The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

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.

Unless otherwise credited, all articles in this blog are authored by Sheldon Chang.

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.

Going back to the mid 1980’s, I’ve been a part of some very memorable online communities that were the kind of intriguing cross-cultural societies described by Howard Rheingold in his landmark book, Virtual Communities. Unfortunately, ever since a few years after that book was published, I’ve seen fewer and fewer online communities that have any element of community at all. Many are anything but communities. After all, in the physical world, would you describe an overcrowded apartment complex where anonymous residents constantly shuffle in and out as a community?

What happened? Online communities were once looked upon as an emerging social phenomenon that was so powerful that it would lead to the development of new socioeconomic groups, but it seems like most of the ones around today are either dead quiet or so noisy that everyone seems to be shouting out to nobody in particular. Are we just going through an extended learning curve caused by the worldwide explosion of Internet users at the turn of the century? Do we just need better applications that are more user-friendly? I believe the answers are yes and yes, but I also believe that the most popular model of online community, the community of interest, has fatal flaws in it that limit its ability to function as a reliable social community.

The problem with communities of interest is that they have a tendency to become unmanageable and impersonal. The topics discussed in these communities fall within a narrow scope of content matter, members come and go constantly, and individual identities are practically impossible to develop. Organizing communities according to interest may appear to be the most logical approach since people naturally want to affiliate with others who are similar to them, but in the physical world, affiliation is a scarce quality. Online, it’s not as hard to find others with similarities and partially because of this, virtual communities based on interests have come to resemble social mobs rather than online communities. (Ironically, Rheingold’s second book about connected culture is “Smart Mobs.”)

These mob communities are formed by large masses of transient individuals with similar interests congregating to exchange information or to fulfill a purpose. They’re highly unstable social constructs that lack the continuity to develop social cohesion. Search engines and the culture of instant gratification help drive the formation of these mob communities because they allow users to go from community to community looking for immediate answers. Developing more complex social relationships with other members of an online community is not only no longer necessary to find information, but it’s also prohibitively difficult to do in environments lacking a shared culture. Before search engines, finding information online was often a social process requiring users to interact with other people and data interfaces alike. Being in an online tribe full of diverse minds had a functional purpose because it was the best way to get answers faster.

Cyberspace is said to be such a great medium for bringing people together because it renders the constraint of space irrelevant; however, space plays an important role in modulating human interactions. The online communities of the 1980’s and 1990’s were either stand-alone services that you had to dial into with a modem or they were on much more primitive networks that became less reliable the farther information had to travel. Even the far-reaching online communities were in practice limited to regional clusters by the immature Internet, which was then a slower patchwork lattice. The constraints of space were not irrelevant then, but merely relaxed.

If physical constraints helped the online communities of the past behave in a more human manner then it might be natural to assume that physical proximity has an enabling role in the development of social online communities. I’d argue that it’s not the physical proximity itself that makes a difference, but some common qualities that are commonly observed with it. When the members of an online community are physically near each other, the likelihood that they interact regularly increases. They’re more likely to see each other, engage in activities together, or perhaps they were already friends who expanded their friendship into Cyberspace.

Of course people can also have regular interaction without living near each other. Virtual project teams, online gaming clans, and online support groups all have all been known to develop strong community ties from regular interaction without seeing each other face to face. These examples are important to take note of, but for the purpose of bringing online communities into mainstream usage, they’re not likely to have a significant impact in the foreseeable future.

To replicate their niche success of online communities on a widespread level, they need to become integrated with the regular everyday communities that people are used to being a part of and will likewise be subject to some of the same physical and social constraints. They need to be more than mere online communities, but “Social Community Systems” that would essentially be to the local community what Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are to large corporations. Social Community Systems would pull together various types of social and information applications into an integrated whole that will support and coordinate the interests of the local government, residents, and merchants. Like ERP and CRM systems, online communities must weave themselves into the very fabric of how physical communities operate to achieve success. There are plenty of ignored community portal sites around to remind us all that it’s useless to merely design something elaborate.

What would such a Social Community System look like? Well, I’m currently building one. My prototype Social System is currently in the last phases of development and I’ll be launching it as a pilot in my hometown of Campbell, CA in about a month. If you’re interested in finding out more, I will have an entire Web site built to promote my Social Wave Communities Project soon. Drop me an email and I’ll add you to my announcements mailing list. For now, if you want more information I have an FAQ and some promotional flyers that you can download. You can also take a look at my prototype site at http://campbell.socialwave.net. The final version will be available at the end of this month.

