Creating Self-governing Online Communities

In general, I disdain the casual manner in which many people throw around the word "community". As a member of the Microsoft.com Communities and Collaborative Development team, the subtly overloaded nature of the word "community" is particularly troubling.

'What do you do?' an associate asks.

'I enable people to connect to other people and interact more richly in online communities of practice,' I respond.

Depending upon who I'm talking to, the response is usually something like: 'Oh, so you're the forums guy,' OR 'Does your team own blogs?' OR 'what are you planning around wikis?' OR sometimes even 'What do you think about CodePlex?'

Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton define community as "networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity."

Obviously, the word "community" can and does mean different things to different people.

To clarify what we mean by "community", my manager Bob Rebholz (RSS) formally distinguishes between "weak tie", "flex tie" and "strong tie" communities. Forums are an example of "weak tie" communities, in his opinion and mine. As such, you might infer that forums are of less interest to us, as Community Guys, than other community mediums. Insofar as we are passionate about enabling the creation of, supporting, and inspiring "strong tie" communities, that may be true...to a point.

Like most people, I imagine, I am inspired by a good challenge. When I see a "weak tie" community medium, like an MSDN Forum, I feel challenged to figure out how to enable its loyal participants to evolve their forum into a "strong tie" community of practice. This, at the end of the day, is what we all get paid to do: take something that's weak (or of lesser value) and make it strong (more valuable).

To this end, I was very taken by this blog post by Tom Coates: Self-reflexive rulesets in online communities...

In my opinion, a self-governing Forum has the potential to convert a weak tie community into a strong one. Tom writes,

Imagine a set of messageboards, each with their own clear identity and each with a functioning moderation system based around a pre-existing political structure - one Monarchic, one Parliamentary Democracy and one Distributed Anarchy. Each of these political structures has been generated from one abstracted ruleset, and each component of that ruleset can be - in principle - turned on or off at will by the community concerned. Moreover, the rules are self-reflexive - ie. the community can also create structures to govern how those rules are changed. In other words, members of those communities can choose to shift to a different political model, or can develop their own by incremental improvements of changes to sections of the ruleset to allow moderators or administrators or normal users to create the 'laws' that govern how they inter-relate.

This self-reflexive component would operate with a bill-like structure - ie. an individual would be able to propose a new rule or a change to an existing rule that then may or may not require some form of wider ratification before it becomes 'real' and starts empowering or constraining the citizenry of that board.

When a new user joins the community, s/he is presented the current political structure of each one and from that point chooses a board to be affiliated with. S/he is then part of the population of that community and can rise up through the ranks (if there are ranks) and participate in the functioning of that political community. This goes right down to the creation of different parts of that commnuity, how the various parts of the community inter-relate with one another and who can post what and when.

Each community will have its own strengths and weaknesses - some will no doubt go horribly politically wrong and have power seized by mad administrators, but hopefully others will find their own kind of political equilibrium after a while - and maybe that political equilibrium could be a good model that could be genericised and used as a more common and rigid platform for new online communities that aren't interested in the emerging rule-set component. That is to say, maybe we can evole a better system for handling debate, discussion and power relationships in messageboards and other online community spaces and games. Of course, for that to happen, the ruleset has to be sufficiently politically abstractable that new arrangements could emerge that didn't initially occur to us during the creation of the ruleset and the reflexive process has to be comprehendible to real users.

Some sample bills:

• Anna proposes a bill:
  Junior members to not be able to create threads
• Bill proposes a bill:
  Administrators to not be able to change user roles.
• Charles proposes a bill:
  Junior members to be able to create posts. Action will require ten ratifications from Moderators, Administrators, Normal Members. One disagreement can veto.
• David proposes a bill:
  Moderators to be able to edit abstracts. Action will require three ratifications from Moderators or Administrators. Three disagreements will veto.
• Edgar proposes a bill:
  The User Responsible to be able to change their own display name. Action will require no ratifications.
• Fiona proposes a bill:
  Normal Users to be able to Unblock Users. Action will require 60% assent from Normal Users polled over 24 hours.
• Gavin proposes a bill:
  Normal Users to not be able to propose bills. Action will require a 51% decision of all users polled over a 6 hour period.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 21, 2006
  Bob Rebholz discusses weak tie communities: http://theworkingnetwork.com/blogs/blog/archive/2006/07/20/significance_of_weak_tie_community.aspx.
• Anonymous
  July 21, 2006
  I belong to what I consider a self-governing and strong-tie community. The technical nature of the community has two elements; one is usenet and the other is a heavily modified perlmud that can be accessed using a mud client or any telnet client. We use it in the same way that IRC is used in that we have channels to diifferentiate topics of conversation.
  
  The initial community started over the development of a shared hobby. It later grew stronger when one of our members created the mud.
  
  We have had several weddings of members, and many in-person gatherings.  The community is in it's 9th year of existence.
  
  I have often thought our online community could be copied in other environments, especially technical ones.
  
  If you're interested in observing our community, or joining it, visit ifmud.port4000.com. We talk about the hobby stuff sometimes, but are also often found discussing world politics, religion, news, windows, java, macos, hardware, networking, audio, video, and more.
  
  David C.
• Anonymous
  August 04, 2006
  Where has Apple been since the second invasion of Iraq???   Recently, Apple decided to jettison its forum...