Authors:

Lee M. LEVITT <lee@newscorp.com>
Laird POPKIN <laird@newscorp.com>
David HATCH <dhatch@newscorp.com>
News Internet Services
USA

In this presentation at the Internet Society INET 1998 conference, the authors discuss both social and technical challenges of building Online Communities.

Social Challenges

Business goals
"Ultimately the goal of the site must be supported by the focus of the virtual community"

Directing the group
Moderation is essential and policies must be well thought out and communicated frequently to members to avoid dissension. It is also a legal necessity for the sponsor of the site to have a clearly communicated moderation policy and to be able to exhibit "best efforts" enforcement. Moderators should have topical knowledge, but should encourage the community to provide answers. A site should have several moderators to enable greater coverage and quicker responses.

Community management
Communities typical have a small core of participants among the active contributors, which are themselves a small percentage of total visitorship. This core group needs to be actively fostered, and community builders and moderates should identify them and build a rapport with them. It is essential to have a method for gathering feedback from users and this feedback must be responded to and acted upon to make sure users feel valued. Site owners should explicitly state a Privacy Policy, and should take great care in safeguarding all personal information beyond a username to the public. Users must be in control of their information at all times. Use policies and the policies for enforcing them need to be clearly posted, and site managers must react swiftly, fairly, consistently and appropriately to abuse.  Managers should also document all abuse. The way abuse is dealt with defines much of the overall tone of the community.

Technical Challenges

Membership Systems
The basis of community sites are its members and the ability to identify them, and so the quality of the technical system for keeping track of members is key. Because it is easy to join an online community, but takes more energy to participate in one, membership can be very fluid, and the site will need to continually attract new members to thrive.

Scalability
Application performance decreases as the amount of information being processed increases, and systems need to be carefully designed to scale well as the membership grows and the amount of activity increases exponentially. The system also needs to handle sudden surges of activity when unexpected events suddenly cause a huge number of people to access the site. Managers should monitor site traffic to identify usage trends and predict normal traffic increases, and use this information to develop strategies for quickly responding to unexpected surges.

Integration
People expect to move seamlessly between different features of a site, and special consideration should be given to how to integrate the software that provides various features to ensure this seamlessness.

Community system applications
Meeting the needs of both novice and experienced users often requires offering a range of applications from chat rooms to email lists to customizeable user home pages.

The article concludes by providing us with a set of questions to ask ourselves in designing an online community:

    * How will a virtual community support the goals of the corporation[organization]?
    * How will the community be nurtured?
    * What procedures can be put in place to minimize damage should the community go astray?
    * What management and implementation personnel will be needed to ensure success?
    * What community building tools or applications would be most appropriate?
    * What technical issues will be encountered?
    * What resources are available to assist?