Interesting article on "Building Communities with Software" from Joel Spolsky.
The article runs through a series of Q&As about the rationale behind his forum software. I agree with much of what he says: simple design, single thread of conversation per discussion (no branching), posting at the bottom of the forum so you have to read through (or at least scroll over) all the comments to post your own. Personally I put the posting input on the same page - Joel says he puts it on another page to avoid excessive quoting from earlier posts, but I find people want to refer back to comments to help them compose their own.
Joel analyses how apparently simple decisions on software design can affect people's behaviour and the ease or difficulty of building a community. His approach may not be to everyone's taste - and won't be appropriate for every forum - but the recognition that technical decisions have a wider impact on community-forming is a good one.
His primary axiom of online communities is:
"Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels."
It's something I find myself pursuing ever more frequently on projects. It's relatively straightforward to see the connection between usability and individual use of a given feature. It's less obvious to follow that through to the group behaviour influenced by that feature.
I recently revamped the community section of a client site. It had a typical threaded discussion forum with a whole range of options for how you viewed and replied to previous posts. It was tricky to use, hard to follow the threads, and seemed to encourage low quality nit-picking conversations.
We replaced the forum with a simpler version. Each discussion has a single thread, comments listed first to last, with an input to post your own comment at the bottom. That's it. It's clearly much more usable and the number of postings has rocketed. People can easily follow the threads and see how to contribute. But more importantly the nature of the discussions has also changed. The posts are more on-topic, more conversational, more interesting. The combination of more posts and better quality has taken a moribund corner of the site and turned it into an active community.
So as Joel says, decisions about code strongly impact community - usability affects both individual use and group behaviour.
(Thanks to Ross Mayfield.)
11:44:46 PM 
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