Powazek begins with the Algebra class desktop bulletin board. Features included a "spark that unites," dealing with abusive content, questions of community size, and filtering mechanisms. After this introduction, the author addresses bad reasons for adding community features to a website and then addressed some of the good reasons for doing so. Once you decide on whether community features are right for you, Powazek presents some key steps:

• Know your audience
• Create content that will be meaningful for them
• Then choose specific community mechanisms (asynchronous, chronological, etc.)

Very much a workbook approach. The interview questions at the end seem geared toward moving the reader through a community design process.

Connections

Powazek closes the introduction by recognizing that their desktop community forged "strong bonds...without a single real-life glance" (p. xviii). This speaks directly to my question from the Preece reading: comparison of on- and offline communities. Powazek offers one example of how online communities can offer the kind of connections typically associated with offline contact. I wonder if there are others? In extreme cases, MMORPGs and other online environments can give users a sense of belonging that they may lack elsewhere... but that's only based on anecdotal evidence. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

Powazek begins with a cutesy story about camaraderie, trolls, and flamers in algebra class. At first, it does not appear that the theme of this story will relate directly to the rest of the reading, but upon later glance I do see a moral emerging. Powazek presents the view that online communities should be open and inviting (as also presented by the other authors, specifically Oldenberg if we are to believe that online communities serve as a "third place"), but also that online communities must be closely moderated and kept under wraps. As the introductory story presents, the arrow to the goods is in plain sight but serves as a meaningless piece of graffiti except to those who know to look for it.

Communities are expensive—they require significant investments of money, expertise, time, and equipment. Further, the participants in the community expect something in return, as well. It becomes a conversation between customer and company, between the community members. As Oldenberg states, communication must be fluid and equally balanced, adhering to social norms that present the ratio of time spent talking versus listening.

Powazek repeatedly points out that communities should not be a free-for-all, unmoderated experience. In the author's view, it may be better to constrain community interaction to occasional live chats or to specific topics or goals rather than provide a 24-hour IRC or bulletin board. This will keep the cost down (moderators aren't needed 24/7) and keep the purpose alive.

The author presents the following as things developers of online communities have to know:
1.    audience: goals and expectations of the people involved in the real community; there may be secondary audiences that need to be weeded out to prevent the community from being overloaded with the wrong focus. Understand the primary goals of your audience and build capabilities into the site to support these goals.
2.    Content: quality of content determines the quality of the community by giving something good for users to talk about
3.    Community: participation methods; how people respond. This is dependent on your audience, content, and goals. In some cases, a live chat may be best while in other cases a longitudinal conversation will provide a higher quality of content over time.

These are clearly quite similar to those presented by Kim, except with much more fo a focus on content and community rather than just the audience.  

Critique
I agree with Trek that this is a pretty "duh" piece to many of us, but it is clearly necessary reading for e-commerce and marketing folk, if only to understand when online communities are a really, really bad idea. I appreciated the mention that it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing experience; instead, if constraints are present, an occasional live chat may be a good alternative to providing a unique community experience without requiring the significant amount of moderation that a 24-hour discussion forum or IRC channel would require.

Connection
This reading expands on Preece’s mention of e-commerce using online communities as an advertising and product-push mechanism. The author shows how this approach isn’t 100% good and that it requires a lot of technical expertise that advertising pros may not have. Instead of assuming that online communities will always present a benefit to a situation, one must closely consider who the audience is, what their goals are, and what is being promised by the provider of the service.
 

After a clever algebra-class analogy, Powazek discusses the merits and challenges of online communities for a corporate, or at least business, audience. Online communities, he warns, are expensive in time and support, and not every company may be prepared for the kind of ongoing relationship with customers that such sites create.

Assuming a community is appropriate, Powazek, like Kim, emphasizes how important it is to determine who the audience will be and what their needs are. Equally important, the site must offer high-quality content from the very beginning. Whether a site's community should be synchronous (chat) or asynchronous (forum/email list) will depend on what needs the community is trying to fulfill, and firms may try a combination of methods to see what works best.

Critique

Powazek covers much of the same ground as Preece and Kim, but his business-orientation is more obvious.

If anything his arguments for having a community seem a bit weak, not much more than an opportunity for users to convince one another to buy more of the company's products (without any suggestions how the company might encourage this) and the vague notion that posts at the end of articles can sometimes create a community (though this would seem to fall well short of Oldenberg's definition). Powazek's cautions are undoubtedly important, but some better arguments on behalf of communities would have been helpful. 

