Online Communities - The View from My Window

sunny

On the surface, community seems like a fairly straight forward concept. It is vital to the success of sites like ERE so it should be worth a quick exploration. As Yvonne LaRose recently pointed out when she was a guest on this blog, community is a place where people with common interests can mingle and support one another. A place that creates some form of unity.
/ ^9 p. A  @  C
6 k- [- _- \8 O" p7 t
But who's idea of unity.
$ ?* F' R* w- \) {6 G; ]" F, u
If we come at this from the point of view of the culture of the members we can see that one group's idea of community might well be different from another's. The Well is a well known online community but it is very much different from The Rotary Club.
$ L4 s4 M- t6 [( O. S0 t: W
In the context of the individualistic, future-forward 'Western World' a community may be conceived as a collection of individuals coming together to pursue their own personal aims through cooperation with others. Membership in the community amplifies the power of the individual. Even if there is a degree of compromise on aims the individual can achieve much more inside the group, as opposed to doing it himself. How many individuals could put an end to a disease as the Rotary Club is close to doing with Polio?
, h0 d" t/ A! D1 W4 d: L
In very few communities do people pretend that they are doing it purely for the 'Community' or the group. At best, communities express enlightened self-interest, at worst naked self-interest masquerading as cooperation. Most communities that we belong to combine both strands. The enlightened community tends to survive and the self-interest community eats itself alive or changes into another form that is aligned with its members needs.

! m) ~" J  r4 ^, j9 h# P
And In The East....

sunny

In China, online communities are rare and almost exclusively for the one-child policy generation, the China equivalent of Generation Y.
, P1 n) T  ~) \8 @0 o- ~8 M
5 h7 R$ F* @" V0 I: uFor this generation most interaction is online and community is just an extension of what they are doing already; blogging, emailing and sending SMSs. Some individuals seem to experience a sense of community from this kind of interaction but the feeling is really just the product of multiple one-two-one communication channels. Few people actually come together to form a real community, and when they do it is usually built around business issues.
- g  G; N3 S% F+ t* h) i
The barriers to the creation of a real community in China seem to stem from a basic shyness among professionals in China and a lack of familiarity with honest peer to peer communications with anyone other than family and school friends. There is a strong sense of not wanting to stick out. Even by email. The one-child policy is a big factor as this tends to create isolated individuals that further feeds the issues above.

Of course, at the same time there are forces working in the opposite direction. An initial discussion in my office generated some interesting results. The preferred modus operandi in China is to avoid failure at all costs so the focus was on why communities would eventually work.

sunny

Specifically, people cited some reasons for optimism:
0 Y: l. |& F( y3 m3 c9 mChina's one-child population is very wired. They have mobiles, broadband internet, Ipods etc. and so they are used to communicating with multiple individuals daily. At the moment they do this one-to-one but over time they may begin to see the value of extending the model to build communities
China took to the Bulletin Board much quicker than other countries. This model is still strong in China and could provide a springboard to new, more open communities based on a social software or an industry portal model.
8 \: Q( ]/ }& F6 d) _8 u8 mCompanies in China are moving more and more to the matrix model of management. This is a community on a micro-scale and we may see people taking this thinking into their social and public lives.
There is a strong stated desire among Chinese professionals for 'Community', of any kind. The most common response that I received to my communications on this issue was, 'Community? Sounds great. Where do I sign up?'
8 C* P. \; t1 }' b1 i! T) dThe business potential of the community model and the arrival of the international social software sites. These sites are still currently restricted to speakers of English but local sites are beginning to appear.
There is the possibility that some smart individual in China may build a community based on slightly different model from the ones that we have seen and it may take off like LinkedIn and OpenBC did.
Hope springs eternal. I'm so hopeful I have started to build my own community.