Each of these stages will bring unique features that will increase the value of the online community to both its members and its owner/operators.

The Quest for Online Community

Online communities are the cherished goal of many web sites. Corporate site-owners have recognized that by creating a community around their products, they are able to greatly increase the value delivered to the consumer and at the same time increase the loyalty of the customer for their company. Entertainment sites understand that on-line communities foster one of the most entertaining aspects of movies, music, and games: the social value of enjoying and discussing those experiences with others. Membership associations see online communities as an opportunity to remove the logistical and informational barriers that have limited interactions between members and local chapters. In sum, community is more and more being seen as the long-sought "killer app" that will turn the nternet from an investment challenge into a profitable resource.

Unfortunately, creating an on-line community is not as easy as creating an HTML page. To raise the goal of fostering a community is to face many questions and challenges:

• What do I need to do to create community?
• Is it enough just to put up a place where people can chat?
• How important is it to base the community on open standards?
• What additional features will my community need as it grows?
• How can I keep members in the community?
• What sort of "programming" (special events, guest speakers) do I need to provide?
• How can I get the members of my community to become its co-creators?
• What will the average on-line community look like in three years?
• What sort of community-support software will I need to get me there?

Overview

Let’s look at the different evolutionary stages as they might be achieved in the web site of an imaginary home supply store which we will call "Hardware Heaven."

The Digital Crowd

Hardware Heaven wants to improve its web site. Their goal is to develop an on-line community where their customers can get personal service and their management can get valuable market feedback. They decide to start by offering a simple chat space where customers and staff can meet. The chat application they install provides both an open public channel and private 1-to-1 chat channels. To keep their first step simple, they decide not to implement facilities for group moderation, logging, or other more advanced functionality available from the same supplier. Because the Hardware Heaven web site has a lot of traffic and because the chat solution is IRC compatible, many people start to enter the chat space.

The characteristics of a crowd, both positive and negative, are shaped by the happenstance nature of both the meeting place (online or on a street corner), and the participants (people passing by or calling in). Both lead to a starkly simplified mode of interaction ("do you come here often?"). This has both its charms and its limitations, as the following table suggests:

The Character of Digital Crowds

But what exactly what has Hardware Heaven accomplished – beyond, so to speak, setting up a tent,?
The value of their fledgling community is not very high, neither to its visitors nor to HH. This sad fact
can be read from the responses they begin to receive. Some examples:

• People have started to be rude in the chat room!
• Nobody there seems to know anything very useful!
• What is the point of the room? Nothing ever seems to happen there!
• When I entered the room, nobody said hello or was friendly

 

These responses are typical for a simple chat room and they expose the issues such as community trust, quality of content, and importance of context. These issue also provide valuable information for how the online community needs to evolve in the Digital Village phase. Below is a table of the issues and features that will help to resolve them.

Issues with Digital Crowds

To resolve these issues, Hardware Heaven must evolve its chat site into a Digital Village …

The Digital Village

The Digital Village is the 2nd stage of online-community evolution. It is characterized by:

• Persistent identities for all participants
• A program of usable content: guest speakers, special events, games, meetings, etc.
• A shared context based on a 3D virtual setting, which in turn provides structured access to the whole range of other WWW features (HTML pages, Java applets, etc).
• The introduction of private property and the ability of users to create and insert private objects such as their 3D car into the space.
• Individual rights within a community, e.g. the right to enter certain areas.
• Social roles for members of the community, e.g. the group moderator, who temporarily acquires the special right to silence other participants or make them heard.
• Community rules, e.g. the laws that govern the actions of all individuals in the community.

The added value of evolving your web site from a place which attracts a crowd to a living digital village can be summed up as follows:

The Value of a Village

What would a digital village for Hardware Heaven look like? When Harry goes to Hardware Heaven’s 3-D online virtual store, he is met at the door by a pleasant-looking figure with a smile on his face and an HH logo on his hat. "Hi, Harry – it’s good to have you back. At 11 am today we will have Bob Villa speaking about rebuilding your home’s foundation. Hope you can join us." Harry walks over to Isle 24 (maneuvering his avatar through the 3D world), the electrical section. He asks the HH staff member he finds there, "How long do these new energy-saving light bulbs really last?" Joe is an electrical specialist (that’s why he’s in this isle) who answers his question and gives Harry his electronic "business card," which not only includes Joe’s email address, but also direct links to an online multimedia presentation of new lighting technology available at HH.

