Friday, April 30, 2004

CommunityBuilding on the Internet:

Overcoming the Individual Obstacles

By Jason Gehlhausen

LESA L405 – Capstone Research and Reflection Papers

For Dean Catherine Hoff

  1. Introduction
  2. Thesis
  3. Introduce the project
  4. The goals
  5. The audience
  6. The solution
  1. Necessities of creating online communities
  2. Purpose
  3. Basic community member needs
  4. Place for open communication
  5. Forum structure
  6. Category
  7. Forum
  8. Topic
  9. Post
  10. Discussion strategies
  11. Place for private communication
  12. User information profile
  13. Name
  14. E-Mail
  15. Interests
  16. Occupation
  17. User ranking
  18. User roles
  19. Administrators
  20. Defined role
  21. Community impact
  22. Super Moderators
  23. Defined role
  24. Community impact
  25. Moderators
  26. Defined role
  27. Community impact
  28. Experienced Members
  29. Defined role
  30. Community impact
  31. Trusted Members
  32. Defined role
  33. Community impact
  34. New Members
  35. Defined role
  36. Community impact
  37. Guests
  38. Defined role
  39. Community impact
  40. Banned
  41. Defined role
  42. Community impact
  43. Calendar
  44. Administration utilities
  45. Moderation utilities
  46. Rituals
  47. Welcome Area
  1. Designing applications for communities with high levels of trauma
  2. Colors
  3. Psychology of color and effects on usability
  4. Possibilities
  5. Our choice
  6. Placement
  7. Psychology of spatial relations and effects on usability
  8. Necessities
  9. How we accomplished
  10. Language
  11. Psychology of language and effects on usability
  12. Problem
  13. Solution
  1. Designing applications for technologically adverse communities of counselors
  2. Low learning curve
  3. Why the audience has a low learning curve
  4. Not from a technology oriented field
  5. Are overall reluctant to use technology
  6. How to create an interface that meets their skill level
  7. Use command oriented buttons
  8. Keep the clutter down
  9. Skepticism of the technology
  10. Why the audience is skeptical of the technology
  11. Lacks awareness of benefits of technology
  12. Believes that technology hinders interpersonal communication
  13. How to overcome that skepticism
  14. Make the benefits overly apparent
  15. Use as many tools as possible to give the application a personable feel
  1. Impact of online communities on offline communities
  1. Conclusion

Online CommunityBuilding

Since the beginning of Internet, one of the primary goals of the network was to enhance and strengthen the scientific community, and over the past two decades, the Internet has been proposed to support every community thinkable. Proven by the high number of defunct portals and chat-sites, this has not always been accomplished successfully. The Internet shows viability as a tool to strengthen existing and build new communities, but that is only if the application is geared to overcome the specific challenges of that group. Recently, the Office of Women’s Affairs has undertaken the task of creating an Internet resource for rape counselors, educators, and students at the university level, and I have attempted to design an application that will strengthen this community.

As part of Department of Justice grant, OWA has been charged with creating StopCampusRape.org to strengthen the university community and develop more successful services. The primary community building application incorporated into StopCampusRape is the site’s forums. The forums initial goal is to provide users with a public place for communication, but public communication isn’t the only necessity for creating a community. Because of the additional necessitates, the software packaged used includes several additional features that other comparable packages didn’t have to meet the requirements of the project.

One of the major factors in designing this project was the various complications of creating an application for an audience with a series of subtle needs. The primary audience for this application will be educators, counselors, and administrators from the university community. The secondary audience will possibly be extended to students of the university community, but that may not be implemented immediately. To some degree, the issues that arise from one audience overlap into the second. Also, due to the nature of the content, other considerations will have to be made in regards to the interface design.

Our initial solution for the forum was to use an open source application known as phpBB version 2.0.6, but the software package didn’t provide all of the functionality that we required for the StopCampusRape forum. To solve the requirements of the project, my design team chose to use an off-the-shelf solution created by Invision Power Services called Invision Power Board version 1.3.1. In addition to meeting all of the functional requirements of the project, purchasing a lifetime license includes 24/7 support from Invision Power Services for the complete lifecycle of the application. The price of the application was comparable to other packages available.