Powazek begins his book about online communities with an interesting an interesting analogy: an encounter with a mystery pen pal in his high school algebra class. He describes all the classic qualities of an online community: members, arguments, agreements, trolls, and even eventual contact in real life.

The rest of the book reading moves from amusing anecdotal stories to a few "well, duh!" common sense points about whether or not your organization needs an online community presence, determining who your audience is going to be, matching your goals with the users' goals, and finally a self-interview to help bring it all together.

The book seems aimed at managers or other business people who have some sort of presence on the web already and who want to more of a community feel to their sites. I was a little surprised by this. Just from the communities that I am part of on the intarwebs, and from the ones that are getting the most attention I'd say that most successful online communities lack a "regular" web presence and exist solely as a community space (epininions, facethejury, myspace(*barf), digg, slashdot, et al.) or sites who are extensions of real locational communities (facebook, manhunt, or a school's intranet site).

I hadn't really considered the perspective of trying to add community space to a business, for example.

But, maybe this just reflects on what communities I am a part of IRL and online.

Description

Derek's book has been really valuable to me, mostly as an artifact to hand to people who could benefit from its distillation of common-sensible features and costs of online community building.

The respect and awareness of the community's audience described on page 7 (of the book, not the PDF) informs decisions about to design a community, and how to run it. It also informs decisions about how, and when, to shut the community down -- something which I think Powazek has always handled really well with his own projects over the years (the fray, San Francisco Stories, Kvetch, etc.).

Response to Lev's question

Lev: Powazek offers one example of how online communities can offer the kind of connections typically associated with offline contact. I wonder if there are others? In extreme cases, MMORPGs and other online environments can give users a sense of belonging that they may lack elsewhere... but that's only based on anecdotal evidence. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

I don't have an answer to your question, but am interested in it. What you've called "a sense of belonging" -- taken as a specifically valuable kind of connection between persons -- is something that I think can come out of online communities.

I'm paying a lot of attention to the (working) definitions provided by the authors of these readings, since there are a lot of online spaces (I'm not sure if they're considered "communities" per this course, but this uncertainty is one of the things which drove me to enroll) out of which people make valuable connections that don't necessarily involve direct conversations. Conversation seems to be an implicit, yet important, part of Powazek's definition. Your examples of MMORPGs, etc (to which I'd propose adding del.icio.us inboxes or instant messaging status displays) provide what appear to be useful edge cases we can use to hone what we are, or are not, considering a community. Is "presence" or "connection" enough, or do you need more? (Powazek considers a few kinds of communities in his book, but if I recall correctly, they all involve conversations [for example, one case study is webdesign-l, an e-mail list. Preece's multiple perspectives might be applicable here, as well as Kim's invocation of Maslow's hierarchy.)

Powazek covers much the same ground as Kim, but starts out asking whether a web site needs community features. He points out pitfalls to take into account in making the decision, mainly the costs associated with regards to hardware and support. He also makes the interesting point that communities may be better with fewer rather than more members. Very e-commerce-oriented and doesn't explore online communities arising from the ground up.

Highlights:

- Be realistic about your expectations
- Having community feature costs more but is rewarding
- Audience: knowing your user matters, especially before deciding on the features.
- Content: Give your users something to talk about
- Community: decide on how the user participation will be (synchronous- strong emotional impact, not well thought vs. asynchronous – more convenient, lacks real-time interaction)
- Mix and match different synchronous and asynchronous tasks
- Decide on to what extent the community will be open to external world.

Critique

This was a piece nice to read but not much to comment on.
I was confused a little bit about ‘adding the community feature’ to your site. Is he talking about web sites that has a community as a part of them or is the website the community itself?

This article illustrated a personal anecdote that represented the one of the main drivers for people going online: boredom and talked about when it’s useful to add a community.

I really enjoyed reading about the author’s escapade in high school of making a forum out of a desk. It really touches on the innovative inspirations that people can come up with when they’re bored. I also liked the explanation of what kind of community tools are NOT goods and also the misconceptions. I especially like Bad Reason #1 of “Because its Cool.” I think that reason is one of the main culprits of why a lot of websites are badly designed. Look at www.craigslist.org. Perfectly functional without the uncessary pizazz.

I feel that this article was a lot more useful than Kim’s. Complements Preeces and Oldensburg’s article well when designing eCommunities.

The topics covered in this can be used to cut-out-the-fat when designing an online community. The designer has to ask a lot of questions in the business perspective of “is this feature going to help my website make more money?” *Note: of course this DOES NOT take away from the user experience.