Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2016)

Building Successful Online Communities

COM597 A - Masters of Communication in Communities and Networks (MCCN) Elective, Department of Communication

Instructor: Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Course Websites:

• We will use Canvas for announcements, turning in assignments, and discussion
• For coordinating Wikipedia assignments, it will be helpful to refer to the WikiEdu class page and dashboard.
• Everything else will be linked on this page.

Overview and Learning Objectives

Before Wikipedia was created, there were seven very similar attempts to build online collaborative encyclopedias. Before Facebook, there were dozens of very similar social networks. Why did Wikipedia and Facebook take off when so many similar sites struggled? Why do some attempts to build communities online lead to large thriving communities while most struggle to attract even a small group of users?

This class will begin with an introduction to several decades of research on computer-mediated communication and online communities to try and understand the building blocks of successful online communities. With this theoretical background in hand, every student will then apply this new understanding by helping to design, build, and improve a real online community.

This course combines an in-depth look into several decades of research into online communities and computer-mediated communication with real-world experience applying this research to the evaluation of, hands-on participation in, and the critique and design of successful online communities. As students of communication and leadership in the twenty-first century, I expect that many of you taking this course will, after graduation, work in jobs that involve communicating, working with, or managing online communities. This class seeks to inform these experiences by helping you learn how to use and contribute to online communities more effectively and how to construct, improve, or design your own online communities.

I will consider the course a complete success if every student is able to do all of these things at the end of the quarter:

• Recall, compare, and give examples of key theories that can explain why some online communities grow and attract participants while others do not.
• Write and speak with a fluency about the rules and norms of the Wikipedia community and demonstrate this fluency through successful contributions to Wikipedia.
• Engage with the course material and compellingly present your own ideas and reflections in writing and orally.
• Demonstrate an ability to critically apply the theories by critiqueing and/or helping design a real online community of your choice in a consultant/client-based model.

Notes About This Syllabus

You should expect this syllabus to be a dynamic document. Although the core expectations for this class are fixed, the details of readings and assignments will shift based on how the class goes, changes or updates with guest speakers that I arrange, my own readings in this area, etc. As a result, there are three important things to keep in mind:

• Although details on this syllabus will change, I will try to ensure that I never change readings more than six days before they are due. This means that if I don't fill in a "To Be Determined" one week before it's due, it is dropped. This also means that if you plan to read more than one week ahead, contact me first or you'll risk reading things that might not stick around on the syllabus.
• Closely monitor your email or the announcements section on the course website on Canvas. Because this syllabus is a wiki page, you will be able to track every change by clicking the history button on this page when I make changes. I will summarize these changes in an announcement on Canvas once week that will be emailed to everybody in the class.
• I will ask the class for voluntary anonymous feedback frequently — especially toward the beginning of the quarter. Please let me know what is working and what can be improved. In the past, I have made many adjustments to courses that I teach while the quarter progressed based on this feedback.

Organization

This course is organized into two components that roughly span the first and second halves of the quarter.

Component 1: The Theory and Practice of Online Communities

In the first half of the class (Weeks 1-6), the readings will look to theories that can help explain how and why online communities succeed and fail and how and why they grow or shrink. In each of the weeks in this period, we will read from the book we'll be using as a textbook: Kraut et al.'s Building Successful Online Communities (BSOC). Here is the citation:

Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, 2012.

MIT Press sells the book for $28.00 in a digital format and $39.00 in hardcover. Amazon sells the book for $25.00 in hardcover and $23 for the Kindle version. Wikipedia has this long list of possible book sources.

More or less following the organizations of BSOC, we will focus on these key drivers of participation in online communities:

• Motivation: How do online communities incentivize participation?
• Commitment: How do online communities build relationships to keep individuals involved?
• Rules and Governance: How do online communities create norms, rules, and governance?
• Newcomers: How do online communities attract — or fail to attract — newcomers?
• Creation: How should one start a new online community?

In order to ground the theoretical readings during the first half of the quarter, there will be weekly assignments that provide a structured opportunity to learn about and become involved in Wikipedia.

You should keep in mind that the bulk of the reading in the course — and most of the most difficult material — will be front-loaded in this first five week period. The goal is to make sure that you have all the tools you'll need by the end of Week 5 so that you can use this material to focus on your projects in earnest.

Component 2: Examples and Challenges

In the second half of the course, we will focus less on theory and more on examples of online communities and on applications, examples, and challenges, associated with interpersonal media and computer-mediated communication.

Our reading during the second part of the quarter will be focused on cases studies. We will also focus on in-class discussions and exercises that prompt critical consideration of how online communities take place in different domains as well as the challenges associated with using online communities. Our goal here is to build up the ability to critically understand these communities in terms of the theory we covered earlier.

In general, readings during this second component will be on the lighter side and there will be no weekly assignments other than reading. The readings are lighter during this component because I'm expecting you to be spending time outside of class working on your projects.