Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Care and Feeding of (online) Communities

I love the topic of "communities": how to build them, how to maintain them, and understanding the critical factors that determine their success or failure. It's fascinating to me to discover why many ad hoc, unplanned communities succeed while so many more intentional communities fail. The answers are in the common, essential elements that successful communities embody, often organically, and which failing communities neglect.

A colleague recently asked for a short list of recommendations for resources on "community." Here are my top picks:

1. A great "pure" book on building community -- in general, not specifically online -- is Peter Block's Community: The Structure of Belonging. Block's book focuses on the sorts of critical conversations that must happen for communities to happen. It is a "bible" for community organizing, etc.

2.Perhaps the best, ready-to-apply overview I have seen is Guy Kawasaki's How to Change the World: The Art of Creating a Community which (like much of Kawasaki's material) is based on insights dating back to his days as The "Software Evangelist" on the original Macintosh project. His points are nicely mapped onto non-SW and even non-Web communities.

3.The site CommunitySpark.com regularly provides excellent advice. I've followed it for more than a year and have found it to have very good articles, discussions and podcasts on online community construction and maintenance, including very practical articles on dealing with trouble-makers, inciting conversation, etc. I like it because it puts into practice many concepts I've seen in the Block book, etc.

4.Finally, Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Church is full of proven advice on community building from a spiritual perspective, 100% in synch with the practical advice provided by the resources above. Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA grew from nothing into one of the largest and most successful evangelical congregations in the USA based on these principles.