The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

Excerpt: Campbell resident Sheldon Chang believes it's all about community. Whether it's virtual or live, meeting people and sharing experiences is what creates a neighborhood, he says.

Chang, 28, believes so strongly in the positive power of connecting people, he's developed a website called Events at 1083--the number represents his street address--where he organizes and coordinates ongoing social events.

Full Article:
http://www.svcn.com/archives/campbellreporter/01.30.02/pub-cit-0205.html

At the height of the dot-com economy, online communities were predicted to be a form of social unification that would wield the collective influence and financial power to affect the outcome of global events. Companies lined up to create or support them even if ostensibly they were really just trying to use them as a way to market products which ranged anywhere from software applications all the way down to hair dyes. As was typical of the late 90’s, online communities were over-hyped and heralded too soon, but the buzz wasn’t entirely unfounded. Online communities do indeed have real world potential to improve people’s lives and they’re set to make a comeback in 2004.

The dominant doctrine of the Internet bubble years was the “network effect” and it was applied to everything from operating systems to communication devices, and unfortunately even to services like online communities. Roughly translated, the “network effect” states that popularity makes something even more popular and popular things have far more utility than less ubiquitous ones. The most popular and useful product naturally ends up controlling the direction of the market and so companies raced each other to rack up the highest number of users. When it comes to communication products like fax machines and proprietary instant messengers, the network effect applies well, but when it comes to social groups, the network effect’s logic falls short.

The network effect is useful for predicting the relationship between utility and the rate of user adoption, but as far as online communities are concerned, utility provides only a portion of the value. People don’t always exchange information purely out of a need for utility. There are also social reasons why people contribute and exchange information. Sometimes people contribute to a public forum as a way of building an online identity. The more they contribute to the utility of a site, the more likely that they’ll become recognized as individuals. By the time the user has reached the point that he is “someone” on a site, he’ll have an identity that’s associated with it and will therefore work to maintain the site’s value. Once a user has established an online identity, he experiences the “community effect,” a sense of belonging that binds him to where his identity is as long as his status of being a recognized personality is maintained.

Since identity is such an important part of producing enduring online communities, the strategy of harnessing the network effect to create dominant online communities ends up being counterproductive. In the late 90’s, sites that managed to earn the popularity that they sought became overcrowded so quickly that they lost their ability to make anyone feel unique. As the population of an online community grows, existing members start to slide back toward anonymity and it becomes increasingly difficult for new members to establish individual identities. Most of the discussion forum applications that are used to build online community sites have little ability to scale in a way that preserves the community effect. However, with some modifications borrowed from social networking and online dating applications, discussion forum software can be adapted to handle a much higher membership capacity. While the membership capacity can be greatly enhanced, online communities will still not be able to scale like networks. A physical limit on membership may need to be imposed to ensure an online community’s ability to endure as a real community.

If the goal is to create real communities that endure through time, a new model of online community building that’s based on geographical limitations may be a better approach to the purely virtual models of the Internet bubble days. Mirroring online communities after neighborhoods and towns may produce better results because virtual communities tend to benefit from also having a degree of physical representation. Modeling after localities will provide online communities with the opportunity to tap into existing infrastructures to solicit for participation, funding, and human resources. On the other side, physical communities will gain additional logistical and communication resources to help support the needs of local residents and businesses.

Ideally, a well-planned physical community doesn’t need an online twin to function as a social unit, but very few people live in such utopian environments. We don’t have to continue living in the disconnected fashion that we’ve gotten used to. Online community applications can help us build communities where it counts the most—in our towns and neighborhoods. While it’d be ambitious to revive the late 90’s dream of online communities disrupting the world social order, it’s not a far stretch to envision online communities as the bridge we need to change our neighborhoods and towns from places where amicable strangers live to places where people have identities.

Social Weaver is the companion blog of the Social Wave Community Project, a localized approach of applying social networking and online community technologies within a highly defined physical community to stimulate real world social interaction. The objectives for the Social Weaver blog are to:

• Assemble knowledge related to the application of social networking and online community technologies as pertinent to use in real world situations
• Document the progress and lessons learned from the Social Wave Communities Project
• Promote model examples of appling social software for use in improving geographical communities
• Publish analysis of social applications and trends in their usage.

Much has changed since the day I first became involved in an online community back in 1986. That was when I got a 1200 baud modem for my twelfth birthday and promptly signed up to use one of the first commercial Internet access gateways in the United States. It was mostly by accident that I ended up an avid user of tools that put me in touch with other people around the globe, but it didn’t take long for my membership in the world of online citizens to develop into an ongoing intention to bring what was then my alternate society into the everyday world.

Needless to say, much has changed. When I first got online, the Internet wasn’t even called the Internet and a $6/hr AOL-like service called CompuServe was the king of the industry. It’d be all too easy to assume that things have changed for the better. In many ways, this assumption appears almost irrefutable. Computers are faster, software is more advanced and easier to use, broadband is commonplace, and there are so many people online throughout the world that even remote villagers have access to the Internet.

On the other hand, many of these improvements have also come at the cost of undermining the cultural integrity of an online society that made the connected experience such a richly social one. Even as more advanced social applications are coming out, the nature of using the Internet becomes increasingly less social than it used to be. Cohesive social groups were once fairly common online but the hysteria of the Internet bubble years and the thoughtlessness of marketing-driven software development has done much to undermine the social foundations of the old Internet all while it corrupted what could have been a golden period of establishing real societies online.

It’s good to see that we seem to be getting a second chance to get it right. This blog is my contribution to the rebuilding of the Internet’s social foundations. It’s a collection of gathered thoughts and philosophies in the making formed from my many years of life online. I hope it contributes to a future in which enduring online communities are more real than they are virtual.

About My Credentials:

It surprised me how little people knew about the Internet when I started work on my physical therapy degree at Boston University in 1992 so I took it upon myself to teach students and faculty about the Internet and how to use it. In my six years as a student at Boston University, I started my college’s first electronic community newsletter, ran a tutoring service to help people find professional quality healthcare information online, and authored a modestly famous white paper, Do Healthcare Providers Need the Internet? In that period of time I also wrote an introductory Internet book that fell just short of publication. I finished my academic career at Boston University with a Master’s degree in physical therapy, a strong foundation of scientific research skills, and an award for distinguished student leadership, the Scarlet Key.

My career as an information technology savvy healthcare clinician was less than a year old when I was recruited out of the clinic by Neoforma, a Silicon Valley healthcare oriented technology company in 1998. I went to Neoforma to use my eclectic background in a variety of roles, but most prominently in the development of a multi-disciplinary online educational resource for healthcare facility designers. That project ended with the end of the dot-com boom in 2001 and I shifted into a more technical role as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System Manager until I decided to leave Neoforma in 2003 to return to work on social software applications.

Today, I’m working on adapting the hot social applications that have appeared in 2002 and 2003 for everyday use in real communities to improve residential life and provide support to local economies. I’m also the online community manager (and a founding member) of the Valiant Clan{VAL}, an enduring online gaming clan that formed around the original Unreal Tournament (UT) first-person shooter. In addition to my online community efforts, I work as a freelance Web designer and publish a small line of quirky greeting cards.