[Personally I found it helpful to read Sassenberg (2002) before reading this paper] 

Summary:
Definition of online community:
“online group that interacts over time around a shared purpose, interest, or need”
Note: do not consider shared resources, reciprocity, and community norms or policy to be essential features of online communities

Community design has been an art, with few attempts to apply social science theory to community design.

Questions
1.    Couldn’t joint reward be considered a type of common fate? Or does joint reward imply that group members receive benefits only through cooperation?
2.    Is there a development pattern in online groups – e.g., initially common bonds may be predominant but as group continues and grows common identity predominates.
3.    Is there a size effect? For which size groups are common bond or common identity more likely to be predominant?

Connections:
The article provides more nuanced analysis and recommendations than Kim or Powazek. This is probably due to the analysis being informed by theory and empirical research, as opposed to anecdotal evidence in both Kim and Powazek.

Summary
Apologies for the length. This paper will likely factor heavily into my final papers about Cool Running, so I wanted to document it well.

Ren, Kraut, and Kiesler examine the design implcations for online communities given certain social psychological theories of common identity and common bond. They also make the larger point that theory matters and can provide a "more principled approach" to the design of online communities.

Common identity: a feeling of attachment to the group as a whole rather than to fellow group members. The authors assert that common identity online implies a commitment to the purpose of the online community.
Common bond: a feeling of attachment to their group and to group members. The authors assert that common bond online is displayed through social or emotional attachments to particular members of the community.

Takeaways

• Common identity-based attachments to community are more likely to occur when community members are similarly categorized (Prop. 1)
• Common bond-based attachments are more likely to occur when community members engage in personal interaction with one another, share similar attitudes, or have personal knowledge of one another (Prop. 2)
• Bond-based attachment encourages more off-topic discussion (and is generally more tolerant of it) and is more tolerant of social loafing (Props. 4, 5)
• Members with identity-based attachment will be more likely to conform to group norms (Prop. 6)
• Newcomers will feel more welcome in identity-based online communities and are more likely to engage in generalized reciprocity (as opposed to specific) (Props. 7, 8)
• Identity-based attachment weakens with discussion diversity; bond-based weakens with membership turnover (Prop. 9)
• Bond and identity attachments can overlap in the same community (p. 19)
• Identity-to-bond transitions have been observed (the Bruce community, p. 22)
• Topic moderation (or lack of) has consequences for membership, depending on whether community members seek a bond or identity attachment from the community
• Group size considerations: identity-based attachment communities can withstand high turnover and large community populations
• "Neighborhoods" within large communities can help the population congregate around different themes

Connection
This identity/bond framework explains parts of Cool Running quite well. I can see both attachments at work in the community.

Suggestive of a strong identity-based attachment within Cool Running:
1. The community is so large yet continues to function smoothly (identity-based)
2. Newcomers feel welcome
3. The community withstands high turnover easily, and can function well with an abundance of social loafing occurring

Suggestive of a strong bond-based attachment within Cool Running:
1. Community members exchange personal knowledge with each other and share similar attitudes
2. Off-topic discussion is tolerated

One point to explore further: the relationship between identity/bond-based attachment and the creation of joint enterprise. On p. 14-15, the authors make the claim that people with identity-based attachments are likely to compensate for social loafing that occurs in the community by taking over responsibilities and/or contributing more heavily. I feel like there is a connection here to joint enterprise as Wenger defines it (from my Wenger blog post):
1. It is the result of a collective process of negotiation
2. It is both pursued and defined by those engaged in it (i.e., it's a dynamic, changing, evolving thing)
3. It creates mutual accountability

In what ways (if any?) does identity-based attachment contribute to the definition of a community's joint enterprise?

Ren et al. list a series of hypotheses derived from social science research to make predictions about ways to strengthen communities. The major theoretical point underlying much of this paper is that people can want to belong to a group for two reasons, because they have bonds with many other individuals who are members of the group (common bond) or because they identify with what the group stands for or its objective (common identity).

In general the distinction between common identity and common bond is understudied in the social sciences, although the offers do list a few studies here. Researchers know a lot about common identity, and they know a lot about how dyadic bonds work in romantic relationships, but in comparison they know virtually nothing about common friend-bonds. This is not fatal to the article. Instead it made this paper an exciting read for me. Ren et al. make a number of predictions about how common bond and common identity groups would behave differently. These findings would be important to social psychology as a whole.

