the World Wide Web Artist Consortium's entitled Interface and Design Salon, co-hosted by Emily Davidow and Chris McCarthy.

The theme of the meeting had been advertised as "Virtual Community Building," with recommended reading of Metaphors and the Net: Social Life and Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities, by John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong, both of which are available online.

What defines a community? At its most basic, community can be defined as a like-minded group of individuals with some common purpose. Communication between the various parties, whether it be the users or the hosts, is an absolute necessity as is, unfortunately, some element of exclusivity. The very notion of exclusivity seems to be rather antithetical to the "open" nature of the Web, and is distasteful to some. It seems the more exclusive the community, the more people desire to be included.

Communities began forming on the Internet very early on and continued to thrive despite the advent and evolution of the Web. Threaded dialogue within Usenet groups, flame wars on mailing lists, with participants lobbing e-mail back and forth at one another, and chat on AOL are all various forms of community. While these forms of non-Web communities still survive and thrive, the notion of Web communities is very much at the forefront of current discussion and development.

Microsoft's Sidewalk and America Online's Digital City (to be unveiled later this month) are one kind of "community" being developed. These sites are really more representations of offline communities, but they seek to build bridges between life both on- and offline.

Microsoft has unveiled the Seattle and New York versions with Boston, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities to follow. Both sites are clean and surprisingly easy to read given the amount of information represented. A user is given the option to customize the content for a more useful user experience, and there is an option to receive weekly site updates via e-mail.

Sidewalk and Digital City will eventually be going head to head in a number of markets, and it will be interesting to see, given the resources available, how the sites develop.

While these sites represent actual physical communities, other Web communities are being developed that exist solely online. These communities represent the interests of many different users, whether it be a site developed by a company to extend customer relations as in Towne Square 2000, launched late last year by U.S. Robotics, or GeoCities, one of the earliest online communities that is home to some 600,000 registered users.

All of these sites share the basic tenet that users have the opportunity to express their individuality, whether it be customization of content, or information, or the actual creation and progression of the community. It would be a mistake for any developer to preplan the complete structure of any community. While there may be an intelligent infrastructure in the end, a community's success or failure will be determined by the community members' commitment.

Unlike a more traditional site, a community should be driven by user participation. It's very important that the designers enter into an ongoing dialogue with the users to ensure a continued success.