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Towards a Sustainable Online Community

Aus Erlebnisraum Nachhaltige Entwicklung
Version vom 16. September 2014, 04:28 Uhr von Chelsea Rash (Diskussion | Beiträge) (Cleaned up formatting and content.)
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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.

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 "Centralization"?

  • 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