Ren et al. did leave out one crucial determinant of attraction to friends in their review: proximity. Although much of the influence that proximity has on attraction could probably be subsumed within familiarity (which they also downplay) in the real world, colocation seems to matter. I was left wondering if this is irrelevant on the Internet, or if a similar logic of virtual proximity applies in virtual space.

I also found proposition 9 to be particularly interesting. Ren et al. claim that Identity-based attachment to the group decreases as conversations drift off topic while bond-based attachments decrease with greater membership turnover. This seems to inform our understanding of how the fortunes of eCommunities ebb and flow. The longer a community exists, the more likely it is that identity based attachments shift to bond-based attachments. People in bond-based attachments probably tend to talk more about off-topic subjects. Thus new members coming into the group (who are probably joining for identity-based reasons) feel dissatisfied at the groups lack of purpose and some older members may feel turned off by all the n00bs. Both forms of attachment seem to produce noise that is aversive to the other. This makes me wonder if there are stable equilibria of bond and identity-based attachments. .

I also wanted to point out that Facebook (and to a certain extend MySpace) do offer people the ability to develop bond-based and identity based attachments in parallel. In facebook you can form individual bonds by adding friends or you can share interests by joining a group. This might be an ideal solution because the noise generated by the two kinds of attachment occur on seperate channels and thus may not interfere with each other. Groups don't clutter up your friend list and make it impossible to find the individuals you are looking for and conversations with friends do not end up posted on group discussion pages where they would be seen as irrelevant.

It seems the eCommunity developer has to focus on EITHER "common identity" (strong mission statement for the entire community, i.e. wikipedia) OR "common bond" (relationships amongst members, i.e. facebook). As time goes on, the incompatibilities slowly start to melt away and both “common identity” and “common bond” develops.

The author argues that both contribute to the cohesion of a community but they contribute in different ways. It seems like developing towards a “common identity” in the beginning is more beneficial in developing a booming eCommunity since it encourages new member participation, discourage social loafing (which encourages content), and sets a common tone for all the members coming in (which will result in higher quality content in the future).

As the community matures, it’s useful to encourage “common bonds” to form so that members can form lasting relationships. These lasting relationships add more value encourage repeat visits.

Applying this to eventrue, a firm tone could be set declaring that www.eventrue.com will be the one stop website for people to visit before going out. As members register and content is created, more features that encourage “common bonds” could be added to facilitate relationships.

The paper's basic thesis is that social psychology, sociology and economics can help in designing online communities. Adding on to Yong Mi's great summary, I thought I would hammer on the idea of trade-offs. Ren et al are examining the design implications of online communities as regards common bond ("I'm here for the people") and common identity ("I'm here for the common goal/topic/mission"). Different design choices can target audiences based on either common bond or common identity, and will probably entail tradeoffs as a result. Examples include:

• Constraining to on-topic discussion increases group-identity but decreases opportunities for interpersonal conversation
• Emphasizing group goals can strengthen group identity without hindering bond formation, but this probably doesn't work in the other direction.
• Large-scale communities geared for group identity may lose the ability to support those repeated interactions that are necessary for bond formation

Application
As a community framework, wiki can support both common identity and common bond goals. The paper uses Wikipiedia as an example of the former, and there are a host of small, conversational wikis that exemplify the latter.

Question
In the discussion of common bond antecedents, the authors list personal information that could encourage the formation of relationships. Photos, background, experience, and interests are all included as self-disclosed information that can focus the community on relating to individual members. I questioned their lumping together of information disclosed in conversation and information disclosed in static user profiles or signature lines. Do these two classes of self-revelatory information impact the forming of relationships differently?

For the WikiStats project, we give users a score based on the size of the changes they make to a page. This isn't the sort of information that, once disclosed, will make me feel more apt to be somebody's friend. (Is it?) But it could be a signal of the type of person you are (eg. an extremely conscientious editor), and thus encourage certain types of individual interactions.

I can't help but think of (I believe it was) Kim's comments that members "come for the content but stay for the relationships." It seems Ren et al might think that view slightly simplistic.

