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.

Using 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)

Basic Steps to Create the Community

• Create the software tools
• 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

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 entralized: 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

• Challenge: Not the best tool for general community discussion

• Potentially 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

Conclusion

• The best long-term solution will be gateways connecting both worlds

• all types of users can participate using their favorite tools

• The best short-term solution is to use something like phpBB
• In the long term, my favorite platform would be one where everyone can participate using xe's favorite tools
• In the short term, as long as we don't have gateways, we must not confuse the users by too many competing platforms.

• once they do no longer compete, we still must not confuse them by allowing too many choices

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-On "Centralization" --we want to 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 --everyone can contribute to the infrastructure by setting up xer own server --Criticism: this “decentralized” approach would make it more difficult to access these platforms ---it is more complicated to contribute to the infrastructure of a decentralized platform than to access Facebook ---it is just as easy to access it, however --having all resources physically distributed among serveral servers doesn't conflict with having them logically centralized ---the user experiences them as a single resource --To summarize: We want to have a logically centralized platform ---And we want to have it physically decentralized ---Both goals do not conflict

-Within the community --Raise the awareness of sustainability

-Names --Sustainable Online Platform --Eierlegende Wollmilchsau ---Very useful, but quite ambitious

-Questions --How can we get those sustainable tools? ---Start with current tools, move to initial platforms, move to more sustainable resources --How can we attract people there to form an online community? ---Social Media Group willing to introduce new students to the sustainable platforms --How can we keep them there and make the online community sustainable? --How can we raise awareness of sustainability in that community? ---Community feeds itself with art and science ---Focus on a topic of sustainability for these projects

-Why is the OTT sustainable? --Traditions that keep the community together ---Versus potentially alienating newcomers (why?) --Friendly population ---Creative, intelligent ---Not what created the OTT, but rather a result of it --Use of Wiki ---Links from signatures in the thread to it ---Well-written ---Kept up to date ---Used to further understand the thread ---Centered around community rather than artwork --Blitzing ---Newcomers encouraged to start at beginning ---Read entire content ---Experience formation of community personally ---Help and motivation from the Present community

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Blitzer tools (Example: mrobdex)

---Means of accessing community history ---Artistic reward while blitzing (the ONGed OTC) --Willingness to assimilate weird new things ---User presentation (avatars), communication formatting (footnotes), manner of speech ---Perhaps result of competing tensions: desire to follow OTC and onset of Madness

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Created core set of users not dissuaded by unexpected changes

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Easier to welcome new traditions

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Flexible community

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Flexibility fosters sustainability

---Commmunity knowledge that all users have opportunity to contribute own traditions

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More apt to participate in others' traditions

-Sustainable community conclusions --Be willing to experiment, hear new ideas, adapt to the unfamiliar ---Don't be afraid chasing away some of the people in the community by exposing them to new challenges ---Necessary for distilling out the core set of users who will become the solid rock to build the sustainable community on ---there must be something to bring back those who flee the Madness --Promote individual creativity and recognize user contributions --Optional traditions rather than mandatory --Sustainable Online Platform must provide tools to ease blitzing everything. ---Search functions ---Filters ---Blitzer scripts, as in the OTT ---Hyper-Threading

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inserting searchable headlines into our email

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an email archive which could handle them, display them online, and maintain them while sending new emails through a web interface

-Why is Drawception not sustainable? --Very young (in age) community based around a game --Arguments over procedurals (gameplay) ---Reminiscent of heated OTT discussions over "how to blitz" --Game site trying to be social media site ---Tension between game and social aspects

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Results in a split userbase

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Opposing "sides" with differing goals

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Community fights self rather than fostering self

---Social tools inadequate

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No private messages

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Unmoderated forums

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Hundreds of tiny, scattered comment sections that are difficult to find

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Impossible to read it all

--Little sense of heritage ---More focused on current games and daily trends --Potential fix: remove the dichotomy? --Potential fix: providing a Hotdog Interface in our platform

Misc -Creation of appropriate forms of expression for furthering awareness of sustainability -Non-technical maintenance of international online communities -catalog of requirements for the implementation of the online platforms according to the goals of the project

Also known as: creating the "artistic design" of the community

-Methods to avoid --Spread students among too many disparate social media platforms with no clear recommendation ---Results in factions that have few intercommunity exchanges

Order --The active discussion comes first. Otherwise there is nothing to blitz.

-Potential setbacks --Differences in language