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Design For Community
from the customer-is-court-jester dept.
| Design For Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places | |
| author | Derek M. Powazek |
| pages | 307 |
| publisher | New Riders |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Cliff Lampe |
| ISBN | 0735710759 |
| summary | Good stuff, nice to get the developers perspective. |
Since this is at heart a 'how to' book Powazek arranges the chapters in a sensible manner leading the potential community-builder through a series of potential decisions. One of the strengths of the book is Powazek's clear-headed take on the need for community elements in a website, and the first chapter counsels the potential designer to seriously consider whether building an online community is really the best use of his resources. Following chapters range from the sublime to the mundane, including design elements, programming tools to consider, interaction policies, moderation and finally when to know the community is dead. That last element is often neglected in books on building online communites, and is handled with unexpected candor and grace here.
Feature building advice given in this book is typified by Powazek's treatment of design as an element of building online community. When building features for interaction into your website, the following principles need to be considered:
- Design for your audience
- Design for flexibility
- Design for your experience
- Design for simplicity
- Design for readability
- Design for beauty
With each exhortation the author offers screen capture and narrative examples of people who have done it well and poorly. Other features like policies and moderation also are broken into these easily digestible, rarely contentious pieces intended to allow the casual user to consider the options for building community without feeling overwhelmed by issues involved. (As a facetious aside, I thought the designs for both kvetch and fray were terrible, but "do as I say, not as I do").
The real strength of each chapter is the interview with a Real Life (tm) community builder who describes an experience that provides support for the chapter. For example, the chapter on moderation includes examples of what is done at Slashdot, and then an email interview with Rob Malda in all of his curmudgeonly glory. Other interviews include, but are not limited to, Steven Johnson (FEED and Plastic.com) talking about design, Emma Taylor (nerve.com) on barriers to entry and Matt Williams (amazon) on commerce communities. Each community-builder gives a little blurb on what they do, and then goes on to some fairly decent reflections on what it means to run an online community. It ain't all rosy "Love Thy Neighbor" crap, and the narratives really help illustrate the real and solid design issues involved.
What's Good?
The narrative, as mentioned above, makes for compelling reading. Powazek seems to have really done some thinking on the issue, and the practical tone is a nice counterbalance to the Rheingoldian tradition of lionizing online communities. All books (well, this type anyway) are very dependent on audience. If you are a person who is just beginning to think about adding interactive elements to a site that you are running, or want to convince your boss to do the same, this is a very well put together book that addresses the major practical issues.
What's Bad?
The counterbalance to the above statement is that if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but...' will come often to mind. Also, Powazek speaks with the voice of Authority to comfort his intended audience, but in reality the jury is still out on a lot of the benefits of different features in online communities, as well as the value added of user interaction in the first place. Correctly for this style of book, Powazek does not address those issues, but if they are your main interest, you may be driven mad by their absence here.
So What's In It For Me?
If you are thinking of starting an online community, you should get this book. The descriptions of major considerations, with examples from the realities of what's been done before, will be a helpful starting place, though by no means the end of your research. If you are not going to start a community, or are already embroiled in one, this book still has quite a bit to offer. The interviews with various community builders makes for fascinating reading, and could be expanded into a book all its own. Overall, this is not a revolutionary work redefining our concepts of virtual community, nor does it want to be. It is a handy book on designing online interactions, with compelling examples and rich narratives that make for a quick, fun read.
Reviewer notes:
Cliff is a doctoral student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His research involves self-organizing websites, online deliberation and social captial effects of persistent online interaction. He can be reached at cacl@umich.edu
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I'll be getting this book... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where's The Cash? (Score:5, Insightful)
The online community community ends feeling like the guy who threw a party and a thousand people showed up. It's great to be popular, but who the hell is going to pay for this?
What I guess I'm trying to say is that a rationalization or consolidation is in order for the online communities of today. I wouldn't get used to the concept of a full-featured online community, (Slashdot included) because I have a feeling that most of them will be collapsing under the weight of their own successes.
