dburry.com

What makes a growing, vibrant, and lasting online community.

There are 12 principles that guide communities.  These principles are common to all communities, whether they are online or not, but they are especially important to understand for those of us who are trying to build online communities, because of their virtual nature.  Not all online communities take advantage of every principle very well, and this is fine for a community in its early stages, but the more that are covered within a given community, the more real, vibrant, and lasting the community will be.

Here's my own personal paraphrased summary of the principles:

 * Purpose: Members of a community should have a common purpose, goal, or interest, a reason to come together as a community and exist.
 * Identity: They should know who is who, and each member must have a separate personal identity that they can call their own.
 * Reputation: Members should be able to build reputation and status among their peers based on their actions, what they do and say, who they are (identity), etc.
 * Governance: The community should be regulated and governed according to the stated shared values, by members of the community.  It shouldn't be a "free for all" with nobody in charge for example.
 * Communication: Members should be able to communicate with each other and share ideas and information that relate to their purpose.
 * Groups: Members should be able to relate to each other in smaller groups for various reasons.
 * Environment: Members should interact in some kind of a shared environment that is appropriate for their goals and purposes.
 * Boundaries: There should be a way to tell who is in in the community and who isn't, and who's in any groups and who's not, and why.
 * Trust: Members need to be able to tell who is trustworthy.  This goes along with identity, reputation, and history.
 * Exchange: Members should be able to trade knowledge, goods, and services.
 * Expression: The community as a whole and any groups within it should be able to express their group identity.  Members should be able to see what is happening with other members.
 * History: Members of the community should be able to look back over the history of what has happened in the past, and learn, grow, and evolve from it.

For more detailed information, see Cynthia Typaldos' work on this subject, including a white paper (PDF) that has a nice pyramid graph (page 10) illustrating the importance of different principles and which ones build upon which others.