Community Standards

What does it take to build an online community?

Talking about the promise of community is one thing, but what are the design principles that make it easy for community members to find one another and to share their interests? Are all community members equal, or are some of them more equal than others? Do community and commerce mix?

Those are questions that occupy the minds of Net-company leaders for whom community is a crucial element of their business strategy -- whether their business is a highly specialized B2B site or an entertainment site aimed at teenagers. And Cynthia Typaldos has been asking and answering those questions for years.

Typaldos, 50, is a true Web pioneer. A software developer by training, she earned an AB in chemistry at UC Berkeley and attended graduate school in computer science there as well. (She also received an MBA from MIT's Sloan School.) Later, she held senior-management positions at Data General and Sun Microsystems.

Then she got with the Web program. In January 1995, she launched GolfWeb (www.golfweb.com) , a now-popular site for golfing enthusiasts (and currently part of CBS SportsLine) . An important element behind the success of that site has been the GolfWeb Players Club, an online community whose members pay an annual fee of $39.95 to get discounts on merchandise and to trade tips and war stories about the best courses and the toughest holes.

As she worked to develop the Players Club, Typaldos thought more and more about how online communities evolve and about what it takes for them to thrive. Her research base broadened from the tens of thousands of postings that she studied on GolfWeb to the work of sociologists like Marc Smith, now the resident sociologist at Microsoft. In November 1997, she and Mark Waters, who was then an executive at GolfWeb, founded RealCommunities, a company that designs and builds infrastructure and services for other Web communities. Typaldos's interest in online communities even led her to teach a class at UC Berkeley Extension called "Web Communities for Content, Commerce, and Customer Retention."

Here, in an interview with Fast Company, Typaldos discusses the ideas and design principles that define real communities.

Most Net companies talk about building "community" on their sites. What does it take to make community real?

Communities form around a shared purpose. They're made up of people who come together to do something that they couldn't do alone. Think about a PTA, or a neighborhood association, or a Web-based meeting for systems administrators. Each of those communities exists to accomplish something that's important to people who are involved in an activity -- and that they can do only as a group. If you don't provide people with a compelling reason to come together, and if you don't give them the means to accomplish that shared sense of purpose, then your community will fail.

Now, there's a big difference between people who have a shared purpose and people who merely have something in common. You can't build a community around people who own white cars, for example. A couple of years ago, Citibank tried to create a "community" around its checking-account customers. But what's the common purpose or the shared passion among checking-account customers? They're just a random group of people who happen to have checking accounts at Citibank. That fact makes them similar to other account holders, but not in any way that really matters.

How is a Web community different from a real-world community?

It's not. We're not changing human nature; we're just changing the tools of communication. In the class I teach, I ask that very question, and I always hear the same answer: "Online, you can't see other people." But do blind people have communities? Yes, they do, just the same as sighted people do. "But they can hear the intonation of your voice," my students will say. Well, don't deaf people have communities? Of course they do.

Tone of voice, facial expressions, body language -- these are tools that people use to communicate, but they aren't fundamental to building community. In fact, most ideas about online communities focus too much on the digital tools that people use to communicate: bulletin boards, chat rooms, email lists. What really make or break a community are issues of trust and identity, clarity of purpose, and boundaries -- the same issues that affect real-world communities.

Let's talk about those issues. You mentioned "trust and identity." So much online interaction is relatively anonymous. Does that pose a problem for community building?