“Communities can grow anywhere communication occurs.”[source]. This statement (quoted from an O’Reillynet.com piece struck me as a good place to start when attempting to define “community.” People who wish to communicate with each other and, presumably, have a specific topic (or group of topics) form a “community” by agreeing to focus on the topic(s) at hand and avoiding irrelevant, tangential discussions. In an online community-type setting, the community members have chosen to be there and should expect to observe and engage in the discussions.

As with real world” communities there is a reasonable likelihood of miscreants being present. For this reason, leadership is another key ingredient in an online community. Etienne Wenger wrote about different types of leadership. Aside from the leaders, a group of people with a common interest should also respond to problems to ensure they do not threaten the main purpose of the group’s interaction or the process of interaction.

“But in all cases, leadership must have intrinsic legitimacy in the community. To be effective, therefore, managers and others must work with communities of practice from the inside rather than merely attempt to design them or manipulate them from the outside.” (Wenger, Communities of Practice“). This statement imparts an important idea that plays a vital role in online communities. The virtual communities that continue to develop and multiply often have a commercial motive. These are fine and aren’t necessarily “illegitimate” but they, perhaps more so than non-commercial communities, need to have genuine and involved leadership. An ideal situation would be a community leader who has a passion for the topics being discussed and is able to couple that passion with a paid role to encourage and support the community. The opportunity for overt sales or marketing would be greatly diminished since the point of the community would be to grow steadily and see return visitors to participate in the community. Trying to masquerade as a “community” and then attempt to keep people involved merely through sales offers would likely be identified as a marketing “trick” rather than a real community.

“Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases. Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic “knowing” that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge.” (Wenger, Communities of Practice“). This statement, for me, provides key measurement points to evaluate the health and maturity of a community. A useful nuance from the statement is the absence of any mention of quantity or percentage of community members who should be fully engaged. However, a community can only have so many voices and members before it reaches an unmanageable size. I believe that size limitations apply in both the online and physical worlds when talking about community effectiveness.

Resources reviewed while developing opinions about community: