Tilling the Soil
Tools for Building a Web Community
By Jonathan Steuer
The first steps in building a successful Web community should always be driven by purposes and goals, but once you have focused your purpose, determined who your community members will be, and established the social infrastructure in which they will interact, you're ready to attack the technical implementation.
As with any other Web-development project, the technologies you choose to implement your online community will affect the options available to your users, so it is important -- especially during the design phase -- to be flexible about both goals and technologies.
Technology Overview
Choosing the appropriate communication tools for your community is critical. Communication tools are generally private (one-to-one interactions) or public (simultaneous interactions among multiple people); synchronous (messages are exchanged in real time) or asynchronous (messages accumulate, so you need not be online simultaneously to interact).
Table 1 groups community technologies according to these variables; here, I'll discuss the choice of appropriate tools.
Email. Because it is ubiquitous on the Net, email is a useful for holding your community together. Simple email distribution lists can be incredibly powerful for making announcements or for facilitating communication between users. Open discussion lists (using Majordomo, Listserv, or other mailing-list technologies) can even allow conferencing-style interactions among community members, though mailing lists do not create the same sense of "gathering" in a location with other community members that conferencing-style interaction can provide.
