I think global is a given. There’s no avoiding that; and what kind of community would we be if we said ‘no, sorry, you can’t join because you’re not from around here’.

An online community can be both big and small. If it’s conducted in the public sphere, like here, you can have a small group of dedicated users who stick around, and a large number of lurkers and people who pass by.

But in the end, what we want is people to talk to and getting to know people beyond just face facts. You don’t need much to do that other than perseverance.

Yeah, but that’s not the goal, that’s a side-effect of a good community. If the goal is to make things, you want a company, not a community.

You might not be wrong, we might all just see the question differently because we perceive the community differently.

I think it’s very hard to say what makes a community.

I used to manage a forum called VBASkins (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20030101000000*/http://vbaskins.com) before the domain name was lost. I joined it somewhere between 2004 and 2005 (meaning I was ~13 years old) and quickly went from user to moderator to full administrator.

On the surface people were just dropping in and out to download simple graphical skins for their favourite emulator, the VisualBoyAdvance. You could say that was “the goal” of the forum, the goal of most of the visitors and even the goal of some of the regulars.

In our case, however, the goal was also something that brought us there. The goal was not so much the end of the journey, it was something that put you on it. To paraphrase: “that’s not a good community, that’s a side-effect of the goal”.

The regulars started to visit the forum more than they produced new skins. The extra board for random banter got more popular. From a lose bundle of design hobbyists we had formed a real community without any of us noticing. Even now, after the death of the forum, I still have contact with some of the regulars.

I think the thing with communities is that they happen by accident.

I’ve seen people start forums only to form a community. This rarely works. I’ve seen people start forums about subjects that were covered by a million other forums, often fan-forums (think fan-pages).

On the other hand people started websites with a goal. Some had information sharing as goal with being a place for discussion only as a second goal. I think of things like reddit but also the great MetaFilter. The latter has great examples of a close community: helping each other through the weirdest situations. MetaFilter is actually a web blog, not a forum or community central at all, that just happened.

I’ve also seen people start social networking sites. This is almost harder.

A small group of Dutch teenagers worked on their own social network called JustMySelf (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060101000000*/http://justmyself.nl). They made the news on local TV and the developers where great people but they never made it. It wasn’t a real community. They got their friends to sign up but after that the flow of new users stopped and they were stuck on a website with people they met in real life anyway.

That was a clear case of people aiming for just a community without a goal. It failed. It failed miserably. (And I think they would agree.)

“But in the end, what we want is people to talk to and getting to know people beyond just face facts. You don’t need much to do that other than perseverance.”

It is hard to have any perseverance or get people talking on an internet where everything is fast paced. It’s hard to organise people around something without a goal.

This even goes for this forum. The regulars here certainly have a shared goal, but our goal would be to keep the forum going. With only that as a goal it is hard to gain more following, it’s a goal not easily shared.

(I have the feeling my writing got slightly more incoherent towards the end, sorry ’bout that.)

Martijn added on 21 May ’11 · 15:34

Second link, click able this time: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060101000000*/http://justmyself.nl

Then the question to ask is why do people come here and comment? Obviously I stand for a high standard of software design and I would think that people come here because they are inspired by my work or aspire to be a better programmer / designer. The goal, then, of the forum is to help all who aspire to be better programmers and designers.

You have a goal though:

“As has been alluded to so far, I’ve cut a lot of crap that is standard in forums these days. There won’t ever be signatures or user pages, crowd-spam and the like. People’s “rank” should be known simply from their participation and generosity—their actual deeds, rather than a label. In essence the forums should let humans be humans.”

(source: http://camendesign.com/code/forums#goals)

And I think you will find many people who classify as (semi-)regulars are exactly the people who “come here because they are inspired by [your] work”, especially inspired by your minimalistic work and how you made this forum. The regulars have this forum at heart, their goal is to try see this forum filled with life.

This is also what puts it ahead from the social network project I named in my previous post. There only the creators had making the thing active as a goal, the users’ goal was to sit around and see what happened. Here the users’ goal is to make things active!

Since you inspired all of us to get around, share your goal and do something I think that’s what made this into a small community.

In my opinion, whatever community it is, it forms from a goal.