The IPB software was chosen because its functionality closely matches all of the theoretical requirements of an online community. For an online community to be successful, it must be able to duplicate many features from offline communities. First, every community needs a purpose. There must be a place for open and closed communication. Users must be able to search through each other easily to create compatible relationships. A leadership pyramid must be developed to maintain order and orient new users to the community. Leadership will also need a set of tools to implement control. Communities also need a central place to inform the whole of various events and meetings. Within communities, there are also sub-communities. Finally, communities must develop rituals and rites of passage.

The purpose of the StopCampusRape forum is to foster communication between educators, administrators, counselors, and students in areas concerning gender communications and relations on campus. The forum will be used to inform the community of various activities, create new programs and enhance old programs within the field, and to create stronger ties between the user groups for greater overall success on improving gender relations on campus. The need that this community fills is that there is no central location for members of the university community to discuss the matters proposed for this forum (Kim, pg. 2-3). There are a few similar solutions, but this will be the first to specifically address the problem on a national level.

For a community to be successful, it must meet all of the needs of its members. According to Amy Jo Kim, these needs can be inferred from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The first level of needs is the ability of a user to maintain an identity and interact with the rest of the community. The second level of needs requires that all users must be safe from unexpected electronic and verbal attacks. Needing to belong to groups and subgroups is indicative of the third level. All members of a community needing to feel like they contribute something links to the fourth level need of the ability of a person to give and receive love. The final level of user development in an online community is the ability to advance their skills and responsibilities (Kim, pg. 8-9).

Every community needs a place for open communication, and for the StopCampusRape project, we decided to use the threaded forum structure. We decided to use the asynchronous forum approach because it is very unlikely that this community could operate completely in real-time. This creates a hierarchical approach for organizing messages. Our model uses four levels to organize the conversation. The category is the highest level, and the individual post is the lowest level of organization (Kim, pg 36-37).

Category refers to highest level of organization used for the StopCampusRape project. Because discussion will cover such a wide range of topics, we felt it would be best to create multiple threaded forums covering individual areas of discussion. Currently we only have the Main category, but by using multiple categories, we could also create a series of moderator and administrator only forums. This strategy for forum organization is highly expandable.

Under each category is a series of forums. Each forum addresses a certain area of conversation. Below each forum title, is a brief description of what types of conversations the user should expect to find. This allows users an easy way to determine which forums would hold threads that they would be interested in participating. An example of a forum would be the Welcome Area or Campus Safety.

Conversation really begins at the topic level. Within each forum, there can be any number of topics created by users that would be appropriate for that forum. If a forum is moderated properly, each topic should contain information on a single subject. Once a topic has shifted subject, then a new topic should be created for the continuing conversation. Examples of topics would be Recruiting Men for Programs under Sexual Assault/Rape Awareness Educational Programming forum. Topics should also have a description below the title.

Posts are the individual public responses from each user concerning a single topic. The post is designed to act generally like a public electronic mail message. Accordingly each post can have a subject line, the text can be formatted, pictures can be included, URLs linked, and files attached. Because the conversation is asynchronous, it is necessary to allow users to quote other posts in their replies for more understandable conversation. Using the topic example mentioned above, a possible post could be “Call out meeting for men - April 21st at 7pm. - Memorial Hall East Rm 123” posted by user Nallely Galavin.

Our discussion strategy is closely tied to the forum structure and software. The discussion board will be closely linked with the rest of the StopCampusRape project. The forum is organized hierarchically for easier navigation. The topics must be open enough to elicit several points of view. We will reward users by promoting them from one user level to the next. Flash tutorials and FAQ’s will be available before and while the user interacts with the forum (Kazmer, pg. 2 & 7).

Beyond needing a place for public communication, a community needs a mechanism for private communication. The IPB software meets this requirement in three different ways. The first way is through an internal private messaging system that works exactly like an electronic mail service for users only. The second way is to allow users to directly e-mail other users. Finally, the software allows users the option of granting peers to contact them through third party instant messaging software.

Private communication facilitates several necessary processes for the offline community. The added type of communication allows subgroups to form and discuss issues away from the entire user base. Private communication also facilitates closer one-on-one relationships by letting individuals be more selective with who they share certain information. Parties require small private conversations to fuel the several public conversations taking place.

