While there is no silver bullet when it comes to ensuring the success of an online community, recent research by Sequentia Environics on Digg and Reddit, two of the most prolific online communities, have highlighted the following elements as necessary for designing or managing a community that will thrive:

1. Optional anonymity. The ability for users to remain private helps shift the focus onto issues rather than individuals. Anonymity is also critical to help promote collective action within a community setting.
2. Democracy. The basic need for community is driven by a desire for collective action and a change in the balance of power.
3. Earned authority. While authority is tolerated in communities, it must be earned rather than appointed.
4. A strong sense of purpose. Every community needs a purpose or collective agenda, whether implicit or explicit. This purpose needs to go beyond products, services and tactical activities.
5. Transparency in operation and intent. The heart of an online community involves its relationship to a countercultural agenda. Transparency in operation forms a critical piece of that approach.
6. Inclusive ownership with scale. Every community should provide a mechanism for members to take ownership of certain areas of interest. This is especially important as a community begins to grow, as it allows for the development of collective identities.

To read more, download the report from Sequentia Environics.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

Running a web community can be fun and rewarding, but you’re always reliant on the good faith of your members. So what happens when rogue elements threaten to disrupt, even destroy, the foundations of your society, often behind the cloak of anonymity? How do you rest back control from the ‘supervillains’?

Powasek’s article elaborates on 5 scenarios to keep the community happy. These relate to various defence mechanisms that he has employed on websites like kvetch.com and are summarised below.

The eyeball defence

People behave better when they think someone’s watch their every move. It is human nature that people become more trustworthy when they are being watched. Whether it is a ‘pay for what you think it’s worth’ type service, or a web community, people become more honest if there is a modicum of Big Brother about the website.

The probation defence

Block ‘angry’ users from posting content for a period of time. Once that period has expired, allow the user to again fully interact with the website.

The community boot defence

Give members the ability to report the bad members. Members can flag bad content or people. After a certain number of flags, the content can be programmatically removed or the person banned for a short period of time.

The denial of existence defence

Since deleting a troublesome user’s account will just prompt them to sign up with a new username, write a tool that degredates the performace of the site for those members who are causing the problems. You could even go as far as show a version of the Twitter Fail Whale. Websites are known to break, so it won’t be out of the ordinary for a person to experience a badly performing website. It just happens that that person is a nuisance.

The dig your own hole defence

Deleting a person account is sometimes the only answer. Therefore, giving the user the ability to delete their own account and optionally take all their generated content with them will provide a release mechanism. Always provide a friendly fairwell message: We’re sorry to see you go. You’re welcome back any time.

Buy .Net magazine to read the full article.

The ColdFusion, Flex and Flash User Groups represent a central information resource for all UK Adobe developers. With the increasing importance of Rich Internet Applications, Rapid Application Development, the popularity Adobe software and industry recognition of the ColdFusion, Flex, Flash and AIR products, these user groups assist developers in defining their role within the Adobe and wider community. These groups aim to provide information resources and a chance to meet fellow developers and network within the community.

To join the groups and start networking, simply click on the appropriate link below:

UK ColdFusion User Group:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/27811/79F5911ECBBE

UK Flex User Group:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/27255/6343D73C42C2

UK Flash User Group:

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/27401/0E94A97A7DD4

The Flex and Flash User Group websites are still being designed/developed, but you can email them at

info [at] ukfxug [dot] org

info [at] ukflug [dot] org

respectively with ideas on what you would like to see on each site.

Michael Wesch speculates that the accessibility of the internet both to add and receive content is leading to a massive paradigm shift in human thought and society.

However:

The internet still follows the fundamental form of the written word and the motion picture: non-participatory reception of information.

The exact interface of scripting language is irrelevant. The internet is essentially a series of Guttenberg presses and Edison kinetoscopes connected by telegraph wire.

The accessibility of these devices to add content had only changed the scope of the content, not the basic form. Regardless of who made it, I’m still reading text and watching movies.

A semi-global library is a remarkable acchievement (Remember that most people in the world still don’t have net access).

But the real acchievement of the internet has been to SIMULATE participation. It has made non-participatory addition of responsive content more rapid; even instantaneous.

E-mail or a chat room, for instance, has infinitely sped up communication across distances. But it is still not a fully sensory, participatory conversation, and we’ve had to find ways to compensate for that.

This trajectory will eventually lead to virtual reality. Increasingly sophisticated pseudo-sensory simulations of the full sensory, participatory reality of which we are a part.

This is a movement towards making the non -participatory form imitate the participatory reality.

We’re trying to make the printed word imitate what we already experience every day.

The natural interaction between us and the world.

During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed “old hat” as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors’ chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century “Blue Sky” web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation.

Today, the reality has shifted from solely bricks and mortar or dotcom, to a balance between the real world and cyberspace, of traditional business operations complemented by the unversality provided by web-based technologies. The web has given businesses a greater understanding of their customers. With Web 2.0 a new type of web is emerging, further enhancing the understanding of a user or customer through the creation of online communities, where information is shared and new ideas evolve.

There are numerous examples of web communities from the early FriendsReunited to MySpace and the more specific Islandoo for the Channel4 TV progamme Shipwrecked. Web 2.0 is all about collaborative networks tipified by Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube. However, Web 2.0 has primarily been used in the consumer arena, as identified by the examples, but the use of such technologies has far reaching implications based on understanding how people interact with the technologies and behave online. Linking people across countries, time-zones and company boundaries will enable people to work together without hierarchical boundaries, bringing people together as one team to collate the best input. This is emphasised with the concept of a wiki whereby any end-user can make changes to the shared resource without the need for specialist software and expensive training. This makes sharing knowledge extremely easy.

Other areas of Web 2.0 is the technology identified by the term “folksonomy”. Simply, a folksonomy is defined on Wikipedia as:

… an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

While it takes time for an expert to create a taxonomy specific to a particular organisation in order to categorise or define data, folksonomies do not require fixed taxonomies. Instead, users define their own descriptions of the data to be described by applying tags to the data, whether it is a bookmark in terms of del.icio.us, an image on Flickr, a video on YouTube or a document in a company repository. Over time, these tags can be amended by other users resulting in a definition that is more specific. This enables users to find information with relative ease, without having to type the exact keyword.

Web 2.0 will bring a whole host of issues into the business arena. While there are clear benefits from establishing communities and social networks, people with different views, be it political or religious, can drive the agenda. Further complications arise through the necessity to audit changes to the data and ensuring the data is indeed accurate (Wikipedia has had cases where people have maliciously altered data to either enhance their own profile or devalue the significance of historical events).