DragonRealms has implemented quite a few ways of maintaining both Identity- and bond-based attachment.

Bond-based:

• They have a yearly convention
• They allow OOC discussions in certain forums
• They have implemented an OOC verb which allows players to whisper OOC to each other in game.

Identity-based

• Players are divided into guild groups
• Players are divided into race groups
• Premium members can become a citizen of one of the four provinces.

I'm running out of steam now, but I will elaborate more on this in my paper.

The authors quote a study arguing that "[the common identity and the common bond] perspectives might instead be viewed as describing two separable processes in the development and maintenance of groups" (p.5), but Ren et als. later discussion and speculation of how identity-based attachment might shift over time to bond-based attachment suggests these two notions are not so easily separable.

If one was to view these two types of bonding as separable, then an e-community could be structured so that information-seeking (i.e., common identity) members could have a designated place where the conversation is always on-topic, and members looking to socialize (i.e., common bond) members could have an informal, commons area. Yet the trade-off of doing this, the authors point out, would be to make it difficult for members seeking both types of bonds to go about their business, and also for common identity-based relationships to develop into common bond-based relationships.

Critique and Application to the BaWers

Just as Matt has found with his community, the BaWers exhibit the traits of both common identity- and common bond- based groups. In Ren et als' terms (p.4), I've observed people participating in community life for several different reasons: (1) because they feel attached to their profession as ESL/EFL teachers and are seeking information on how to advance their careers and the profession (common identity); (2) because they feel attached to the individual members of the community (common bond); and (3) because they feel both types of attachment.

If pushed to "separate" the two processes, I suppose I would liken the low-participating, peripheral members (the ~220 of 250 total members) as those who join
the community out of common identity and strictly for information-seeking purposes. The people in it because of common bonds are the handful of technologically savvy regulars who aren't really learning any new tech advice from hanging around, but who participate for the sake of supporting and keeping in touch with their colleagues. (Already the distinction gets messy, because they still share a common identity and are still nominally committed to the community purpose). The members who enact both types of attachment tend to be the ones who are held up as exemplary members, and who tend to become community leaders.

A high degree of fluidity between both types of attachment is socially encouraged and logistically made possible due to the unstructuredness of the primary group communication mechanism, the community listserv. While conversations tend to swing off-topic from time to time, and members strictly seeking information simply must learn to be tolerant of the fact. For the most part however, community interactions are very much on-topic; and this I believe is due to the fact that the community is first and foremost a professional community of practice. Nobody completely lets their 'guard' down by getting really personal, due to the social ramifications such exposure might have on their professional reputations.

This article summarized a variety of research on common identity and common bond; notably, how they are created, the purposes they serve in different communities (ie: why we want to create/sustain them), and how design can support or hinder them. The main thrust of this paper is that "social science theory can point to how a design decision is likely to satisfy and encourage people with different reasons for community participation" and that different structures for communication meet different types of needs (3).

The authors start with the following definitions of member/group needs:

• Group identity refers to attachment and a feeling of belongingness to the group as a whole
• Common bond refers to attachment to individuals in the community

Communities may be designed to afford one, the other, or even both. For instance, Myspace is designed to clearly support common bond; Wikipedia binds contributors through a common identity of achieving a specific information goal; and cancer supoort sites engage members through both group identity and common bond.

Creating group identity and common bond
As mentioned in other articles this term, the authors here point to four ways of strengthening the feeling of belongingness and understanding of a group identity in a community:  by creating a clear definition of what members should contribute to the whole (joint task); what it hopes to achieve (common purpose); the ways in which group members will be treated equally (common fate); and benefits the group will receive from abiding by the previous three (joint reward). Further, defining clear borders around the community helps members understand what the group supports and delineates the group from vastly different groups (out-groups).

Similarly, the authors mention three ways of building common bond: encouraging members to frequently talk with each other (social interaction); enabling members to provide sufficient information about themselves for others to find those with whom they are similar (personal knowledge); and creating a perception that individuals are similar to each other in terms of preferences, attitudes and values (interpersonal attraction). By enabling individuals to express their similarity to others, communities can also serve a secondary goal of facilitating group identity when similarity is relevant to the group's joint tasks and common purpose.