Kim would say that we have now created a venue for an online community. She suggests that every online community employs a public user profile in order to facilitate quicker relationship building. The public user profile should include information such as the username, link to email, instant messenger screen names, interests, number of posts, and user rank. This information gives users a simple way to decide with whom they would like to speak (Kim, pg. 77).

As within any other community, social structures are created to allow more involved members to garner more responsibility in online communities. The StopCampusRape project creates user stratification in a number of ways. Most users move up user-levels by successively posting messages. All other stratifications are considered special and require an administrator to modify.

All users will start out the process of entering the message board as a Guest until they either they register or validate their account. Guests will be limited to read only access in order to avoid unwanted messages from anonymous users. It has been proposed that students be allowed to have Guest access, because a large number of students posting could overload the primary community’s ability to stay current with the issues being discussed. Students who read the forum will be able to learn of the programs available and issues surrounding the community. Guests could also be considered visitors, because they play no permanent role in the community (Kim, pg. 120).

Once a user has registered their account, they become a Member. Members have access to all public forums. These users can post new topics and reply to existing topics, but all of their messages will be sent to the moderation queue for review by a Moderator or Administrator. It is necessary to moderate all new Members to whether or not they can be trusted with the responsibility of furthering the discussion versus being a nuisance. If a user becomes highly involved with the community, they will begin to develop self-esteem within the community by being promoted.

After posting a finite number of accepted messages, Members become Trusted Members. Currently, StopCampusRape is setup to automatically change a user’s status from Member to Trusted Member when their thirtieth message is approved. Trusted Members can post messages directly to any public forum without the intermediate step involving the moderation queue. Granting established users the extra level of trust allows them to feel recognized because with every message they post their user-group appears. This group would be considered the regulars by Kim (Kim, pg. 143).

For certain Trusted Members, an official role of leadership will entice them with title, increased responsibility, and added power. The first level of leadership would a position as Moderator of an individual forum. This group of users is responsible for maintaining the day-to-day duties of each forum. They have access to the Moderation Control Panel for only their forum. This group eases the load of the two leadership groups above it (Kim, pg. 144).

If a Moderator proves themselves to an effective and fair leader of their group, then an Administrator may choose to extend their authority to the entire community and make them a Super Moderator. The role of the Super Moderator is to enforce the overall guidelines of the community throughout all of the forums. They should not be in charge of approving messages from the moderation queue; rather their primary function should be to watch for unlikely problems like bad etiquette from a Trusted Member. This group has control of everything but the Administration Control Panel.

Online communities require a separate leadership group that is primarily responsible for the more complicated aspects of maintaining the community. Administrators have access to the Administration Control Panel where they can install plug-ins, change the look of the interface, modify permissions, ban users, and other more technical tasks. The design team is the first set of Administrators, but we will be training a more permanent Administrator from the OWA. Because most of the work will simply require Moderator access, a Super Moderator may also hold the position of Administrator with the community first begins.

Some members will eventually move on to official leadership roles in the community, but the majority will continue to interact with community as an experienced member. This group of members will not have an official title declaring them as experienced members, but a tally of all messages posted by a user will appear with each of their messages. If the user is frequently posting thoughtful and interesting messages, then they will become well respected within the community. This group of experienced users would correlate to the elders of a community (Kim, pg. 147).

In all communities there are individuals who impede the community that need to be limited or removed. The users that must ultimately be removed will be placed into a group known as Banned. Banned users have no access to the community at all. Only Administrators can ban users through the Administration Control Panel (Kim, pg. 201 - 232).

In order for leadership to control and exercise authority over the community, this group must have a set of tools that can be used to enforce the rules and regulations. For basic control over the incoming flow of messages, all Moderators and Administrator have access to the Moderation Control Panel. For more refined control of user-groups, forum permissions, and other advanced functionality, the Administrators will have access to the Administration Control Panel. These two utilities allow leadership to maintain order in a community of potential chaos (Kim, pg. 144 – 147).

The Moderation Control Panel allows all Moderators and Administrators the ability to approve, delete, and edit topics and their posts within each forum. The most commonly used function of the MCP is the message queue. All posts from users without Trusted Member, Moderator, or Administrator status will be held in the moderation queue until they are approved my an authorized user. The MCP also allows authorized users the ability to delete inappropriate topics and posts. If a member has content on their profile that doesn’t suit the needs of the community, the MCP gives leaders the ability to edit that information.