Chapter 21. evolt.org: An Online Community


How incentives can serve to drive an economy of participation among content creators and consumers

The building of online communities has been going on since the Web began. Some have succeeded, but most have failed spectacularly. Yet again and again, the allure of thousands of paying customers happily discussing the benefits of a company's latest widget makes even the most hardboiled and pragmatic businesspeople throw caution to the wind. Fanning the flames of the online community fire were all sorts of new and intensely marketed community-enabling technologies, such as chat applications, that promised that "if you build itwith our technology, of coursethey will come."

Clearly, online communities require more than cool tools to succeed. Technologies enable people with shared interests to converse and exchange ideas, but it's up to those people to contribute interesting and relevant information, stay on topic, be patient with one another, and police themselves when things get out of hand. Every community is unique in who it allows to join, how it welcomes and initiates new members, what types of events and milestones it promotes, and what types of behaviors it honors. So it's not grandiose to claim that each successful online community truly has its own culture.

Cultures and communities don't just happen; they require careful nurturing. On the other hand, they wither when overmanaged. A well-designed information architecture can help balance these two extremes, flexibly encouraging freedom of expression and action while organizing and structuring content for better findability. And where other architectures have to fit within a context, an online community architecture creates that contextit is often the only place where its members meet. In effect, online-community information architecture is the ultimate exercise in designing for context. This case study describes evolt.org, a real live online community that is grappling with, and succeeding at, providing and nurturing the context for its members.




Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
ISBN: 0596527349
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 194

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