What makes online communities work successfully?

A contribution by Sam Rose of Forward Foundation:

“Those online communities that are driven by the needs of users succeed. There is no recipe for success in online communities. The metrics are the evidence that people on the individual scale are drawing value from the community. The metrics are not traffic, clicks, or even the amount of posts per day people are making.

Successful online communities are a very poor vehicle for immediate monetary revenue profitability. Successful people-driven online communities are a great vehicle for long term sustainable pooling and sharing of value and wealth that is *not* money. Successful online communities are a “commons” (which is a co-governed resource) and so are best managed by applying commons co-governance models.

If you build it, they will not come. But if you organically grow it based on asking people what they need, and working with them to help build that, you will succeed.

You can organically build by asking people to talk with you about what they need. Many times, people are too busy these days to make “talking” the base activity for community. So, looking for where they are already talking, working, sharing, etc and how you might help them leverage the work they are already doing (no matter where it is online), is a more sustainable way to pool efforts than asking people to stop doing what they are doing and do things your way.

The metrics in networked communities are not “web property” and “role” based. They are connection and activity/action based. People are not “users, readers” etc. They are “making, sharing, using, reading, creating” etc this is what is happening on the most successful networks of people online right now. One person can potentially take on up to and including all traditional “roles” in a system, because they have access to all of the actions available in the system

Summary:

* Value in online communities is on the scale of the person and their experience within the community.

* Online communities are really networks of people, and thinking about them through the lens of networks and complex systems will offer a way to think about their architecture, nature, and plausible outcomes of the system

* Focus on the activity a person is doing now (even prior to their engaging your system) as the primary value in the system. Ask the people you want to use your system how you could enhance those actions they are currently doing. Each person and their actions are value to be multiplied or lost. Unless people are explicitly telling you they are giving it away for free with no strings attached, follow the rules of their contribution to pools of resources (attribution, share-alike).

* Metrics are people telling you that you are helping them or not. Supporting evidence is that people are using your systems, but that is not the main evidence. The main evidence will only be available by having open channels of communication with people using your system(s), and having them feedback to you that this is working for them.”

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