Community Types: Me, We, and It
<box 45em round green> “I, we, and it. That's simple enough.” </box|– Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything>
When enabling online communities, it is easy to become confused evaluating which tools and technologies to use when we should instead be considering social dynamics and structures. For the last five years or so, I’ve been using a taxonomy called Me/We/It to first sort out the primary social contexts in all communities, and only then looking at the tools and technologies and how they interact.
<box round right 25%> Though these are drawn as discrete boxes, they really represent a continuous if clumpy space. For example: many It communities use Group/Mailing-list tools - but there are distinctive differences that are significant to successful community design.</box>
| <html><font size=+2>Me</font></html> “Who am I?” | <html><font size=+2>We</font></html> “Where we connect…” | <html><font size=+2>It</font></html> “What we talk about…” |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Community Size | One | Some | Many |
| Focus | Personal need | Social communication Sharing | Subject matter |
| Purpose | Self-Expression | Sense of Belonging | Knowledge Base |
| Moderation Model | Dictator I am in control “My way or the digital highway” | Autocratic Owner is in control Social pressure limits abuse | Democratic All in control Requires code to facilitate |
| Platforms | Profile Blog Avatar Karma | Social Network IM Group | Message Board Rating & Review Poll Chat Tag |
In the table above, each community context type in Me/We/It contains three main attributes: A Focus (or organizing principal), moderation model, and a motivational purpose – below each are a list of tools and technologies that optimally support this type, and at the bottom is a typical number of members in that community.
The Me communities are organized around the individual, alone. They have complete control of what they do and what they share with others, including the internet as a whole. The most common purpose of me-based communities is to express one’s self or to capture some personal value from a greater extended community. Examples of this one the net are Profiles, Avatars, Blogs, Photo sharing sites, and even Ebay.
We based communities are generally small collections of people, where the members of the group are more important than the topic of their interaction. Each member knows and/or cares about all of the others and the loss of a specific member is seen as a significant loss to the group as a whole. These are truly social groups and, as such, the members moderate themselves and each other through purely non-technical social methods, such as scolding, ignoring, shunning, and personal confrontation. In fact, technical solutions (such as voting and banning) to problems in We communities are seen as heavy handed and are generally disliked. We groups are most often created by a Motivator, such as the current trendy research type Chief Household Officer – who bootstraps the community and makes all the initial connections.
<box yellow round right 25%> The Me/We/It community types were identified in 2003-2004 while I was Community Strategic Analyst at Yahoo! and are primarily the work of James Seivert, Scott Derringer, and myself. </box> The We group exists as a means to support people who want to belong to a group. That sense of belonging is what holds the group together. Examples include Family mailing lists, strong social networks (like Facebook), and local/congregational groups. There is probably a practical upper limit to the size of a strong We group, and that is probably about 150 (Dunbar’s number) - a theoretical approximate maximum of the number of people that you can know well enough to call a close friend. My experience supports an upper bound in this range as well, because at more than 100 people, messaging systems like Groups often become too chatty/spammy, causing the groups to split into smaller ones.
It communities are larger and are centered on a topic or issue, and who is a member of the group is less critical than the value of the content created by the group about the topic. More than any other community type, this group needs tools to moderate, discover and organize its content. Moderation moves to center stage as a critical management task, and as the group grows larger, the authoritative moderator(s) model often fails leading to dead groups. For many It community technologies, such as message boards, central moderation isn’t effective and better-scaling democratic moderation methods are required – consider SlashDot and Digg as examples. The purpose of the It community is to create a high quality knowledge base on the particular subject and to make it easy to share with others that need it. Most community sites fail to provide adequate search and quality assessment tools.
Many of the context problems I will discuss today start as errors in identifying which of these types of communities is appropriate.
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personal-context group-context object-context me we it