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Vital Statistics
TITLE: Context is King
SUBTITLE: Thirty Years of Lessons in Online Community Building
AUTHOR: F. Randall Farmer
PAGES: TBD
PRICE: TBD

For more than three decades, people have been mediating communications with each other using computer networks. Though the telephone facilitated communications between people who were physically separate, online networks enabled entire new classes of interaction between people who were temporally separated.

Strangely, detailed best practices about how to facilitate online collaboration, communication, and community (aka Social Computing) are not yet gathered into one volume. This book attempts to remedy that situation by providing detailed patterns and anti-patterns for building online communities in context.

Though one might think that websites for a TV guide and a Movie ticket vendor might be similar because they are promoting long-format programs – they actually have distinct community contexts: The movie ticket vendor is actually not very interested in users chatting with each other in groups about movies – his users are buying tickets/looking for a theater (interacting with the content) and aren’t thinking “I want to chit-chat with other Toy Story III fans” – ratings and reviews are about the limit of their community interactions. On the other hand, at a TV guide site, the users are often doing the exact opposite – they want to directly interact with each other around the actors, characters, plots, and events surrounding their favorite shows. So, unlike with the movie site, you don’t want to ask TV site users to rate TV episodes, you want to offer collaborative tools like wiki’s, blogs, or message boards.

Some difficulties with other books in the area of online community building are:

1. Too general – Advice such as “Listen to your users” and “Greet your first users personally” are good as far as they go, but don’t really talk about how to facilitate the users interacting with each other and a sites content. Specifically, this book will provide tools for a company/site developer to identify their community context decide which patterns are right for their community.
2. Ignore/Minimize risk - Most books on social computing don’t handle critical issues such as abuse mitigation, such as reputation gaming and trolls as well as how features interact with international laws and culture.
3. Too old – The first generation of books on this subject are now ten years old, and in serious need of a sequel.
4. Too shallow – Most books focus on positive examples, without detailing the wrong turns that teams made on the path to their successful formula, depriving the reader of needed insight. This book will also detail anti-patterns: What can, and has, gone wrong with generous examples for each chapter.

Each [anti]pattern will be given a proper name, and a broad range of example community contexts will be provided with a recommended set of patterns to consider for each.

“Most sites don’t need their own social network – stop trying to copy Facebook, it won’t work. Your community context isn’t the same as theirs was: single campus current year college students, positively identified by an .edu mail address.”

“Considering adding a point-system and leader board to your community to encourage participation? Well, before commit your precious web developer resources to revamp your entire site, read about why Digg abandoned their leader boards because they decreased the quality and diversity of featured submissions to their site.”

Primary: Product Managers, Web Developers Secondary: Group moderators and small site operators. Estimated market size: 100,000 [back-up with Amazon.com sales numbers for related books, if available.]

Books such as The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of the Crowd, and the new Crowdsourcing along with the explosive growth of the Myspace.com and Facebook.com social networking sites has generated a renewed passion by all kinds of companies worldwide in the phenomenon of user-created content a.k.a. online communities. This is the “second wave” for social computing and, even if the hype subsides somewhat as many attempt and fail to leverage this phenomenon, its continual resurgence indicates that people will always be looking for ways connect to their customers, and to have them connect with each other.

Product Managers are looking to deeply engage their customers using online communities and/or collaboration, all while navigating the complicated space of platform options, moderation costs, and international data & kid-related laws. This book will significantly streamline the product/site specification process.

Web site developers need a canonical reference for designing and implementing sites and applications as well as provide a 800-pound gorilla in user experience consulting discussions.

Group moderators and small site operators commonly have to fuse multiple technology providers together to assemble the tools they need to enable their community. This book will help them more finely tune their choices.

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Online Community Research Network – Give a presentation and distribute comp copies to community platform companies. I am willing to travel to promote the book. I love to give talks – in fact, much of the inspiration and initial material for the book is drawn from several talks I’ve given over the years. Web Conferences (list here) Web-based promotion, such as a Facebook page for the book, Yahoo! Group for professionals to discuss the patterns, the Community Patterns Wiki (proposed below.)

I’m hoping to publish early drafts of many sections on my blog, Habitat Chronicles, where I have an established audience readership of industry peers. Feedback on this basis, I believe, will lead to a much stronger book initially, as well as provide ongoing discussion of the book matter after publication. This should lead to the development of more [anti]patterns for either a web edition of the book and/or future print editions.

There should be a separate wiki for the book as well, so the many people can contribute to the refinement of these [anti]patterns. With any luck, this will create a well-established home for future online community developers to leverage the work of those who have gone before them.

Front Matter Introduction

Content, Context, and Attention	
About patterns and anti-patterns

Social Contexts

User Contexts
Object Contexts
Corporate Contexts

Social Tools

Realtime [Verbs]
	Chat
	Instant Messaging
	Voice/Video Chat
	Virtual Worlds
Asynchronous [Verbs]
	Groups/Mailing Lists
	Message Boards
	Blogs
	Wiki
	Status Logging (Newsfeeds)
Data Stores/Elements [Nouns]
	Profiles
	Avatars
	Video/Audio clips
	Tags and Taxonomies of Metadata
	Favorites, Fans and Friends
	Content permission models
		“Public is public!”
Reputation
	“All web search is social.”
	Proactive vs. Reactive
	International Concerns
	“Did you even read the article?”
Application Platform
	The (5?) models of Web 2.0 application interaction
Abuse Mitigation

Social Capital

Incentives and/or Revenue
Metrics
SEO

Stitching it all together

Me/we/it Incentives (win-win-win) Metrics (Measure, Measure, Measure) Context vs. Content - 5/6 main contexts - Common Context errors - Determining your context(s) Identity and Social Networks About Patterns and Anti-patterns Reputation Ratings and Reviews Groups, Message-boards, Blogs, and Wikis Realtime – Chat/Instant Messaging/Mobile/Presence/Geolocation/Vitality/Avatars & Virtual Worlds Moderation & Abuse Mitigation Legal and Local The Open Web: What happens when your identity, network, data and reputation follow you everywhere. End-to-End contextual design examples

High-fidelity communication Compare Bokardo’s engagement path to AJK’s stairs to Crossing the Chasm and original FRF Path of Ascension Randy’s Method of development to Bokardo’s AOF method – include by reference? Need to talk about “Community Ownership?” Everyone seems confused about this and are always asking for guidance, though the Flickr folks (Heather and George) pretty much have this nailed down and everyone are deferring to their notes. If included, do so by reference. Specifically – has anyone written about how to handle the cases where the community and the company can NOT agree and somehow survive. EONs changing their age limits and Y!Finance MB, and Y!Answers are good examples of no-win cases. How much can I tell the truth about Y! communities? The more the better. Has anyone done Virtuous Cycle? Does that go back to Howard or AJ? New site vs. retrofitting. “Don’t try to copy Facebook!”

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