• Social Wave FAQs
• Social Wave for Residents
• Social Wave for Merchants
• Social Wave for Neighborhood Associations

As Social Wave gets into its second year, we're regrouping to tighten its definition now that its structure has become more stable. We also plan to use the term "Social Enterprise" more noticeably even though it has been a Social Enterprise from the start. One of the reasons why we need to adopt this label is to address the clashing ideals that residents have for Social Wave vs. the ideals that businesses have for Social Wave.

Residents want everything to be free and businesses want to make sure that you're making enough money to provide good service and so that you can stay around. We can almost resolve this clash of ideals by elaborating on what it means when we say that Social Wave is a social enterprise.

Mission Statement

Social Wave is an online service designed to help Silicon Valley develop stronger communities by creating opportunities for residents get to know other locals, businesses, and their area both online and in person.

Social Wave's Business Structure and Goals

Social Wave is a Social Enterprise

A Social Enterprise is a business whose operational goal is to achieve financial sustainability while serving the common good by using innovation in business to address a sociological problem that negatively affects the community. Social Enterprises do not have to be non-profits, but any surplus generated is returned to the community through additional services or direct contributions. The purpose of a Social Enterprise is defined by the problems that it's designed to address. In the case of Social Wave, the problems addressed are social isolation and its role in the decay of sustainable local economies.

• Society has become highly mobile in all aspects, leading to the degradation in the quality of traditional community life because natural social networks require stability and take time to form. Radical changes in industry as we've seen in the past two decades produce large scale economic migrations which negatively impact the quality of community life in places where people leave and in the places where people follow jobs to.
  
  
• Sustainable locally owned businesses are more difficult to operate in fractured communities because natural social networks are part of the economic relationship people have with the businesses around them. While price competition pressure is likely the most significant factor in explaining the troubles of small locally owned businesses, it does not account for the entire range of challenges facing them. Any expert online shopper knows that large online retailers have great expertise in making buyers pay for their discounts in the long run.
  
  
• Information networks such as the Internet were once hailed as the great equalizer, but end up serving the purposes of dominant brands instead of local economic interests. Without focused application, Internet services tend to favor entities with the most marketing power, the farthest reach, or the loudest voice because the Internet is completely geographically agnostic.

Social Wave operates under the belief that problems with fractured communities and weak local economies are highly related and the best way of solving them is to address them together. A highly fractured community will be less engaged with local merchants because small locally owned businesses traditionally rely on social connections such as word of mouth or reputation to survive. In a fractured community, strong corporate branding becomes a surrogate for the trust relationship that people may otherwise develop with local businesses. This relationship can be developed through direct experience or through word of mouth.

In another time, there was a direct relationship between social interaction and the local economy. The need to go downtown for goods, services, and information was a primary driver of community interaction. Downtowns (and similar districts) have since become obsolete as essential commercial hubs, but still possess high potential to be the centers of social interaction that help make real communities possible. Information tools can help direct residential attention toward community centers, but so far has not served the interest of the local community well.

It was once believed that the Internet would level the playing field between big and small organizations because it amplified the power of word of mouth. Years after the euphoria that led to this utopian proclamation, the Internet seems to have ultimately tipped the balance of power further to the side of large corporations that have unmatchable resources to spend on reinforcing the power of their brand. Because the Internet as it exists today is a decentralized medium with no bias to geographic location, it is less a conduit for traditional word of mouth (which is based on social connections) than it is a revolutionary conduit for large scale phenomenon.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many locally owned businesses do not even have a website and the ones who do often don't have competent sites. With high quality local information so difficult or impossible to get online, people will be reluctant to test the potential for using the Internet to find information that they need to connect with their community economically and socially. A focused service like Social Wave can help repair fractures in the community by facilitating the development of social connections between people and by making more high quality local information accessible online.

Many services have been launched that help people develop their social lives. There's hundreds upon hundreds of them in the form of online dating sites and social networking sites, but none of them tie in directly to the local economic infrastructure. Without a socioeconomic connection, these services can at best succeed in benefiting a small percentage of participants, but will never be an effective way of achieving broader community. By unifying a range of popular types of online information and networking services with an innovative approach toward supporting locally owned businesses, Social Wave hopes to improve upon the efforts of its social networking service siblings and stimulate long lasting improvements in the overall quality of community life.