The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

I'm finding that many people in Silicon Valley seem to equate the words "online community" or "community-network" to Craigslist. This is been a minor problem for Social Wave because it's hard to explain what Social Wave is to the general public without being interrupted with questions like, "Is this another Craigslist?" When Social Wave members submit feedback and make suggestions about what they want to see, some of the feedback could be summarized as requests to copy Craigslist.

Any developer of community-networks would be pleased to have his project mentioned in the same breath as Craigslist and I'm no different, but the problem is that Social Wave is fundamentally different from Craigslist and any moves to make it more like Craigslist will essentially signal the end of what I set out to do when I drew the plans for Social Wave.

Craig Newmark cites Usenet and the WELL as philosophical sources for what eventually became Craigslist. From what I can tell, Craigslist appears to have aligned itself more toward Usenet than the WELL and it does such an incredible job of doing what Usenet did well without its associated downsides that I stopped dreaming of having the Usenet of the late 90's back again. Craigslist to me is the Usenet for the rest of us, but it is not the WELL for the rest of us, except perhaps in its spirit of wanting to help locals connect with other locals.

The WELL for the rest of us is still a hole that sorely needs to be filled in the digital community landscapes and Social Wave was launched as an attempt at doing just that, but the people who make up "the rest of us" have no idea what the WELL was (nor do they know Usenet either) and inevitably I find myself having to explain why I'm not just the latest opportunist trying to copy Craigslist. That part isn't very hard to do.

The hard part is getting people to stop trying to use it like Craigslist. I'm finding that for much of the general public, Craigslist is less of a community that they want to engage in more so than it is where they go to address a specific need like buying or selling something. I've also had people say that they're looking for more entertaining things to read like they get on Craigslist. On the other end, there are people who just post and never read. The online social ethic of giving and taking as things that should be done together doesn't appear to be very strong with most people who tell me that they access Craigslist all the time.

Now to be fair, it's not Craigslist's fault that people don't follow the mostly obsolete rules of netiquette anymore. The golden ethics of online social interaction that formed around the glory days of Usenet and local dial-up BBS culture have been slowly eroded by patterns of usage influenced by advanced search engines, improvements in network technology, mass adoption, and the emergence of real-time messaging services among other things.

The only reason why I'm discussing this in the context of Craigslist is because one of my goals with Social Wave is to engage people who aren't already well engaged in any sort of online connection to the community. With these people even using Craigslist can be a challenge and getting them to imagine something beyond Craigslist is very difficult.

I have nothing but admiration and praise for Craigslist, but with its average level of engagement diluted by its now massive size and it's massive activity recently reported at 2 billion page views and 5 million posts per month [source], maybe it's time to find something other than "online community" as a label for Craigslist.

Craigslist is a wonderful resource that helps communities connect, but it no longer seems like the sort of place that is ideal toward fostering a community of its own and I don't think anyone who's fiercely loyal to Craigslist should feel insulted by this view. If Craigslist embraces its evolution toward being some sort of network layer for the general community, it'll far exceed its potential as a community itself and in the process will continue to help projects like my Social Wave project.

Social Wave and I owe a debt of gratitude to Craigslist for helping us attract some great members to build our foundation on, but in the course of reflecting upon how much it has helped my efforts, I came to challenge an idea I always held as fact. "Is Craigslist really a community?"

A key component of Social Wave’s strategy originally centered around working with residentially based organizations such as neighborhood associations and homeowner associations, but after a year observing my own neighborhood association and talking to people about like organizations, I’ve come to the conclusion that organizations associated with residential infrastructures are not ideal partners for creating social connections based on personal affiliations.

This might sound counterintuitive because I’m essentially saying that if you want to help improve a local community, the neighborhood associations and homeowner associations aren’t the best places to go. What else could be more local and more connected to the local residents than a small association defined around their group of streets?

The problem with residential associations is that they tend to have few resources and rely on the dedication of volunteers to operate. Without a consistent staff and steady leadership, it’s very difficult to produce the kind of leadership necessary to effect a socially connected community. Residential associations tend to be most active in times of crisis when suddenly everyone feels like he or she has a stake in the quality of life in the neighborhood. An example would be a group of residents fighting to stop a major highway proposed near their homes for fear that their home values would drop.

Once the crisis is over, the critical mass needed for any meaningful social cohesion between neighbors becomes very difficult to sustain. Granted, skilled leaders can often take advantage of a crisis for its team-building potential as a bonding experience that will open doors in the future, but when an organization has little funding and relies on volunteers, such leadership is difficult to come by in sufficient quantity.

In the San Diego area, 4S Ranch, a large developer of planned communities has included a community intranet called 4s-Connect in with their latest expansions. A corporation with the resources of 4S Ranch may be able to produce a more engaged community that will add to the quality of life for the owners of the houses on their developments and increase home valuations. Although, I’m leery of community-networks initiated by large housing corporations, I have to applaud 4S Ranch for taking the risk of putting resources behind a managed online community to go with their planned communities. It’ll be interesting to see if it manages to elevate the social environment of the neighborhood or if it’ll backfire on them as a collaboration tool that residents may use to organize against the developers.

I’ve noticed some hostility toward online community and social networking services that aren’t totally free, but in the right hands, online communities that charge a fee may provide more value for your time and money. If the 4s-Connect gamble and similar efforts succeed, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to pay people for work that’s often expected to come out of goodwill and generosity alone. Personally speaking, I hope to eventually provide a small salary or at least a stipend for myself and others who are deeply committed to making Social Wave work.