Purposes that group identity and common bond serve
Both group identity and common bond provide similar advantages:

• members will rate the community more highly
• members will participate more frequently
• members will likely stick around longer

There are some differences in the effect of group identity and common bond, however:

• Common bond will encourage more off-topic posts, while a feeling of group identity will discourage off-topic posts
• Common bond places more responsibility on the individual for their actions, while group identity encourages sharing of responsibility
• Group identity encourages conforming with group norms than common bond does
• Common bond creates an obstacle for newcomers to overcome, while group identity may make newcomers feel more welcome
• Common bond encourages members to recriprocate more with each other on an individual basis while group identity encourages group reciprocity (doing things for the benefit of everyone, not just one person)
• Common bond is more negatively affected by member turnover than is group identity, but group identity is more negatively affected by an increase in off-topic posts

Because there are many differences between common bond and group identity, community developers may seek to design a community to take advantage of the best of both worlds. For instance, a large community with a strong sense of group identity may encourage common bonds to be formed by creating smaller groups for members with common interests and values.

Design implications
Communities seeking to focus on group identity should:

• clearly state the mission and policies to keep conversations on-topic
• make members aware of the benefits that the community receives from their participation (similar to our previous readings on making community members feel that they can contribute something special to the group as a whole)
• allow anonymity and large numbers of participants
• facilitate only public communication

On the other hand, communities that seek to strengthen common bond should:

• allow conversations on a wide variety of topics, including ones not relevant to the specific topic of the community
• limit the number of participants, or filter participants into distinct subgroups to increase the chance of individuals interacting regularly with the same people
• allow for a significant amount of private communication (especially to strengthen the subgroups)

I'll stop here with the summary. I see plenty of connections between this article and other articles we've read this term, and I vaguely pointed to a few, but it'd be neat to see someone else go into more detail on those connections.

This paper was a nice read for me since it discussed implications of different design decisions besides the theoretical framework.

Once again, I am having difficulties applying theories to 43T. Being a huge and very heterogeneous community, members of 43T have motivations of all kinds. Intuitively, it is hard to satisfy different groups of members with different needs. Below I will try to apply the concepts discussed in the paper to 43 one by one.
   
It is difficult to decide whether 43T is a common identity or common bond community. First of all, I don’t think that social categorization is applicable to 43T since there isn’t an umbrella identity that unifies all community members. Yes, the members are interdependent on each other to achieve their goals. But the only form of interdependence at play is “common purpose” and I get the sense that it is not utilized enough to create a sense of group identity. What I mean is that different people with the same goal collaborate on the same task but this doesn’t necessarily establish a strong group identity among them.

43T doesn’t provide its members with synchronous communication tools, such as the chat box, or awareness tools that show who is currently online. But members have opportunities to self-disclose and learn about each other. Members can upload their pictures or link to their photo page in flickr; reveal the place they are living and their personal URL.

In 43T, nothing is off topic. Members can create any kind of goal and post any kind of messages as long as the content complies with the terms of use. The site doesn’t tolerate anonymity but it tolerates large number of participants. It cannot be said that conversations would improve if the number of participants were limited since members do not get email communication and the benefit they get from the site doesn’t decrease with increasing number of members. This is especially true since the site is tag-based.

The authors argue that interdependent goals and competition with other groups intensify identity-based commitments. While 43T has interdependent goals, it doesn’t group its members explicitly. But the common purpose of achieving the same goals fosters bonds between the members. In a way, members who have the same goal are clustered into groups of people with similar interests. Further, a person can belong to as many groups as his/her goals.

43T implemented the three basic routes to support repeated interactions: 1. members’ actions are visible to each other through notifications or the interface 2. public communication is possible through entries, and comments, and 3. the site has an internal messaging system that allows for private communication. Unfortunately, 43T doesn’t have tools for forming explicit social networks. Members can only see whom other members are doing things with.  Another feature that 43T is lacking is a good search system. When a member enters a query, only matching goals, users and tags are retrieved. The actual content – entries, comments – are not searched. This limits the ability of members to find out about similar members. 

To sum up, 43T is mainly a common bond community but it also has some features of a common identity community.