Online Communities: What is success for whom?

This week’s review deals with a paper by Alicia Iriberri and Gondy Leroy published 2009 in the ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) journal. CSUR describes itself as an academic publication body specialised on “comprehensive, readable tutorials and survey papers that give guided tours through the literature and explain topics to those who seek to learn the basics of areas outside their specialties” [1]. The paper at hand “A Life-Cycle Perspective on Online Community Success” [2] seized the opportunity of working out comprehensive development guidelines “for success” to take an active look at the rich body of online community research from the perspective of different scientific domains. In fact, Ibiberri and Leroy conducted a literature review comprising 32 selected studies from Sociology, Psychology, Management, Computer Science and Information Systems, and integrated the respective findings into a life-cycle model. Their main argument for doing so was the view of online communities evolving by going through five different stages (inception, creation, growth, maturity and death). The needs of users and operators change during these stages. Implementing success would therefore require to directly address these stage-specific needs and meet them at the right time.

In principle, the authors’ endeavour to distil specific success factors out of documented experiences is a respectable approach to make the implementation of online communities more effective, and the resulting recommendation lists grouped by life cycle stage are certainly a helpful tool for developers and designers. However, like every model it could be over-simplifying to a certain degree and this is why it is important to read the findings with certain care and without expecting them to be complete. Especially as the article was written in 2009 and the latest literature in their review was from 2005. Ten years are a long time for the fast-changing field of online technologies and businesses.

While Ibiberri and Leroy are very specific in constituting their life cycle model and the importance of success factors for design, other parts remain rather sketchy.  For example, what exactly is success in this context? Ibiberri and Leroy call it a “complex concept” [2:11] and mention many different quantitative and qualitative metrics going along with various definitions of success measurement, but they omit to give a clear vision of the goal of this analysis. So the question remains: What is success for whom? Is it the depth of friendships maintained online by the users? The number of registered users adding market value to the hosting companies? The quantity of prosumeristic content generation or the frequency of user interactions? And whose success counts most? Even though the authors officially just gather different perspectives without prioritising any of them, the life-cycle model itself could imply a certain tacit stance. In fact, it is very growth-oriented which to some extent might favour business interests over user experience. An online community could stop growing and entering the stage of Death, while existing users could still experience deep social relationships. And even if the online community eventually ceases, does the social community really die? Once social ties have been established, they can be maintained using different tools than the initial community.

As an impulse for further thoughts I therefore confront the life-cycle model from the paper with an alternative model highlighting the member experience which I found online. Both represent a partial abstract truth which can be helpful (or not) depending on the specific perspective.

 

References

[1] ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). http://csur.acm.org (last accessed: 2/11/2015)

[2] Alicia Iriberri and Gondy Leroy. 2009. A life-cycle perspective on online community success. ACM Computing Surveys 41, 2: 1–29. http://doi.org/10.1145/1459352.1459356

3 Key Considerations:

• Perspective:
  Online Communities are a complex topic involving many different-kinded aspects. It is therefore useful to look at them through the lens of different disciplines.
• Zeitgeist:
  “Online community” has been a buzzword for decades, but the usage and technologies are changing rapidly. Hence, it might be worth thinking about the relevance of the respective zeitgeist in which a community emerges.
• Models and their limitation:
  Models are a useful tool to communicate an abstract idea, however this implies that they need to be specific and hence, they can never tell the whole story/truth in all its different facets. In this respect it is a quite daring approach to set up a holistic and universal model for such a diverse topic.

Paper chosen:

Pujan Ziaie. 2014. A Model for Context in the Design of Open Production Communities. ACM Computing Surveys 47, 2: 1–29. http://doi.org/10.1145/2661642

I chose this paper because it presents a more recent and relativistic view directly building on the lifecycle model – as can be seen in the following part of the conclusion: “There are several theoretical and practical implications to address. One theoretical implication is that the studies relating to a specific type of community may not be generalizable and applicable to other communities with different attributes on one or more of the proposed design dimensions. […] Also, depending on the purpose of study, different levels of detail may be necessary. For example, whether the lifecycle of a community should be divided into two (before and after tipping point), three (Rising, Organizing, and Stabilizing), or four (inception, creation, growth, and maturity) stages significantly depends on the goal of a designer or the context of research.” [29:21]