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.