Not everyone is out to make money (Score:5, Insightful)
The best place for them is for non-profits and governmental organizations who want to communicate, educate, or do something related online. If your audience is more targeted, you don't have the Slashdot effect for your community--for example, not just a website for youth involvement, but one for youth leaders [youthactionnet.org] who are organizing other youth to do things (that's a real-world example).
Obviously, it's not all we do, and we're moving into other areas, but it's still a part of what we do and it's working for our clients (or we wouldn't be in business--we're self-financed).
It's harder than it sounds (Score:2, Troll)
This book is obviously intended to be read by managers who still think they can put up a simple web site and make millions of dollars catering to the needs of individuals on the Internet. (I know because I borrowed and skimmed it.) Well, the reality of the matter is that it's just not possible. Online communities just happen. If you try to intentionally build one, you are wasting your time.
Just my 2c.
~wally
Practicality (Score:1)
if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but ...' will come often to mind.
Well, yeah, every How-To book has this problem. "Do we make it comprehensive at 1250 pages, or do we make it usable at 250-400 pages?"
The Gardener
Fatbrain... (Score:2, Informative)
Fatbrain: $28.48
Bookpool: $24.92
Amazon: $24.99
Oomind Open Education Community (Score:3, Interesting)
Oomind Open Education Community [oomind.com] So basically it works like this: the units of educational material are called Courselets. Each courselet is like an article writen about a specific subject. There's lots of flexibility here so even a poem can be a courselet. A courselet has ratings in ten different attributes including Beauty, Creativity, Insightfulness, Theoretical, etc. Registered users can moderate these ratings on a courselet. The ratings change based on a weighted average taking into account a user's level of influence. Courselets also have quiz questions. The questions can be written by anyone, not just the author of the courselet. The questions also have a score which is just a weight, and a price (!) which is in "oo-points". Oo-points are Oomind's internal unit of currency. They are purchased and redeemed for cash. When you answer a question and get it correct then the price of the question is taken from you and distributed three ways: 40% to the courselet author, 40% to the question author and 20% to the system. Oh: authors can use multiple aliases. When you answer the question correctly you also get "credit" - the 10 scores of the courselet are modified by the weight of the question and added to your "Portrait". Therefore your academic credit is cumulative rather than percentage based. It is also dynamic: as the scores of the courselets change, so do your learner scores. You also have educator scores which are the sum of the scores of all the courselets you have contributed (also dynamic). Courselet are free to be read by anyone and can be linked too from external sites - "knowledge wants to be free". In progress: group and messaging features. I really hope that people check it out and sign up. Right now there are about 80 registered users. The next 20 get 1000 oo-points free, and after that it is just 100 oo-points free. Also there aren't that many courselets right now (maybe about 100) and not too many questions on courselets. Please contribute! Thanks and please mod this up. I know this is blatant but I think it is of real interest for the Slashdot community.
designForCommunity.com (Score:5, Informative)
Excerpts, discussions and more!!
Real People? Please Accept Robot Sociality. (Score:1, Funny)
Any really up-to-date book or article on Design For Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places ought to mention the artificially intelligent intruders [sourceforge.net] likely to be met on-line in either virtual reality or ostensibly real situations.
For instance, suppose you check into the online virtual-reality Habbo Hotel. [habbo.com] How will the readers of Derek Powazek's book or of Cliff Lampe's review be able to deal with Turing-Test-complete virtual entities ?.
Please move over, human society, and make room on-line and in your hearts for our fellow stewards of Earth coming to greet us amid the approach of Technological Singularity! [caltech.edu]
Links (Score:3, Informative)
A Conversation with Derek Powazek [webbieworld.com]
San Francisco Stories [sfstories.com]
Derek Powazek explains the power of community [digital-web.com]
User to User Support [webtechniques.com]
15 Questions for Derek Powazek [zeldman.com]
How did {fray} come about? [storycenter.org]
Picture of Powazek [supersnail.com]
The book is OK, but.... (Score:1)
My problems with the book is that it takes a superficial look at aspects of an online community and tries to distil them down into antecdotes without really examining the deeper implications of them.
