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.

Why every individual congregation should be participating in online community to improve their own local real life community.

There are many ways in which having an online presence benefits an individual church congregation.  For example, giving people directions, schedules, special event information, news, and many other pieces of information.

But there are many ways that are not yet tapped in most church web sites.  A church is, at its heart, a community of people, and there are many ways it can augment this community nature online.  For example, here are some features churches could add to their web sites:

 * Forums: places where church members can post discussions between themselves, when you post a message, others read and respond later when you are offline
 * Chats: live discussions over the internet, typing with a computer keyboard
 * Blogs: frequently updated newsy information, in a web log format
 * User comments: letting web site viewers participate by responding to articles and posts, and to each other's comments as well

Here are some benefits churches would see from having more of the above-mentioned features on their web sites:

 * Increased awareness: The more active the site is, the more people will become aware that the church exists.
 * Increased attendance: Increased involvement in the web site encourages members to come to church more often.
 * Increased membership: As current members invite their friends into the online activities they become aware of the church and potentially join it.
 * Increased donations and tithe: from the increased attendance and membership.
 * Increased involvement: The more activities a church has, the more people will become personally involved in them, lead out, etc.
 * Better communication: The more ways there are to communicate, the greater the chance of finding the best way for each situation.
 * Closer friends: the more people can communicate and the more activities they have, the closer friends they become.
 * Increased participation in the Gospel Commission: the more different mediums are used to share, the more God's Word gets out.

I hope this list gets everyone's creative juices going.  At a later time we can think about the barriers to doing community and potential ways to overcome them.

Does charging money for basic useful community membership help or hinder the community in general?

I've noticed a few online communities charge money for membership, specifically to reduce vandalism of the community (bad behavior, language, etc), as well as to support themselves.  The theory I've heard from marketing is that those undesirable types of people will be less likely to be willing to pay, and that those who do pay will be more likely to value their community and keep themselves and others from destroying what they've paid for.  While those theories do have some merit, I question if this is the best for a community in general.

To see what I mean, let's try out the same principle in a real life example: Suppose you have a church building that is being vandalized by some of the attendees each week.  They keep putting graffiti up on the walls, pestering nice people with foul language, etc...  What should be done about it?  Here are three options I can think of:

 (a) charge admission at the door.

 (b) ramp up security: add cameras to catch people in the act, and create a security team to haul offenders out quicker.

 (c) same as (b) only additionally create teams who target these "undesirable" people and try to witness to them too, by befriending them and showing love and caring in a non-condescending way, listening and talking to them, etc...  yes, even if they've been dragged out for causing a raucous during the service!  It's the old "giving you this spanking's going to hurt me worse than you" approach, instead of the vindictive angry parent approach.

While (a) might appeal to the people doing the budget, and (b) and (c) are a lot more effort and expense, I strongly suspect most people would ideally much rather do (b) or (c) than (a) if in any way possible.  This is because (a) would *drastically* reduce the number of people attending, and might also have the tendency to change the atmosphere somewhat from an open, welcoming place to the direction of a small group of people that don't associate with outsiders.

I believe the same principles apply to online communities.  So in my opinion, charging admission at the doors of the community is not the best way to have a nice safe community.  Yes, it works, but it drastically reduces the size of the community and also tends to create an atmosphere of "us-and-them" mentality, which separates the haves and the have-nots.  I think it's better to just increase development on tools to make it easier to deal with offenders as they happen, and actually go out and try to witness to them by the way too....