Everything in Moderation: Bringing Politics into Online Communities
Tom Coates is really trying to be consistent with his newish weblog Everything in Moderation. The problem, as he points out, is that he's posting community-related articles on his ever-popular weblog at PlasticBag.org. Oh well, at least he's writing about it somewhere.
His most recent post was a reflection on an article about how cellists manage their relationships as part of a quartet over many years.
From this article he drew conclusions and lessons about how online communities form and deal with politics over time. I like the post and the lessons, but I didn't get the feelings from the article as he did.
However, it's great to see folks like Tom thinking about what we can learn about online communities from successful and unsuccessful group connections in the real world.
While online communities are a different animal, I think we have a long way to go in terms of building online communities that benefit from what we observe in real life. Too often, in my opinion, online community systems ignore some of the basic things that we observe in real life.
An online community that is formed to serve an existing real world community must take into account how the real world community behaves in real life. People are people in either case and their existing relationships and context must be able show through in their interactions online.
An example of this may be displaying real names, organizational affiliation and title within a professional group's community. Just a name may not do.
This kind of information helps members use the community within the pre-existing relationships and context that may have developed over years in the real world.