Towards a Sustainable Online Community

On this page you will find the first results of our investigations about sustainable online communities.

Wait for it. ;)

Goal: To build a sustainable online community.

What is a Sustainable Online Community?

• Comprises a diverse audience concerning gender, age, location, interests, etc.
• Sustains for a significantly longer time than what could be expected when it was created.
• Has substantially less personal conflicts (“flame wars”) than in other online communities with comparable diversity.
• Not driven by the consumption of external input, but it is productive by itself in some field/s of art and/or science.

Steps to Establish a Sustainable Community

• Create the software tools

• Social Media Group willing to introduce new students to the sustainable platforms

• Attract user interest

• Ongoing public art and/or projects

• Decentralized approach, no single creator

• Maintain the international online community

Continue to welcome newcomers, ease the transition into the fold

• Raise awareness of sustainability in the community

• Community feeds itself with art and science
• Focus on a topic of sustainability for these projects
• Appropriate forms of expression for furthering awareness of sustainability

Sustainable Tools for a Sustainable Community

Free Software (Open Source Software)

• Not reliant on a single company
• Available to all users
• Freedom to study, modify, redistribute the software
• Example: phpBB

Benefits

• User-controlled content and information feel more secure/comfortable
• Prevents the one-way data relationship many companies have with their userbase

• Company receives data on users, users not privy to company actions
• Information stored there by users liable to be lost with site closure (not sustainable)

Potential Software Tools

Platforms that house, inspire, and connect the community.

Email List (with public archive)

• Good for readable resource rather than in-the-moment community
• Ability to scan and skim content
• Potential Challenge: Sorting everything and keeping the overview is up to the user

• Easy for email to be lost in the shuffle

Wiki

• Managed by the users themselves
• Sustainable: multiple user-editors means multiple avenues for content addition
• Logically centralized: all users working together on a single resource in one location
• Good for lists

• Project priorities, needs

• Display pertinent information immediately (vs. a forum thread)

• Useful to display the current state of subjects

• Potential challenge: Not the best tool for general community discussion

• Possible scattered conversations in a variety of locations
• Difficult for any one user to locate it all
• May be avoided with clearly designated comment sections
• One intermediate solution could be to redirect discussions from the wiki to a forum

• for instance by placing an URL to the thread on each “discussion” page
• Best if not enforced
• Fruitful discussion can die immediately if it is forced from one platform to another

• Long-term solution could be a wiki whose “discussion page” (or “talk page” in Wikipedia) is a thread in a forum, automagically.

Discussion Forum

• Easily bring new users into the ongoing conversation
• Challenge: Less skimmable, harder to find information

• May be mitigated with outside resources that direct the user to the appropriate locations
• Still blitzable

• Posts added chronologically

• Easier to follow conversation
• More difficult to sort by subject

• Mitigated by good organization of subforums

• Provide ordering and searching tools which can help to keep overview
• Potential markup languages

• phpBB

• Fairly widely used

• Markdown

• Possibly difficult to jump into
• Some similarities to MediaWiki's markup

• User-entered HTML

• More freedom
• Easily mangled

Additional tools

• Something like Dropbox, file-sharing source

• Having a file-sharing service in the same Internet domain as a phpBB forum would simplify the use of images in the forum

Conclusions

• Some combination of the above is most likely
• The best long-term solution will be gateways connecting these worlds

• All types of users may participate using their favorite tools

• The best short-term solution is to use something like phpBB

• In the short term, as long as gateways are absent, too many competing platforms could potentially confuse users
• Once platforms no longer compete, too many choices might still lead to confusion

Analysis of Existing Internet Communities

Why is the OTT sustainable?

Traditions that keep the community together

• As opposed to traditions that tend to alienate newcomers

Friendly population

• High levels of creativity, intelligence
• The thread didn't spring from this particular userbase; the individual users were attracted to the community

• As evidenced by OTTer activity in the rest of the forums

Use of a Wiki

• Interconnectivity: Signatures in-thread link to the wiki
• Well-written
• Kept up to date
• Used to further understand the thread
• Centered around community rather than artwork

"Blitzing" or "Reading it all"

• Newcomers encouraged to start at beginning, read entire content
• Experience formation of community personally
• Means of accessing community history
• While reading, help and motivation offered from the community

• Tools for consumption of the thread (Example: mrobdex)

• Artistic reward while blitzing: the frames of the comic

Willingness to assimilate new ideas

• Extends to user presentation (avatars), communication formatting (footnotes), manner of "speaking" (slang)
• Perhaps result of competing tensions: desire to follow OTC and onset of The Madness

• Created core set of users not dissuaded by unexpected changes
• Easier to welcome new traditions
• Flexible community

• Flexibility fosters sustainability

• Common knowledge that all users have opportunity to contribute their own traditions

• More apt to participate in others' traditions due to this knowledge

Why is Drawception problematic in terms of sustainability?

• Very young (in age) community based around a game
• Arguments over procedurals (gameplay)

• Reminiscent of heated OTT discussions over "how to blitz"

• Game site attempting to also be a social media site

• Tension between game and social aspects

• Results in a split userbase
• Opposing "sides" with differing goals
• Community fights self rather than fostering self

• Social tools inadequate

• Lack of private messaging system: users have to seek secondary communities like Facebook to connect
• Unmoderated forums
• Hundreds of tiny, scattered comment sections that are difficult to find

• Near impossible to read it all

• Little sense of community heritage

• Population focused on current games and daily trends

• Potential fixes

• Remove the dichotomy?
• Provide a Game Interface in the platform

Conclusions

• Be willing to experiment, hear new ideas, adapt to the unfamiliar

• Don't fear chasing away the community by exposing them to new challenges
• Perhaps necessary for distilling out the core set of users who will become the solid rock to build the sustainable community on
• There must also be something to bring back those who flee the Madness

• Promote individual creativity and recognize user contributions
• Optional traditions rather than mandatory
• A sustainable online platform must provide tools to ease blitzing everything

• Search functions
• Filters
• Blitzer scripts, as in the OTT
• Hyper-Threading

• Insert searchable headlines into communications like email
• Create an archive to handle them, display them online, and maintain them while sending new emails through a web interface

Miscellaneous

What about "Decentralization"?

• Set up a “decentralized” alternative to Facebook such as Diaspora and/or Friendica
• “Decentralized” means, in this context, that the infrastructure isn't controlled by a single company
• All users can contribute to the infrastructure by setting up their own servers
• Criticism: this “decentralized” approach would make it more difficult to access these platforms

• However, it is more complicated to contribute to the infrastructure of a decentralized platform than to access Facebook
• Yet just as easy to access the platform

• Having all resources physically distributed among several servers doesn't conflict with having them logically centralized

• The user experiences them as a single resource

• Summary: Need for a logically centralized platform

• Physically decentralized
• Goals do not conflict

Potential Names

• Sustainable Online Platform
• Eierlegende Wollmilchsau

• Very useful, but also very ambitious

More Challenges

• Students may be spread among too many disparate social media platforms with no clear recommendation

• Results in factions that have few intercommunity exchanges

• Differences in language