As well, the writing put me off, as its a bit self-serving. I much prefer Amy Jo Kim's book to this one, as she removes herself from the equation when looking at other communities. Design for Community is just a bit too much ego stroking for me really.
Thus, the book has been put on the shelf, while Amy Jo Kim's book and Howard Rheingold's books are still on my desk. They are just deeper in content and less gloss.
Ethan
Website "community" is overrated. (Score:1, Troll)
Read a book by someone who's built communities (Score:1)
He's actually built successful community sites [photo.net], not just written generalizations
The book is worth the money (Score:1)
- Integrate live with static content
- Build in barriers -- they matter
- Bury the post button
- Try out some new tools like weblogs
- Offer user moderation of user-created content
Due to my community back-end, some of these have been tough to implement, but I managed workarounds, and like my results. For an independent site owner with a targeted and focused community, the book offers some great advice. More commercial or more diverse sites might find it less useful.Wiki as a good starting point (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, the wiki at http://www.c2.com is dedicated to Design Patterns, a general enough audience, and after so many years it is still growing. Last time I checked there were about 18000 pages, all made by outsiders, and almost all well written and quite interesting.
The best way to have your community thrive is to have it as open as possible. IRC is so successful and well-used because anyone can become powerful in their own little corner of the system. While nobody likes the people who go out of their way to stir things up on online communities, their existence does tend to lead to others following after them and tidying their mess up. In the end, there is more traffic, and your site becomes more popular, until there are enough signal producers to make the noise producers ignorable.
My own First Post (Score:1)
Umm... Been there already? (BBSes) (Score:1)
All sarcasm aside, the WWW version of the BBS, now called a "community website" still has a long way to go to even come close to the level of interpersonal communications that BBSland provided its users. Of course, now you can have more people online at the same time for little to no cost, but there is not much going on besides a few forums on most "community websites". Occasionally, you have a chatroom or two, rarely any files, and more rarely, games.
As time goes on, I look at what the BBS that I ran provided to the users and figure that there must be a way to use all of this technology to bring back the "personal" interaction level that I always enjoyed as a Sysop and a user of BBSes.
Maybe I will get around to finishing that BBS of Doom project that sits occupying a few megabytes of my development drive... someday.
At any rate, the point I am attempting to make is that there is a lot to the BBS model that can be "borrowed" from in order to add the missing dimensions necessary to make any simple enthusiast web site into a wonderfully interactive and interpersonal (let alone friendly) experience.
Just my $0.02.
Former Sysop of Iconian Gateway, WWIVNet Node 4401.
Re:Lame (Score:2, Insightful)
Most communities are filling several purposes. Some are artificially nurtured and thrown together in an effort to drive traffic to a site and promote e-commerce. Some are support groups for folks of similar interests. Some are ways for people to work together on projects despite being scattered across a globe. Powazek is attempting to design a set of guiding principles in building and maintaining these different types of communities. Whether or not he succeeded, I'm not certain--but the value of a well maintained community should be obvious to most Slashdotters.
Re:moderation is.... (Score:1)
Re:Right now I'd settle for book on design standar (Score:1)
I would start with Visual Interface Design for Windows : Effective User Interfaces for Windows 95, Windows Nt, and Windows 3.1 by Virginia Howlett which is old but a useful foundation. After allowing some time to digest it, I'd follow it with GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers by Jeff Johnson, which I confess to having skimmed rather then read, but was worth every second.
Neither is gods gift to design but they are as good as it gets, AFAIK.
If you really like those suggestions, forget gratitude, ask for a copy of my resume to pass on. ;