Vielen Dank an alle meine treuen Leser, Kommentatoren und Verlinker ;) Ohne Euch hätte ich nie so lange durchgehalten. Doch jetzt ist Schluss mit dem WWWorker:
Sascha A. Carlin pflegt diese Website nicht mehr aktiv.
What is a Online Community?
There is a discussion going on in the WELL Jon is quoting from. His take on the changing face of community:
What’s happened is that communities are no longer tethered to specific technologies or virtual places.
This trend, if you may call it so, it not new. Since the Internet slowly turned into a regular means of communication (mass communication, directed communication, peer to peer, …) more and more people began to realize that, and here I quote myself, the Internet of course is driven by technology, but the purpose of it is communication between people.
In 2003 at the Chemnitzer Linuxtag in Germany, the catchphrase of my talk (MP3 files available) was
Online Communities is not about websites where people gather, instead it’s about people who gather on websites.
Ross, quoting Jon, asks about opinions on the changing sense of community. I don’t see such a change. When we talk about tools we do not talk about people, hence not about communities of any kind. A discussion about technology, as going on in the WELL, is not about community.
As Lee points out, a community is a byproduct - perhaps a goal, too, in some cases - that emerges after you successfully implemented what he calls Social Strategy. Summarized:
Community is not up to you [the host], its up to the members.
Exactly.
Regardless what terms we use, one thing is for sure: community is about the people inside and outside our community building, not about the excavator or concrete used to construct it.
