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 an 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.

Basic Steps to Create the SOC

• 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

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

• 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

Analysis of Existing Internet Communities

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

• 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

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

• Flexibility fosters sustainability

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

• More apt to participate in others' traditions

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 trying to be 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

• No private messages
• Unmoderated forums
• Hundreds of tiny, scattered comment sections that are difficult to find

• 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

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

• inserting searchable headlines into our email
• an email archive which could handle them, display them online, and maintain them while sending new emails through a web interface

Miscellaneous

• 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

What about "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

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