As an HH staff member, Joe can re-arrange products on the shelf and call up the current inventory list – special rights that Harry doesn’t have. But as a valued customer, Harry has been given access to a "special sale" section which first-time shoppers will not see – the bargains there are a big reason why Harry shops so often at HH. At 11am, Harry goes to listen to Bob Villa, an expert in home repair. Bob does a multimedia demonstration, which is followed by a question/answer session moderated by the new HH Branch manager. The moderator collects questions from the viewers, automatically asking first the questions which were asked most often. While acting as moderator, the Branch Manager has the special ability to control the session, allowing only one person to speak at a time, and pre-viewing audience remarks to insure their appropriateness. After the talk, Harry chats with another community member who has fixed his own foundation and learns much from his experiences.

What type of feedback is The Hardware Heaven likely to get now? What are likely to be the issues that will cause the community to outgrow the village?

The feedback is likely to be quite positive. In fact there really won’t be any issues until users come back from vacation and begin to hear about all the neat things they missed, or when they want to travel down the street from their Hardware Heaven village to their Boy Scouts or Bank of America village. The driving forces behind the evolution of Digital Civilization will be the need to capitalize knowledge resources, and to interconnect a growing population of independently evolving villages.

The Limits of the Digital Village

The World Wide Web interconnected information with ease and speed not previously possible. Digital Civilization begins with the interconnection of multiple communities.

Digital Civilization

The vision of a Digital Civilization takes us fully onto the landscape sketched so tantalizingly by William Gibson (in the Neuromancer trilogy) and Marge Piercy (in Woman on the Edge of Time), and delineated in entrancing detail by Neil Stephanson (in Snow Crash). It is the vision of a 3D virtual universe linking thousands of local digital villages, themselves already linked at countless points into what we like to think of as the "real world." People will participate, with different degress of frequency, intensity and continuity, in dozens of such communities: at their jobs and in their hobbies, from the PTA to town meetings to the fundraiser for a local school or church, from the Backyard Swimming Pool club at Hardware Heaven to the New Technology Research Group at the Library of Congress (soon to be as open to a 7^th grade schoolgirl in Montana as it is now to her Senator’s staff on Capitol Hill).

Digital Civilization will emerge from the interpenetration of all these communities, often in ways not possible in the real world. It will be enabled by three crucial new technologies:

Already available in their first primitive forms, these three essential enabling technologies will continue to evolve as part of today’s virtual villages. As they reach increasing levels of completeness and reliability, they will be able to provide larger and larger populations of villages with their benefits:

The Dawn of Digital Civilization

What will this mean for Hardware Heaven? Its new location will be on a busy 3D boulevard, just a quick hop away from the local bank and real estate offices. The boulevard connects dozens of village neighborhoods into a lively city, which is in turn the capital of a wide-ranging Nation, one of many spread across the face of the expanding Digital Planet. All these spaces are seamlessly connected. People travel from one community as naturally as (and more quickly than) they cross the hall to another office. Hardware Heaven is now doing a booming business in Digital Tools, and half its customers have never seen its real-world emporium. Customers who ask sales agents how to build a carport are not only given HH’s trademark competent and friendly advice, they also receive links to transcripts of past HH lectures and other library resources. In addition, the current conversation will be captured, organized and stored for others to use. This auto-presentation of information will come from mining large knowledge databases that are shared by related communities. As online communities begin to merge into a Digital Civilization, their coming together will increase the size and richness of the resources available to all.

Open Standards

Crucial to the entire evolutionary process will be the ability of communities to draw on products from multiple suppliers, and for suppliers to integrate their offerings into a single workable foundation.

During the Digital Crowd and Digital Village stages, support for open standards such as Inter Relay Chat (IRC), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) were critical, allowing:

• access to any community via standard browsers and tools
• the development and presentation of consistent content and context

Digital Civilization will require the establishment of a new layer of open standards, to unify such things as the information content of your personal online representation (avatar), support for the Living Worlds standard and for standards that haven’t even been developed yet. The support for open standards is what enables, on a technical level, the interconnection of online communities. Below is a list of important for each phase:

The Need for Open Standards

blaxxun interactive’s Product Vision

• A web site online community can seamlessly transition from one phase to the next without any interruption.
• The online community can be in two phases simultaneously. Users in the community’s 3-D VRML world can still talk to users who are access the community from 2-D HTML clients.
• Web site owners will not have to re-integrate additional services such as billing into a new system as the web site evolves
• The community servers can be interconnected for almost infinite scaleability.
• Users will not have to download and install a new client that supports the new features for each phase. Automatic upgrades to their existing Community Client software will give them new features seamlessly.

Conclusion