Notes about Building Successful Online Communities by Robert Kraut, Paul Resnick and others (via Google Bard):
In their book, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Design, Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick draw on insights from the social sciences to offer design principles for creating and managing online communities. The book is divided into five parts:
- Starting a new community
- Attracting new members
- Encouraging commitment
- Encouraging contribution
- Regulating misbehavior and conflict
For each part, the authors provide a brief overview of the relevant research, followed by a set of design claims that are supported by the evidence. For example, in the section on attracting new members, the authors argue that communities should make it easy for people to find and join them, and that they should provide clear and concise information about the community’s purpose and goals.
The book also includes a number of case studies that illustrate how the design principles can be applied in practice. For example, the authors discuss how the online community Slashdot was able to attract and retain a large and active membership by providing a forum for discussion of technology news and by rewarding users for contributing high-quality content.
Building Successful Online Communities is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in creating or managing an online community. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the research on online communities, and it offers a set of practical design principles that can be used to improve the chances of success.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the book:
- Online communities can be successful if they are designed to meet the needs of their members.
- Design principles that are based on insights from the social sciences can help to create successful online communities.
- Case studies can provide valuable insights into how to apply design principles in practice.
If you are interested in creating or managing an online community, I highly recommend reading Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Design.
[Author’s Note: The above text was AI-generated and may not be accurate. The overarching intent behind this blog post is to provide a starting point for discussions among aspiring community builders. Just as startup founders can benefit from startup oriented content (such as those provided by accelerators and incubators), community builders can benefit from community building oriented content. If you are an aspiring community builder, please contribute to the discussion by commenting on this post]
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One response to “Building Successful Online Communities by Robert Kraut, Paul Resnick and others”
Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social Design is in itself a collaborative effort. The book has been written by multiple writers, with Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick as the lead authors. Other contributing authors are Sara Kiesler, Moira Burke, Yan Chen, Niki Kittur, Joseph Konstan, Yuqing Ren and John Riedl.
The authors discuss online community building in the following ways:
– The promise of online communities: Communities that break the limits of time and space and scale of offline communities
– The ability of communities to produce goods and services that benefit society as a whole (by way of example: open-source software and other kinds of private goods)
– The design challenges that communities face and why some succeed while others don’t despite being in the same space (for instance why Facebook and Wikipedia were successful while others were not)
– How to overcome the cold-start problem of starting a community
– How do established communities attract new members, how to screen members for appropriateness and how to provide information to new members that they are joining the right communities
– How to encourage commitment among members to remain in the community and contribution among those who do remain
– How to regulate behaviour among the members who do remain
– What are the levers of change that community members and designers have in how they control the community
– How findings from social science can be applied (and the fact that there are a sufficient number of findings which can be applied) in inter-related ways