Monday, March 10, 2003
Architecting online communities.

Joel Spolsky's very well-written piece titled "Building Communities with Software" provides insightful perspectives on what makes online communities work. Spolsky makes a good case for simplicity in design; he has paid attention to the tradeoffs inherent in many implementation details. The key idea:

In software, as in architecture, design decisions are just as important to the type of community that develops or fails to develop. When you make something easy, people do it more often. When you make something hard, people do it less often. In this way you can gently encourage people to behave in certain ways which determine the character and quality of the community.

More on building communities here, and in chromatic's piece here.

[Seb's Open Research]

Right on... !
8:49:09 PM  #  comment []